I once had some overviews of the trend of novel creation, condensed into one word, "fusion".
The fusion of modernity and realism, the fusion of serious novel themes and popular literature elements, the fusion of historical culture and current life.
I still think that this generalization may still make sense.
Today, it is difficult to give an overview of the creation of novels in 2020.
This is difficult because the differentiation of novel creation is very obvious, and it is unavoidable to use one or two words to generalize. It is inevitably far-fetched and partial; second, I am very limited in tracking the dynamics of novel creation.
Quickly and violently, I read more than a dozen of the most influential novels recently, and it seems that I have some feelings to talk about.
Give literary rewards to the land where you live
The novels in 2020 create a full of worldly life.
Passion and description of the fireworks in the world, the joy, pain and enthusiasm, helplessness in the worldly life, the complex feelings of family affection, friendship, love between people, love and hate, life and death, past and future Thinking constitutes the life picture and the theme that many novelists try to express.
Of course, any novel at any time, as long as it is of realistic themes, is nothing more than these life situations.
But life is made up of many parts, and there are a hundred directions for understanding and interpreting life.
In a certain period, people will involuntarily gather in clusters from the same or similar directions. This is the so-called fashion of the times.
The same is true for the novel trend.
In the process of expressing life, such a concentrated attention to human fireworks and the performance of secular life are the outstanding commonality of 2020 novels.
In order to express this kind of firework incisively and vividly, writers have incorporated regional culture into it, letting readers know that the same smoke is rising from different places.
In 2020, the most influential novel is Chi Zijian's "Fireworks".
This is a passionate work dedicated to Harbin. It is a novel that hopes to write about the life of the people in Harbin and can be accepted and recognized by the people in Harbin.
This strong regional appeal originally belonged to the creative pursuit of the wise literati in the village, and should not be the focus of writers who happen to live here, whose reputation has already spread throughout the country and even the world.
In the past, it was a regional background that did not need to be strengthened in the novel, but now it has gone straight to the foreground and has become an indisputable real scene in the novel.
Every chapter in "Fireworks Manjuan" basically starts with the description of the city of Harbin.
Using poetic language, Chi Zijian described Harbin's subtle changes in a day from early morning to dusk to late night, and also described the splendor of the city throughout the year.
Emphasizing daily life is to emphasize that it is the same in winter and summer.
And each season has its own style.
The novel clearly premeditated to set up this replacement.
The fifth chapter of the upper part begins with Harbin spring, and the eighth chapter is early summer.
The third chapter of the lower part is about midsummer to early autumn, the fourth chapter is the scene of late autumn, the fifth chapter is early winter, and the sixth chapter is midwinter.
The eighth chapter, as the last chapter, writes the atmosphere of the Lunar New Year.
These descriptions must be clear and unique Harbin logos before they can be included in the painting.
Under the strong city logo, after the prose style of writing, people of all colors living in the city appear on the scene.
They were either born in Sri Lanka and grew up in Sri Lanka, and never left, or intruders, wanderers, and sojourners in this city.
They met and met, and together they deduce the stories of the world that have four seasons a year and day and night each day.
The stories in them are not magnificent, but they are the days that must be lived every day.
The brothers and sisters of Liu Jianguo, Liu Jiaohua, Weng Zian, Huang E and other outsiders jointly interpret a life that is not only normal in secular life, but also full of drama, legend and emotional depth.
It is true that this year, Wang Song published a novel about traditional secular life in Tianjin, called "Fireworks".
This is a novel trying to show the urban culture of Tianjin in modern times.
In the hundred years of history, there have been great historical turbulences, and the people's lives have remained calm and unchanging.
The latter may be exactly what Wang Song strives to fully demonstrate.
How to write the Jinweier culture vividly and well, and write the change and the unchanging into an integrated life, which permeates the fireworks in a hundred years of history, and allows Tianjin people to have a novel that fully presents their own culture, Wang Song’s this Creative ideals are not insignificant.
Almost coincidentally, Hu Xuewen defined the region as a northern village in "Yousheng", which was also launched in 2000.
This is a long novel about the history of life.
An old man in a state of life-threatening condition, her life's occupation is to deliver babies, to welcome more than ten thousand lives into this world, she seems to have a life code that ordinary people can't understand.
What is presented here is also a century of history, and it is also a strengthening of the regional identity.
These mature writers seem to realize at the same time that they want to give a kind of literary return to the land they live in. Whether or not they write well in their own land is the root of whether they can truly own their readers.
Compared with the century-old family novels read twenty years ago, today's novelists seem to integrate performance and answering major social questions into the display of secular life.
Of course, the novel must answer the process of historical evolution, but it must also write about the unchanging in life to show the tenacity and strength of the culture itself.
In 2020, I also read Teng Xiaolan's "Heart in the Heart" describing the faces of all beings in Shanghai, which is also a true description of the lives of ordinary people in a city.
After Wang Anyi's "Song of Everlasting Regret" and Jin Yucheng's "Flowers", the younger generation of writers will have to add a new fire, enough to see the culture and charm of the city, which is opening up in the form of novels in many aspects.
Jia Pingwa's "Temporary Sitting" changed the name of Xi'an to Xijing and Qujiang to Quhu, but the exact names of the Bell Tower, Drum Tower, Big Wild Goose Pagoda, and Qinling Mountains have long been known. This is another piece dedicated to Xi'an by the author. Market Situation Report".
