Liu Xiangru's Eight: About Beauty Slope
Jian Yi
I think it should be a good book when I read Beauty Slope for the first time, but I also have a lot of hesitation. The author has touched a theme that others are reluctant to touch, and the theme background is a little bigger and the time span is too long. Today, when literature is restricted by economic laws, I am really not sure about its market value. When I read it carefully for the second time, I gradually changed my mind. It turns out that I am too familiar with the life details of some characters in the novel, and familiarity leads to intimacy. The author describes the changes of China society and the evolution of human nature in the second half of the 2th century. This is a very important subject, but his writing is not artificial, and it can be said that it can be easily reproduced in some places and even written incisively and vividly. Another point is that it is different from those things that are popular in the market at present, so I decided to recommend this book as the responsible editor of this book. To be fair, from Mr. Liu Xiangru's book, we can see that the author has a profound foundation. In his book, he wrote that there are many famous people with surnames, but their personalities are not repeated, which is undeniable success. This should be a novel with intellectuals as the main activity. The story communication of various characters involves philosophy and history, poetry and music, piano, chess, calligraphy and painting, love and knowledge, traditional Chinese medicine and western medicine, and even Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, the Yijing gossip, Hutuluo, couplets, classics of past dynasties, contemporary folk songs, geomantic customs, etc., and it can be said that everything is as trivial as astronomy and geography. What's more important is that as a novel, its characters' storyline has always been fascinating, and all the inner poems run through it without leaving any trace. I should say that I like this novel, so I edited it, and I thought that we should publish such a book even if we don't make money or even lose money. When the second and third trials passed smoothly, I was excited that I could compile such a work, and I was also happy for the author. In January, 24, the China (Beijing) Book Ordering Conference uploaded good news. The order for the novel Beauty Slope climbed all the way, and we printed 1, copies in the first place. According to my estimation, if the cover design is better, the number of first prints of this book will be far from enough after entering the market. This phenomenon makes me feel happy and gratified, which shows that my original worries may be superfluous, which also shows that pure literature books are not necessarily completely out of market. Beauty Slope is of course a pure literary work. But it has a good story. I heard that it had been circulated by a few people among the people before we decided to publish it. The author has been writing this book for more than ten years. I also heard that since the book came out, the author was unwilling to speculate and kept it secret, so it was difficult for publishers and readers to know. I wrote a passage in the editorial review of this book, which may be too high, but I think what I should basically say is my heart. I also heard some other comments, thinking that this is an excellent realistic work and a rare masterpiece in the new century. Others think that this book has high literary value and social value, and the characters are vivid, depicting people with different personalities, experiences and pursuits, expressing profound social and ideological connotations; When a friend of mine first recommended this book to me, he said that this book was written from the perspective of human nature, which made people think deeply after reading it, and it had high historical aesthetic value. He said that he could not bear to release the book after reading it repeatedly, and that "the literary taste is first-class and even exceeds some famous books" ... In view of these early introductions, I have a prior ideological concept, which does not mean that I was influenced by others. I think this book is really good after reading it myself, which means that I am a editor. "Beauty Slope" was originally divided into upper and lower parts. Considering the publishing cost, we combined it into one book when it was published, which is also convenient for readers to read. The book is about 5, words, which was written by Anhui writer Lao Xiang (Liu Xiangru) for many years. The editor's comment reads: This is a magnificent and epic work, and it is also a legendary classic of love and marriage. On the broad social background from the early 196s to the turn of the new century, and amid the complicated relationship between morality, love, marriage and fate, the works show the life state of China in the second half of the 2th century. The novel has a long historical span, magnificent scenes, rich contents, and unique characters. It has a brand-new display and exploration on some major issues such as marriage, love and social status, which is amazing in appreciation and thinking, shows extremely profound social connotation, and has a strong spirit of social realism and rare spirit of historical humanism. Generally speaking, the novel shows that in the early 196s, a group of children from rural areas who died in the year of disasters hoped to make their fortune by studying, going to the city, working and being promoted. After ten years of turmoil, ten years of hesitation and twenty years of human nature evolution in reform and opening up, they each performed a shocking live drama on their own life track. Since childhood, the hero has stepped into a bumpy legendary life because of his unique personality, and he has repeatedly suffered from the beauty complex in the legendary life, from "stealing taro storm", "wild grass incident", "being robbed of a beautiful woman", "meeting a beautiful woman in trouble", "saving cattle myth", "beauty scheming" and "psychological rape" to "seduction by the chief woman" and "forced marriage by the chief daughter" Love and hate interweave, love and hatred interweave, fate interweave, intrigue, ups and downs, forming a dignified, thick and confusing story scene in the works, making the book colorful and fascinating. The concise and vivid language, vivid characters and interlocking stories in the works make the artistic features of this book appear true, vivid and touching, and have a fascinating artistic charm. Of course, the good comments are written for the smooth passage, but I don't think it is too much. Now that this book has met the readers, I can feel relieved with a clear conscience. This book has gone through many years from conception to writing, so it is also a vivid portrayal of a generation's mental journey. After the book was written, the author said that there are thousands of customs every year, and every word cries blood. It's not easy. I'm happy for the author. (Note: The author of this article, originally published in Literary Newspaper, is the responsible editor of the novel Meirenpo.) A workshop on the novel Meirenpo was held-
