Modern Express News (reporter Chen Xi) Regarding the Moonlight Treasure Box, what we can think of is a movie, a time travel that tries to change the fate again and again. In the young writer Tang Chengnan's new work "Moonlight Treasure Box", the unpredictable fate is a key word.
△ Soup is difficult
Tang Chengnan is an architect and a novelist, as an architect dedicated to the construction of space, Tang Chengnan also shows the superb structural ability of an architect in the novel. On the afternoon of March 12, at the Nanjing Vientiane Bookstore, novelist Tang Chengnan, together with Zhu Hui, vice chairman of the Jiangsu Writers Association, He Ping, professor of Nanjing Normal University, and He Tongbin, deputy editor of the Yangtze River Literary Review, discussed the new work "Moonlight Treasure Box".
▲ "Moonlight Treasure Box", by Tang Chengnan, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, January 2022
"Want to herd sheep on the prairie and don't talk all day"
"Moonlight Treasure Box" contains seventeen short and medium stories written by Tang Chengnan in various periods. Whether it is the shoe repair master Lao Zhang in "A Big Tree Wants to Fly" who lost his son at the door of the department store in the early years, and then spent the rest of his life looking for it, and finally found that his son became the scum of the injured party and was devastated, or the peasant father in "Running Rice Field" who is still far away and has a fairy tale pursuit of his ideal of growing rice, or the couple in "Winter of Republican Road" who married because of heroism and finally lost to daily life, "Old Hu Ji" Hu Dajiang, the boss who cuts beef by hand writing poems, Wang Xiuying, who likes to tell stories of "others" to relieve his bitterness, and the literary and artistic young uncle who is tossed by life and is unable to do so in "We Still Have Fish Here"... Tang Cheng's poetic meaning of Difficult Jiangnan writes about the daily humility of these little people. Those worldly warmths mixed in the feathers of a place, those joys and sorrows that are still full of thirst for light in the midst of forbearance, are the daily survival of ordinary people.
In sharing, Tang Chengnan admitted that he is a particularly shy and unwilling person to talk, but he is also a wild person at heart, who likes to travel alone, roam, and travel long distances. She has been writing novels for almost eleven or twelve years, and in the early days she liked to write about "loneliness" and "suffering", and in recent years, she has favored "growth", which may have a lot to do with her personality. "I'm used to hiding emotions or thoughts in fictional characters, like I'm becoming more and more afraid to speak. I also had more illusory ideas. I want to herd sheep in the vast steppe and not talk all day..."
△ Zhu Hui
Fiction is a process of momentum, and the ending must be like that
As Tang Chengnan's teacher in Jiangsu's "Famous Teachers with Apprentices Project" and the editor-in-charge of many of Tang Chengnan's novels, Zhu Hui believes that Tang Chengnan is a person who is indifferent to words in reality, but in the novels she is very sensitive to words. Take writing suffering, "suffering to write well, to write to the bone, is an extremely difficult and unsustainable thing, without moderation it becomes a pile of suffering, to put it ugly, that is, to sell misery, then writing will be restricted", but many of the writing in "Moonlight Treasure Box" have reached the height of outstanding excellent short stories, because the writer places stories and characters in a more extensive time. For example, "Running Rice Field" banished old farmers who loved to grow rice to an extremely vast land, from the south to the north, all the way to the sun to grow rice.
In Zhu Hui's view, the novel is a process of building momentum. The momentum is not created for the end, but the potential has reached that point, and the end must be like that. "In "Running Rice Fields", odd and illusory appear at the beginning - where is such a rural old man who loves to plant rice and chases the sun to plant seeds? He listened to the people in Hainan say that their rice there has been harvested, the wheat in Jiangsu has just begun to emerge, the seasonal gap is very large, spanning several time zones, you can chase the sun to plant rice, which means that there is a huge space in the novel, and the novel's strangeness and fantasy appear at the beginning. Then the old man went out in his clothes, constantly cutting off his sleeves and trouser legs, and wrapped up the fruits of his planting and sent them to his family and to his wife. When you see this ending, your heart will move, because the beginning has created the momentum. ”
△ He Ping
The flying in everyday life, the divinity in everyday life
He Ping said that now some authors wear the hat of "novelists" and write only "full of clumsy instructions in the real world." A good novelist should write about the flying movements in daily life, the divinity in daily life, and write about the impossible things in people's daily logic, thinking, and observation, which reflects the ability of novelists. For example, in "Running Rice Field", buds grow in the gaps in the father's clothes; at the end of "Ferris Wheel", the woman turns down from the Ferris wheel and the old man comes out of another box; at the end of "Moonlight Treasure Box", the monkey wears a mask and becomes a Great Sage of Qi Tian, comes out of the ruins, and pats you on the shoulder, "If you read here, you will break the defense." "A short story is particularly boring without something like that."
In addition, in He Ping's view, Tang Chengnan's novel also has a strong sense of structure. "For a novelist who studies architecture, fiction is really about creating space. He wants to write a novel, in fact, to vacate a venue, and finally form a space with structure, beauty, and narrative rhythm, rather than saying that as long as you cover the wind and rain, you can build a shed. Tang Chengnan's "Running", "A Big Tree Wants to Fly", "Moonlight Treasure Box", "Old Hu Ji" and other novels, none of which do not involve the movement and transformation of space, produce a sense of order in the middle of the contrast of space.
△ He Tongbin
Growing up, everyone can feel the innocence, sentimentality
According to He Tongbin's observation, Tang Chengnan's recent works no longer write about the sufferings of the past, although they are still some unfortunate people, but their fate, encounters and loneliness in daily life are actually closely related to everyone. The novel of the same name, "Moonlight Treasure Box", originates from a news incident: four Henan monkey people were arrested in Heilongjiang, the case was tossed for more than half a year, and finally the monkey trickster was acquitted... Tang Chengnan once said in the creation talk: she saw a photo of a monkey player, and was touched by the facial expression and eyes of the monkey man in the photo, so she wanted to borrow the perspective of a child who grew up with the monkey to show the rise and fall of the monkey play family. "The rise and fall of the monkey opera family makes it easy for us to think that this will be another novel that bears the heavy cultural propositions of the demise of traditional culture and the helplessness of folk artists." In fact, this does not become the theme of the novel at all, and the only theme that can be described in the novel is 'growth'. ”
Another novel, "Looking for Zhang San", is also an excellent coming-of-age novel from a childhood perspective. Write about a teenager who has nothing to do, finds a thirty-year-old leave slip in the abandoned factory, a man named Zhang San wants to take a leave, and the workshop director looks at the production scene in full swing in the factory and angrily writes "no approval, no consent." "Zhang San may correspond to the father of the child, the father did not ask for a leave, had a very unpleasant life, was distracted at work, was smashed to death by steel, which was projected onto his mother who was pregnant and waiting to give birth." In fact, in daily life, you can't construct such a scene. There are many things in the novel that are both true and illusory, allowing us to see the growth of a teenager, including the fate of his parents. "I suddenly felt that Tang Chengnan had become a very mature and excellent novelist, and there were some themes that no one could handle well." He Tongbin said.
(Courtesy of publisher)