what’s over? What has changed? what are you doing? What to do?
At the end of June, we received a note from Guo Shuang, who wrote that she read Muriel Spark’s “Deliberately” in the spring lockup, dismantling the author’s delightful passages, falling in love with Many characters in a novel, and find and confirm their own writing and life again in reading.
Along with this record, there is also its “Summary of Preliminaries”. Guo Shuang wrote:
In spring, at the beginning of April, I received a letter from a teacher, “Because you have just come to Shanghai and encountered epidemic control, you must have encountered more difficulties than the old residents. You must protect yourself…”
In June, when the lockdown was over, I remembered this exhortation and asked myself: Have you protected yourself?
What the mind is really asking is: have you protected your spirit, your reason, your honesty, your enthusiasm, your action and your imagination?
I am a writer. There are many times when reading or writing can seem useless, but there are times when it makes room for people.
After writing this article, I sent it to a friend and said, “It’s over. Let’s move on.”
what’s over? What has changed? what are you doing? What to do?
Share with you.
I am happy to embark on my life path
Written by: Guo Shuang
I’m looking for a writer, preferably a woman writer, she’s different from everyone else, she writes books, she writes books, she’s relaxed and witty, neat and enthusiastic, in short, she’s seen the world, the big world, see She was very popular, but she was not frightened by these. One day, she decided to use novels to cast magic and use imaginary elixir to give readers comfort and excitement, relieve their worries, and detoxify. After reading the last page, she closed the book, Readers can “since then, happily embarked on the road of my life”. It’s not easy to do this, it’s not easy.
I started reading Muriel Spark this spring. Her novel Deliberate has been bought for some time now and is on the coffee table, along with the biography of Margaret Yourcenar, Beauvoir’s novel The Merry-go-round and Hardy, Philip Roth, Kunde Pull the books or biographies of these authors together. If the characters in the book would visit each other at night, and the author and the author would talk when they were close to each other, then the heroine of “Deliberate”, Fleur, the female writer who has won my heart, will definitely deceive Beauvoir’s self , Yourcenar’s masochism, Philip Roth’s arrogance and Kundera’s hypocrisy are so clear that she can go back to her cramped single-person apartment in Kensington, London in 1950, leaning on the bed and writing ah Write, it is ridiculous to write about these people who have seen and seen through. This is not to say that Muriel Spark is a mean writer, good at mischief, and can tear down many masks. The fall of the mask is only the first step, somewhat comical and somewhat ironic, but before and after this first step, Muriel Spark had already thought about the beginning and the end, she wrote from the past to the future, and from the past to the future. The future goes back to the beginning, so that’s why there is that laughter, who knows the comedy background of life with tears, and fortunately let everyone show their true colors as soon as they appear. I think she’s the type of writer who thinks everything out, thinks over it for a long time, and writes quickly, almost instantly, once she starts. In her books, any character, no matter how big or small, or the length of time she has appeared on the scene, has a lifetime of fortunes and joys and sorrows that shine in the writer’s mind. As a result, her narrative is fluid, moving through time like lightning, waiting to strike readers at any time. She doesn’t give a shit, often spoilers ahead of time, and the story often begins in seemingly unpredictable moments of power that only readers who have read the entire book will be aware of. In this slight, a little lonely, and even a little too quiet scene, the protagonist has just slayed a dragon, which can also be said to have strangled the throat of fate. For example, at the beginning of “Consideration”, the protagonist Flair is writing a poem in the cemetery. This scene is ordinary, she is just doing one of the several things she usually likes, and when she comes to this cemetery, even There is nothing special about this cemetery itself, it is just one of the many moments in her life that should be forgotten, but the writer tells us that at this moment, Friel, who is sitting here, has accomplished some kind of major event in her life, and she has since then will be different. And Fleur herself, at the beginning of the story, knew but didn’t know much about all of this. Muriel Spark often chooses to tell the story after the dust has settled, but often tells you directly what will happen in a few decades, so what seemed ordinary a few decades ago is actually how extraordinary. Isn’t this life? Most of the time intuition is more sensitive than logic, and the truth and what it brings and loses is often seen later.