Yesterday afternoon, a workshop on the novel Meirenpo, a new novel by the famous writer Liu Xiangru, was held in Hefei. The seminar was jointly sponsored by the Provincial Federation of Literary and Art Circles, the Provincial Writers' Association, the Chinese Writers' Association, China Workers' Publishing House and Anhui Market Newspaper. The famous writer Lu Yanzhou, the famous literary critic Su Zhong, the chairman of the Provincial Federation of Literary and Art Circles, Chen Faren and many writers, literary theorists and critics gathered together to cheer for the publication of this novel, and at the same time, they also discussed many aspects such as the expression form and spiritual connotation of the novel. Beauty Poe is different from other popular novels. It was first circulated among the people, and then it will be published. "Beauty Slope" was written by Liu Xiangru after years of painstaking efforts, with an upper part and a lower part of about 5, words. On the inside page of the novel, it says: This is a magnificent epic work, and it is also a legendary classic of love and marriage. Lu Yanzhou: Xiang Ru and I are old friends. For more than ten years, my understanding of Xiang Ru was mainly through his works. In my impression, Xiang, if quiet and not hyped up, just buried himself in writing, and has created more than 8 million words so far. "Beauty Slope" was written boldly at the beginning, without fancy and great momentum. It was written from the 196s to the end of the century, and it took 4 years to reflect the history of the times through the fate of the characters. Now there are not many such writing methods. The work does not avoid reality, but faces what happened. There are many strange phenomena in these years, and there are not many works written by farmers. In fact, they are the hardest and the most discriminated against. Xiang Ru just grasped this point and wrote from the countryside. I hope he can continue to stick to his realistic writing path.
Bai Rong: It took me 5 hours to listen to my wife finish reading this novel with 45, words. This is a serious novel, but also a painful novel with a strong sense of history, vicissitudes and critical realism. I have been in contact with Xiangru for 3 years, and I have long called him Sima Xiangru, which seems to be right. The protagonist of the novel has a rough fate, but in the first half, he is still alone in resisting the shackles of society. We are also intellectuals. Although we are not from the countryside, we have also experienced these gullies.
Fang Qiu: A woman is a mirror. With the help of this mirror, the works reveal the beauty and ugliness of human nature. As a child, the protagonist is still an intellectual who is poor and immune to himself, but the Americans can't resist the temptation. Money is greed, sex is greed, and eventually they go to destruction. Xiao Hua is very sensitive to the thinking of national humanity, and it is not an exaggeration to call it a work to wake up the world.
Su Zhong: I met Xiang Ru when I was an editor, and I always thought he was a versatile and prolific writer. "Beauty Slope" faces life directly when looking back at history, and it also faces life directly when describing reality. Writing about beauty on the surface actually has a critical spirit, including the internal criticism of the bad social atmosphere in modern society. Contemporary cultural knowledge should have a critical spirit, which is its value. The success of "Beauty Slope" lies in writing many characteristics of women with different personalities, different looks and different charms, and the writing style is very good, which makes the work more readable.
Liu Xiangru: I have been writing more poems and essays in recent years, but I wrote this novel out of a very simple psychology, and I want to express my feelings, hoping to write a work that can reflect my cognition and feelings about society and life. The characters in the book have always lived in my heart, and I want to write them out. I started writing this book in 1994, but I have been writing in my spare time and there is no pressure, so it took a long time. Originally planned to write 1.5 million words, divided into three parts: upper, middle and lower. In the process of writing, the thinking is constantly adjusted. After writing hundreds of thousands of words, it took another two years to sort it out and finally wrote two parts. Everyone agrees on the title of the book, and I am satisfied with it, but I think it still has meaning and significance. Du Fu has a theory of beauty and vanilla. Life is like climbing a hill, and beauty does not refer to beautiful people, but to the perfection of human nature. Xin Fangsheng began to want to follow the path of Lian and become an upper-class person, but because of his different personality, he turned to tolerate social phenomena, but the nature of intellectuals finally made him have to compromise. Everyone mentioned the problem of person transformation, and I have thought it over and over again. The publishing house also gave an opinion that there were precedents before, such as Lu Xun's Blessing. Later, I simply wanted to write down the lower part in the first person and the third person. As soon as the book was put on the market, it sold well, and all major Xinhua bookstores were asking for an increase in the quota. I am very pleased that the publishing house is currently working overtime to print more. Beauty Slope is attractive because of its richness, ups and downs, and myriad gestures.
