Chapter 2 Prologue 2 "Looking from the direction of death"

On the passenger plane from Beijing to Guangzhou, a white-collar girl from Shanghai was reading the thriller novel "The Daughter of Gu" on her seat.The strange man sitting next to her said to her: "I wrote that novel." The girl gave him a sideways look with disdain, thinking that this man was mentally ill.But what is dramatic is that this short, stocky, boxer-like man is the author of the novel himself.The ending of the event is very much like a happy comedy of kitsch: After a series of twists and turns, the charming Shanghai girl finally married the military writer she met.And this is the true story of Li Ximin.His life is as full of legends as his novels.

But Li Ximin's recent novels have some unusual mutations.He changed his perspective, no longer from the perspective of horror, but directly from the direction of death.Not only is death terrifying, but it also has its opposites—tenderness, friendship, and great motherly love. With more than 20 death stories, it is the death genealogy of the Hakka people, or a life chronology of the Hakka people, recording different types of death cases.The protagonists of the novel are farmers (and their oxen), boatmen, widows, rural teachers, dumb and blind people, children, educated youths, soldiers, old women and low-level officials, etc.; the narratives are disconnected from each other, but loosely connected It looks like a self-closed and circular village-like chain, which not only maintains our concern for life, but also becomes the hardest part of the spiritual history.They belong to childhood memories, so vague that they lose details and need to be filled with literary pens, but they are so real and closely related to the experience of each of us readers.

The author wrote: "Before he left Quliu Village at the age of eighteen, the breath of death enveloped the melancholy Heizi. The process of his growth is a history of the soul." From the direction of "Heizi", the world is endless the sum of the deaths.There is no magic or romantic suspense in this novel, only fragments of memories and dreams, pieced together into a complete portrait of death.We see that the faces of the dead are very different, but very similar, as if they came from the same ancestor.But it was only when I observed these death portraits from a distance that they finally came together into a jigsaw puzzle of the life of my species.Beyond those fragile memories of death, we hold onto a sense of life.We are told that, in most cases, death is the best way to end suffering and switch lives.

From the direction of death, what exactly do we see?Fear is undoubtedly the most essential experience among them.Li Ximin is a "thriller novelist", he has not given up on the description of horror scenes, whether it is the young hooligan Lao Si who specializes in extortion, Li Wenkui who extorts compensation by dying, or Li Laifu who deliberately exhausted himself because of his shrewd wife. Wang Chang, who was beaten to death by the rebels, their existence and death aroused a huge soul horror.It reveals some of the darkest details of a race's history, giving it a sinister tinge.But the attributes of death are diverse. Sometimes it is a tearful tragedy, sometimes it is relief and escape, and sometimes it is even a severe trial-it judges those innocent and guilty things to die together.

This novel maintains the tradition of rural narrative, and at the same time implies a boy's more innocent way of looking at it.Those rural female teachers and female educated youths are Heizi's secret love objects in adolescence; the tender description of his mother seems more like a secret Oedipus ceremony held by the author; the most important metaphysical symbol in the novel is Chimao Granny, she is The symbol of Grandmother Earth represents the last justice, benevolence and transcendence of darkness in the world. Her death is a ritual of redemption. After the great flood, she used her love to define all previous deaths.The author of the novel used her to create a fictional movement for spiritual sublimation.She is the last redeemer of the earth.

Heizi is admitted to university, providing another bright ending for the novel.But this is undoubtedly a false hope.Heizi flees in this hope, trying to get out of the harsh fate of "Quliu Village", but his mother still wants to give him a purse full of grains.But in my opinion, what is contained in this small cloth bag is actually all the ancestors and neighbors of the fugitive youth.He will carry those dead souls on his back and walk in other lands.He cannot transcend his destiny.On the last page of , we see the hard destiny of race. It means Li Ximin's leaping writing.In the past, he wrote a lot of rural and military-themed works. After several years of writing horror novels, he began to bypass genre novels and enter purer literary narratives to describe death and all things related to life. .Although re-entering the field, he has expanded our perceptual space of rural experience.At a certain end of the death narrative, the life of literature is struggling to wake up.