In 2019, New Weekly launched a feature titled "The Power of The Book List," which asked the question: Who is deciding and influencing what books we read? What exactly is a good book?
No book list is perfect, but as the writer Zhang Jiawei said, people who love books are good at finding more books of interest from every book and every book list:
"I believe in the unintentional interest of the writers I love, according to Tussoji. Pound and Fitzgerald were found from Hemingway, Juan Lulfo was found from Márquez, Wang Wei was found from the chat between Dai Yu and Xiang Yun in Dream of the Red Chamber, and of course, "The Tale of the West Chamber". Cortázar was found from Llosa, Hawthorne was found in Melville's tribute, and many of the names of people he used as talkers were found in Russell's History of Western Philosophy. ”
If you want to offer a reading suggestion, both Virginia Woolf and Harold Brom believe, please follow your own nature and use your own reason.
"I urge you to look for something that is truly close to you, something that can be used to weigh and think. Not to believe, not to accept, not to refute and read deeply, but to learn to share the same nature to write, to read by the same nature. (Harold Brom, How to Read, Why Read)
In this period, we may all have a similar experience. We are all concerned with the distant places, from the shadows of Europe to the demise of the rainforest; we are also concerned with vegetables and grain, and we are also concerned with how poets and novelists describe the tides of cities and the changes in their homeland.
2022 Blade Book Awards Spring List
It was released yesterday, and the "Tide Map" of Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House was selected.
Today, Xiao Yijun brings you a book review originally published in the "China Reading News".
True and false frogs
Text/Xiao Yizhi
"I am fiction. I don't talk about people because I'm not human at all. I've had many names, and they've left me one by one, enough to make up my other tail. I speak water dialect, provincial dialect and much better English than Pidgin English. A little bit of Macau native language. Have a certain understanding of Hokkien, Portuguese and Dutch. Know a dozen words. ”
Lin Zhao's novel "Tidal Chart" sets a problem for people at the beginning. It's not new for fictional characters to open their mouths and chat with readers. This fictional creature is not surprising that it belongs to The Scales. The trouble is that when the frog of nothingness makes a fuss about its language skills, a world beckons behind the form, and history seems to be coming out of the novel.
Once one can't help but wonder what kind of world needs to rely on such a mixed language to function, the boundary between fiction and history, between truth and fiction, immediately shakes like a lonely boat in a storm. This vertigo and ecstasy of falling back and forth between true and false is the greatest pleasure of reading Tide Chart.
As Lin Zhuo frankly stated in his afterword, the origin of the story of "Tidal Chart" comes from the fusion of Chinese and Western history in the first half of the 19th century, and many historical materials and studies constitute the "water source and earth" that feed the novel. However, the truth of history is not equal to the truth of the novel, and the historical materials that are forced into the story will only be like the yu yu buried in the meal, and the teeth are rotten and the appetite is downplayed.
Lin's choice is to let a imaginary giant frog connect the real and the imaginary. Born at the mouth of the Pearl River, this chaotic creature first lay in the wooden basin of the People's House, then lived in the glass jar of the Imperial Trader's home outside Guangzhou and in the museum garden in Macau, then traveled to london zoo, and finally died in the town of Bay, where it was located. The life of the giant frog is the skeleton of the novel, and the realism that makes this skeleton stand comes from the fragments of history that the novelist has chosen.
From the Opium Wars to the export of papyrus paintings, real history is always embedded in the story of the giant frog in the most casual way. Giant Frog meets Si Xi, a model with a giant tumor, in the painting studio of the painter Feng Xi, who may have been born from a group of disease-induced portraits drawn by the historical export painter Lin Yu for the American missionary Bo Cha.
Behind Feng Xi's casual sentence "a group of Foshan brothers lined up to board a boat to Go to St. Helena Island" is hidden behind the story of Napoleon in exile and his Chinese gardeners. And the giant frog's inmate at London Zoo, the elephant Jambu, who carries a wooden tower with a "gilded, onion-shaped roof, and a trembling tassel and bell" for children to ride, is really like the prototype of the Disney cartoon Dumbo, the African elephant Jumbo who traveled to Paris and London Zoo and was finally purchased by the American acrobatic king Barnum.
And so on, too many to count. Under Lin Zhao's meticulous weaving, the huge amount of historical details not only did not drown out the original slightly absurd giant frog story, but lent it enough truth that people could not help but suspect that the frog who had revealed his fictitious identity at the beginning - "I am a fiction, an animal that has not yet been fixed." Does it also have a hidden historical source that you don't know?
But what is a frog? Why let history lend its weight to a fictional amphibian? Or how can a fictional amphibian bear the weight of history?
Perhaps the answer lies in "not yet finalized". The fragments of history that Lin Zhuo intercepted spelled out a world of uncertainty, a world wrapped in a global network woven by the expansion of imperialist trade in the 19th century, a world in which different groups of people and different cultures collided and exchanged. What could be more suitable as a symbol of a mobile world than a giant frog that was born in the chaos between land and water, constantly migrating and changing its identity?
