China Youth Daily client news (China Youth Daily·China Youth Daily reporter Shen Jiequn) Recently, the "Reshaping and Creation of Love - Li Yiyun's first Chinese version of the novel "Should I Go"" was held in Shanghai.
"Should I Go?" is the first novel by Chinese-American female writer Li Yiyun to be translated into Chinese and introduced into China. It was recently published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House. This is a well-conceived novel: Lilia, who is eighty-five years old, opens the diary of her former lover Roland, and painstakingly adds footnotes to the events in the diary. "Talking to Nothing" revolves around a diary. , revealing to readers a secret relationship that lasted for decades.
book cover. Photo courtesy of the publisher
"When I first read it, because (the book) first appeared an old lady in a nursing home, I thought it was a work like "The Magic Mountain", about how to face It is a work about aging and facing the last years of life, but later I found that it subverted all my assumptions." At the launch event, young writer and associate professor of the English Department of Fudan University Bao Huiyi shared the book "Should I Go" Give her a reading experience that "subverts the default".
Is this a work about aging like "The Magic Mountain", a smaller version of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" that involves the fate of multiple generations, or "The Name of the Rose" that unlocks the secrets of other people's lives? When she first started reading, Bao Huiyi had a lot of imagination about this work. However, as she continued to read more deeply, she discovered that "Should I Go" was a work with a unique purpose, describing the process of women's deconstruction of men's narrative power: "This book is about the struggle for issues such as memory and time. : A man thinks that he has written a book that can finalize the conclusion. This young girl became his lover that night when she was 16 years old, became one of his many 'collections', and was even just a little girl in his life. Small footnotes. But who actually collected whom? Lilia kept making comments while reading Roland's book. Her comments appeared irregularly, which can be said to deconstruct the life story that this man thought he had. . Then you will see such a struggle for the narrative subject, which is very interesting and tense."
book cover. Picture provided by the publishing house
Regarding the behavior of the protagonist Lilia in the novel, who is obsessed with reading and responding to the diary of an old lover, bilingual writer and literary translator Zhong Na also has her own interpretation; "Actually, this behavior itself is somewhat paranoid, so how do you understand it? I spent a long time thinking about this behavior."
She found the answer in Li Yiyun's last work "Dear Friend, Write from My Life to Your Life": "Li Yiyun has been suffering from the disease for two years. When she suffered from depression, she did some thinking and digestion by reading and reviewing her life, including her relationship with her family, her relationship with literature, and her relationship in the first half of her life. So in fact, she was constantly reading the writers' letters. Collect and diary, and gradually gained some wisdom to regain the balance of my life.
"That book is actually having a dialogue with "Should I Go", which is to connect the readers with "Should I Go" through very in-depth reading? The author's life is intertwined. After I reread that book and then read "Should I Go", I had the feeling of understanding Lilia. When a person's life is in trouble, she enters into him in the most extreme way through reading. to re-establish a narrative through the reader's brain. " Zhong Na said.
Li Yiyun. Picture provided by the publishing house
Source: China Youth Daily client