Regardless of the Shiyun Tower or the tea house, there is a breath of life that overflows from this ancient capital today, and it is also a depiction of the fireworks in the world.
Wu Jun’s "Wanfu" was written about Shenzhen, naturally more turbulent, Wang Yao's "Folk Ballad" and Zhang Ji's "Nanhuodian" wrote about rural life in the south, whether it is excavated from memory or from reality Refined, it shows the intricacies of human fireworks and history.
The fireworks in the world suddenly became the object of novelists' desire to express.
It can be seen from the expression of novels that the attention to secular life makes these novels naturally reliable and readable.
Writers do not write about regions like local chronicles, nor do they blindly express emotions in prose culture.
The narrative of the novel and the novel of the story are their conscious pursuit in their creation.
The depiction of details is more refined.
In the overall design of the story structure, the interlocking of the plot and the plot, and the precise description of the details in "Fireworks Manjuan", you can see Chi Zijian's skill in short story creation.
Hu Xuewen's "Yousheng" shows the abundance of creative resources with dense images.
It can be said that his familiarity and understanding of life is worthy of the narrative with nearly 600,000 words.
"The ants are running around", represented by this image throughout, Hu Xuewen exhausted his efforts in shaping many characters.
Wang Song also embodies a calm creative mentality.
These novels, mostly based on the skills of sketching, the strength of meticulous brushwork, and the conception of panoramic pictures, describe the worldly life that is not clear in fact, with extremely complicated clues and fireworks.
Explore the extraordinary meaning and value in the ordinary day and night
The novels in 2020 show another feature of the episode, that is, in the description of secular fireworks, it expresses an artistic life that is not in harmony with it.
This is really interesting.
Let's talk about "Fireworks Manjuan" first, although the main characters in it are Liu Jianguo, a laid-off worker, his younger sister Liu Jiaohua from a police background, and Huang E a migrant worker who went to the city, and has nothing to do with art.
However, music, and elegant classical music, has become another important clue in the novel.
Many stories, including the core plot, are related to music and concert halls.
Chi Zijian gave a reasonable explanation for this joining in various ways.
The urban temperament of Harbin is based on music. Whether you want to enjoy it or not, music life is related to everyone in the city.
In the poetic day and night of the city and the changes in the four seasons, in the music of the concert hall, there are many common people like Liu Jianguo who come and go.
But this is life, they blend well together.
Wang Meng's "The Wind of Laughing" also wrote music, and many famous names in the history of classical music flashed in the novel.
This year, Fang Wei's novel was directly called "Blood Mozart", an alternative story of "Piano Prince".
In addition to music, many other artistic life also enter the novel.
Feng Jicai's "Artists" is about the life of a painter.
When I also wrote about fine arts, I also read "Art Circle" by Yunnan writer Fu Zegang.
Not only music and art, multiple art fields, multiple art life exist in various ways in novels.
Or in front of the stage, or behind the scenes, or the main story, or the "introduction" to the main story.
Li Hongwei's "A Brief History of Grey Clothes" is based on film and television companies. Although it is not written for the sake of art, it also serves as an introduction.
Liu Qingbang's "Drawings of Female Workers" still writes about life in the mining area and the subject of miners, but this time it is the cultural and artistic propaganda team of the mining area, whose main job is singing and dancing.
Wang Song's "Fireworks" combined the cross talk culture with Tianjin's spoken folk culture.
There are guqin performances in "Temporary Sitting", as well as rice paper brush and inkstone, and the onlookers of operas in the countryside in "Folk Songs", and so on.
At the end of 2020, when Chen Yan's "Installation" was adapted into a popular TV series, it was really interesting to read so many novels about artistic life.
This kind of mixing material life and spiritual life, secular topics and artistic topics, or unfolding another life in the name of art, or expressing the unique life of artists, also presents their "non-art" side. It is not entirely accidental that even novel creations that flash the light of spirit in ordinary life appear concentrated in a certain period of time.
Everyone has gone through the process from yearning for material to yearning for spirit, and now they are more willing to look at life dialectically and in combination.
Just like the "Fogwalker" on the road, a truck is loaded with goods and runs all over China, but this does not prevent the characters from talking about advanced literary issues in the exhausted gap.
Talking about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, about Joyce and Eliot, the topic is almost comparable to the literature class in the university, originally like a "road novel", but it has been incorporated into many topics in the study, novels Why the family conceived the work this way is intriguing.
Let life become everyday and become what it is, and from the daily work and night of this ordinary person, I explore the extraordinary meaning and value. This is the novel landscape I have seen.
The pursuit of true qualities in art can be confirmed in many ways.
Zhong Qiushi's "Waiting to Breathe" and Mao Jianjun's "Mei Shun and Longevity" try to limit the entanglement of love within the scope of "romantic novels", so that life is presented in the novel as it should be, without deliberately exaggerating the meaning of the other. .
Zhang Ping's "Guardian of Life and Death" unfolds a picture of the sad and happy lives of many ordinary people in the consistent anti-corruption theme.
Lu Zheng's "Trident Crossing the World", the portrayal of police characters, describes their different life choices and ups and downs in their destiny.
With both sword and heart, Fang is the world of life in the novel.
Walking between the fireworks and the artistic atmosphere, with artistic temperament to experience the day-to-day life, the novelist will also discover the different scenery and the unique style of music, which is worth our continued expectation in reading .
(Author: Yan Jingming, the Department of Chinese Writers Association committee member, secretary, vice-chairman)