From the "Spirit Toad Immortal" of the Yan family, to the "Polypedates giganteus", which has been collectively named by naturalists from all over the world, to the "Giant Frog Taiji" at London Zoo, to the "Bay Town Giant Frog" at the World Exposition, each new identity of the giant frog means a new opportunity to integrate fragments of history into fiction.
The giant frog "knows the world alive", it "swallows cicadas raw, knows luck", swallows pocket watches, knows math and time, and even secretly thinks "If I can swallow myself raw, like a flipped purse, I can immediately recognize myself and predict every secret button and joint of fate." And the story of the giant frog may be similar, swallowing up a lot of historical details and revealing a picture of the 19th-century world connected by trade."
Or maybe frogs, or nature, have an unusual attraction for Lin Zhao. The ubiquitous knowledge of flora and fauna in the novel reveals her concern for nature. How could the author who juxtapose in the novel the "Anthropocene" with the most famous symbol of modernity, the Crystal Palace of the Exposition of Nations—the "Palace of Mysteries" in the novel—not be a man who was worried about nature?
When the novel's naturalist H meets the giant frog in the reed bamboo bush, the unknown brought by the giant frog seems to strip him from reality: "The reed bamboo is bent over and buried to steal him from the human world." He is leaving his companions, common sense, rules, the framework of the world is leaving him, riding the wind and waves of reeds. ”
However, H and the modern science behind him eventually dispelled the magic of the giant frog, branding it with the Latin scientific name of Polypedates gigantus, which is in line with Linnaean taxonomy, which is like "a seal" exposing the giant frog to the light of the sky, making it "eternally different from everything that is still hidden". The Indo-Edo also hints at the arrogance and violence of naturalism as an imperial intellectual production enterprise.
Through the eyes of the giant frog, we see how the Empire, in the name of knowledge, plundered nature all over the world, suppressed specimens and drew pictures and imprisoned them in cement huts for entertainment. Nature is like the golden rooster that was snatched by the ghosts at the mouth of the Pearl River, torn alive by naturalism: "Countless hands tore it, snatched it, made it open, into a big word, so that its overlord pride could not be maintained no matter what... The only golden rooster was scattered on the spot, as if the ancestors were opened on a large plate and scattered. ”
Or perhaps, when Lin Zhao chose to use frog eyes instead of human eyes to see the world, she chose the weakest and gentlest perspective. After all, no matter how big a frog is, it is not a human opponent.
Naturally, this natural weak person naturally turned his attention to those beings who were as weak as it was, to those small people who were lost in the gap of great history. They are wrapped up in the wind blowing toward the modern age, not knowing where the world is going, just trying to earn a life in the tide of history, hoping that a good life will be brought by a good wind and a smooth water.
Si Xi, who used up her savings to mourn for her friends, Si Xi, who did not want to cut off the tumor and would rather continue to be a model with illness, Feng Xi, who was originally a beggar but learned Western painting skills by chance, Di Yagao, a mixed breeder who traveled with a giant frog from Macao to London and finally froze to death on Christmas Eve, and even those sailors, painters and specimenists who only appeared in one or two sentences, all these people and their pain and sorrow were salvaged out by Lin Zhao.
Even H, the near-legendary employee and naturalist of the Imperial Trading Company, was nothing more than a slightly larger dust in the face of the vicissitudes of history, and he committed suicide in bankruptcy before the Opium War.
When he confided his pain in front of the frog, the giant frog tried to comfort him, but the gap between reality and fiction stopped it: "This I, who has never really existed, is powerlessly licking the shadow of a real person and his real pain reflecting the glass." Perhaps, this novel is doing something similar, using fiction to soothe the pain of individuals who once existed.
Of course, maybe none of this is true, or it doesn't matter, no matter how much history the fictional frog is contaminated, it begins with "fiction" and ends with only a "suspicious letterhead" sent to the Imperial Museum of Nature. Beginning with fiction and finally becoming invisible, this giant frog has never existed outside words.
Exploring the entanglement of history and the giant frog is nothing more than a roundabout discussion of the form of the novel. Lin Zhao chose a highly conscious narrative mode and language to tell the story of the encounter of different worlds, and the narrative structure and language of the novel itself are as mixed and wandering as these worlds.
The opening narrative full of southern moisture and the writing mixed into Cantonese are amazing, but the follow-up story embedded in foreign language loans and all over the modern wonders is equally breathtaking, in the end, this is not a dialect novel aimed at rediscovering the history of Guangzhou, but a historical novel that looks at the world, and what it really does is to cross the place where historical narrative stopped to summon the remnants of people and things in the past world. Novalis said that novels stem from historical inadequacies, and this is the best commentary for the Tide Map.
(This article was originally published in China Reading News)
Tide Chart
Lin Zhuo sighed
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
Shanghai Culture Publishing House
Shanghai Story Club Culture Media Co., Ltd
Shanghai Chewing Character Culture Communication Co., Ltd