Ximin entrusted me to write his preface, and there is at least one strong reason: I have lived in the village he described for twenty years. Hetian” until I was in the first grade of junior high school before leaving for the county seat.In a sense, Ximin and I are real fellow villagers.We spoke the same dialect, watched the same rural customs, and all the rural scenes he described in this book were familiar to me.But the strange thing is that after I graduated from college, I learned that there was a fellow writer of novels from my hometown who had escaped my field of vision because of his status as a military writer.

Perhaps for the same reason, Ximin's creative talent may not have received enough attention.He is the kind of person who is called "a man of temperament", with a free, wild and sensitive personality, and extreme experience. He only points out facts and never tells thoughts.But his work often has an ability to approach the purpose directly from the fact, and it is the same in this book.This is a book describing the deaths, which happened in the countryside, making each death strange... As a witness to the death, the boy Heizi, whose black eyes recorded all the deaths, had a meaning Extraordinary and unique: Li Laifu tried to starve himself to death and eventually exhausted himself; Wang was often beaten to death and finally stabbed with a butcher knife like a pig; Wang Qixiang contracted rabies and died like a dog; Wang Xigui Frozen to death; Gambler Wang Laoji bet to win poor food, and was strangled to death by dried sweet potatoes; Li Yuanxin’s father suffered from bowel cancer, and in order to make his family happy, he ate a chicken a day to death; Alcoholic Qiu Tusheng fell into a cesspit and drowned; Dong Chunshui died of a lightning strike; Li Wenkui voluntarily died under the wheel of his son's rival in order to raise a bride price for his son... Maybe you will feel uncomfortable with Ximin's intensive handling of death incidents, but after I finished reading, I suddenly felt another One kind of reality: Even though these facts are not real, he writes about another kind of reality, namely that death itself is real.Since the young Heizi lost his father (this is like a metaphor for losing asylum), he began to witness all kinds of bizarre deaths, and these deaths were full of unprecedented humbleness.It's real, I say, because the humbleness of being alive is real.In Quliu Village, everyone has left his essence, absurd survival and absurd death are the same thing.What a terrible experience it is that they live only in the way of death.

There are some details in the book that will suddenly move me: such as Wang Qixiang's simplest and most sincere wish to "make friends" with Heizi before he died of rabies; the fate of the old headhunter; The uncle died in order to save the whole village to eat wild vegetables during the famine... These deaths have a noble character.Makes a book of the dead join the important content of life.The description of the mute and the blind wife unable to communicate is also full of metaphors. But this is still a book about evil. Another name for the Book of the Dead is the "Book of Evil", because the people in the book cannot escape the fate of humble death.The evil here is interpreted as a fate of poverty, so poverty, evil, and death are the same thing in the book, and they have a causal relationship.In the vision of the young Heizi, his rural memories are memories of evil and death. Of course, there are also imprints of love and life, but in comparison, the memories of poverty, evil and death are more profound. Even the only animal in the book The death of the old cow - the death of the old cow - is also sad.Its fate seems to reflect the fate of everyone in this village... Existing like ants.This is the fate of Heizi's "fatherless".

Ximin uses a story-like style to develop the narrative, which makes the book very readable.This is also his usual style.But some too fast narration makes this book lose some forbearance and intriguing meaning.This is a good subject, and it would be better if it was written more carefully, but this will not prevent this book from becoming an important work.Ximin has written more horror novels in recent years, and has achieved success because of this.But I think this one shows the deep themes and experiences in his novels, and it is worth looking forward to.There are many precedents for writing large works in a popular way: for example, Singer's short story collection "Kafka's Friends", because he has achieved a high degree of unity of the deepest theme and the most popular slang. Such nonsense is of little value.The combination of the most popular expression and the most mysterious thought is the essence of life, just like a tree grows leaves, there cannot be only the life of the tree, and there cannot be only the leaves, the separation of the two is absurd.

I believe that Ximin will continue to write similar works from the standpoint of this book.He has two choices: either add more profound content to the framework of popular novels, or add popular elements to the so-called pure literature mode.If he asks the opinion of my fellow countryman, I will say that the two are the same thing.This problem does not exist at all if we think that we are indeed alive.For the dead separate the soul from the body.