Lu Xun Literature Prize winner Chen Yingsong's latest novel, Tianlu Bay, was published by Changjiang Literature and Art Publishing House. With the forty years of reform and opening up as the background of the times, the novel lyrically describes the long and arduous entrepreneurial history of the peasants in the Jianghan Plain who have achieved poverty alleviation through struggle, and the panoramic reproduction of the great process of change in China's contemporary countryside.
Chen Yingsong's hometown of Gong'an County, Jingzhou City, Hubei Province, known as the "First Grape County in Jiangnan", Chen Yingsong began to conduct fieldwork in 2019 and began to write in 2020, which lasted two years, "Tianlu Bay", a novel set in the grape industry and depicting the feelings of two generations of farmers about the land, was finally born. In "Tianlu Bay", the introduction, planting, processing and output of grapes all have the special meaning and connotation given to it by the times, and these are derived from Chen Yingsong's deep "nostalgia". Speaking about the inspiration for the creation of the novel, he said: "The inspiration comes from home, but also from life. The purpose of writing this book is to record the history of reform and opening up in the Jianghan Plain of Hubei Province over the past 40 years, and the history of the development of the grape industry from scratch. ”
Compared with other works in the past, Chen Yingsong frankly said that "Tianlu Bay" is an "outlier" in all his works. In the past, he wrote the Shennongjia series of novels, wrote about the poor life in the alpine mountains, and wrote about the mysterious and magical critical realism themes. And this novel, which originates from nostalgia, originates from the field, and has a story development spanning thirty or forty years, is completely a pure expression, and it is completely colloquial, life-like, and regionalized in writing. Each of the characters in the book even has an archetype that carries their character traits. Chen Yingsong said: "By writing this work, I want to tell you that the peasants are indeed the greatest people in our time. In 2009, when I was in a city, I found that almost overnight the countryside had been mechanized, and farmers no longer needed hoes, sickles and cattle, no weeding, no need to plant seedlings and cut grains, and everything was handed over to machinery. "The clever, shrewd and knowledgeable peasants have emerged, and modern, advanced and fashionable new rural areas have blossomed everywhere. This novel, which uses grapes to string nostalgia, is also a tribute to witnessing the changes of the times in a small place.
Chen Yingsong has published more than 100 novels, novel collections, prose collections, and poetry collections. His works have won several important awards such as the Lu Xun Literature Award, the Chinese Novel Society Award, the People's Literature Award, the October Literature Award, and the China Good Book Award. Well-known works such as "Forest Silence", "Returning the Soul", "Hunter's Peak", and "Harvesting to the Edge of the Sky" are all from his pen. Talking about his writing habits, he said that he mainly lived and wrote in Shennongjia Mountain, because the air was fresh and the environment was quiet. "'Tianlu Bay' is the subject of my first hometown, Shennongjia is my second hometown, the writer is born for the hometown, as a local writer, the symbol of the plain or the water town will surely appear again in future works."
Text/Beijing Youth Daily reporter Zhang Jia
Editor/Bow Lifang