Qiao Yanfeng, a writer of Anhui Literature and Art Critics Association, said that she had received a lot of phone calls recently, and there were many favorable comments and arguments about Beauty Slope. In fact, it is natural to have a variety of evaluations and understandings of a work. A work that can't arouse everyone's interest in discussion and debate is not a successful work in a sense.
Beautiful language or sincere words-a hot topic in the seminar is Liu Xiangru's language style. Liu Xiangru is a well-known linguist, and this book features that Chen Faren jokingly calls Liu Xiangru's parents senior farmers. Liu Xiangru himself is a native of Feidong, where there have been many great figures in Chinese and foreign history. Bao Gong, Li Hongzhang and so on. Therefore, his language is quite vivid, concise and wonderful.
Li Zhengxi believes that the advantage of Beauty Slope lies in its simplicity of meaning and truth, and its lack of straightforward narration.
Cao Wei thinks that this language style is white and elegant, which is a fruitful achievement of China literature in the new period. The person "he" changed to "I"-the first half of the novel used the first person, while the second half used the third person, which also caused a lot of pursuit and controversy.
Su Zhong thinks that the transformation of narrative person in the upper and lower parts has individual characteristics.
Ji Yu, on the other hand, thinks that the writing technique of the work is changed according to the writing needs, and the first half of writing about rural life needs objectivity, so the author naturally chooses the third person. The second half describes the oppression of the protagonist in real life, paying attention to the expression of inner feelings, and using the first name is easy to vent feelings.
sex describes right and wrong-if you write about beauty, there must be love. There are some sexual descriptions in Beauty Slope, which have attracted people's attention. Eating color is also an old saying, and modern works also involve a lot.
Tang Xiantian believes that it is valuable to describe love and sex according to aesthetic standards and moral standards, and he affirmed that Beauty Slope was also written according to this standard. For the evocative sexual description, writers think it is a rare success.
Bai Ye, a famous literary critic, thinks that in spirit and flesh, Liu Xiangru writes about spirit, which is noble sex. He thinks that Jia Pingwa and Wei Hui write about meat, which is vulgar sex, while Liu Xiangru writes that spirit gives people a sense of beauty. It is a great success of China literature.
In addition, struggling or escaping from the novel's criticism of social reality and analysis of intellectuals are widely appreciated by writers. Struggle is full of difficulties, and struggle hits a wall everywhere, so Xin Fangsheng, the protagonist in this paper, finally chooses to escape. The vivid description and in-depth portrayal of the novel can arouse people's voices.
Wu Xue thinks this reflects the novelist's sense of social responsibility.
Xu Chunqiao described this as "the price of being a man". Failure was not caused by any part of society, politics or personality, but a tragic collision between personal integrity and reality. This contradictory and divisive writer described it very successfully and excavated it very successfully. Have to escape, but there is nowhere to escape. This kind of confusion and confusion is the tragedy of a generation of intellectuals. -the heart of the novel "Beauty Slope"
I never imagined that after the publication of my novel "Beauty Slope", when I refused to hold a seminar in Beijing, the place where it was published, when there were few national media involved in propaganda, and without any hype, it unexpectedly produced a sensational effect among readers. This is really thanks to the Internet. The book has just been published. Sina and other big national websites put it on the headline of the reading page, and then they saw all kinds of comments from readers. Every day, a large number of posts from readers can be seen online. As the author of this book, I am really touched. In the era of information explosion, the internet has opened all the dust and restored the truth of things to readers and the masses, which is really remarkable! After the book was out of stock in Xinhua Bookstore, some readers even wrote to my unit from remote provinces asking me to sell books to them. Although I didn't have any books to sell, I was very happy. Over the years, I have often heard the saying that "a good wine is afraid of a deep alley", but I have always dismissed the hype in the literary world. Now it seems that there is justice in the world, and the real judgment is still among readers. As some newspapers later reported, it took me more than 2 years to write this book, from conception to writing. In the past 2 years, the world and personnel have undergone earth-shaking changes, so it is also a portrayal of a generation's mental journey. I wrote two sentences in the postscript: every year, there are thousands of customs, and every word cries for blood. This is true feelings. I can't forget.