Muriel Spark
About life, no matter how simple people have something to say. And when it comes to major events in life, no matter how ordinary life is, a few golden threads can be spun like silk. But the meaning and interest of fiction is not in these dry truths, truths that are hard to find, or knocked on the door and can’t get in. Knock or not, go away or stay, the novel is between these wandering, choice, gain and loss, epiphany and abandonment, that is, life itself. Muriel Spark wrote her book the same way. In many cases, she even deliberately blurred and covered up the strict and even cruel moral laws behind these ambiguous life stories. But this approach has released the reader’s perception and imagination more deeply.
Like these sentences I like:
“I don’t know why I thought of Dodi as a friend, but that’s what it is. I believe she also regarded me as a friend, even though she didn’t like me. Friends were destined to be among the people I dealt with in those days. Yes. They’re like your thick coat and a little luggage. You don’t throw them away because you don’t like them too much. Life on the intellectual fringes in 1949 was an isolated world, like Eastern Europe today.”
“For years, critics have been asking if Warland is in love with his nephew. How could I know? Warland Chase doesn’t exist, he’s just a few hundred words, punctuation, sentences , paragraphs, and imprints on the page. If I did psychology research on Warren Chase’s motivations, I would say yes. But I don’t study motivations, never.”
“Metamorphosis”
I don’t seem to have liked so many characters at the same time in one novel. I don’t like Voronsky, I don’t like Anna, I don’t like Juansheng, and I don’t like Zijun. Even my favorite Huckleberry Finn, sometimes I don’t really like him. Some scholars say that the characters in modern novels make readers unable to really like them, let alone become them. This is the hidden disease of modern novels, because people are broken, broken, and turned into beetles. But the amazing thing is that the characters mentioned in the two quotes above, whether it’s Dodi or Warren Chase, I can say I love them. Love their inconsistencies, love their self-righteousness, love them jealous and mad, evil and damned, love them like anyone I’ve ever known.
I wonder how Muriel Spark did this. How could she let a picky reader like me have nothing to say about the things and people in the book. When the curtain fell, she just felt light and wanted to hum a song and go home and lie down on the soft bed to have a good dream. In fact, she also revealed a point, for example, in the book, she borrowed Flair’s mouth to say: “I write poetry and prose not to make people think I am a good person, but to make my words express real and magical things. Thoughts, words are just that for me when I’m writing. I love the sound I make when I work, I don’t know what can’t be said about it. I’ll tell all the relevant facts.”
So it’s just, true. It’s just that this real presentation has Woolf’s wit, Flannery O’Connor’s loneliness, and Katherine Mansfield’s trembling, erotic, moral and ethical dial. Highly accurate probe.
Muriel Spark seems to be writing about some important people and things without any heart. Sometimes this kind of lightness or even inattentiveness can make people’s hearts feel bitter – only if they have been hurt and know what it is A real person will joke about people and things that have hurt him. After all, the truth is that there are no absolute victims. If a man insists that he is a pure victim, it is either cowardice or stupidity. Muriel Spark certainly has to expose the hearts of those evil people and expose them more and more, but she also undoubtedly exposes herself to the greatest extent possible in fiction. This exposure is not confessional, nor is it a private novel, without the hypocrisy of a narcissist, but a bitter, but full of epiphany metaphor for an espresso sticking to the bottom of the cup after removing the emotional froth.
The movie “All in One” adapted from “The Driver’s Seat”
After I read Deliberate, I went on to read her other books, Old Stories of Kensington, The Driver’s Seat, and Miss Brody. “Miss Brody” is perfect, “The Driver’s Seat” is a laissez-faire, and “Old Events in Kensington” isn’t bad either. But I still like “Deliberately” the most. Because the book has a lot of sentences like this:
“It was the last day of a period of my life, but I didn’t know it at the time.”
“I’m fine. I don’t have a job. It’s supposed to be frustrating, but rationally, it’s okay. Greedy landlords don’t matter…”
“Back then, I had some great friends, good and bad. I was nearly broke, but full of energy…”
Also because this is a novel about fighting for the right to write. The central object of the story is a manuscript. Friel, a still-obscure novelist struggling “on the fringes of the stinking literary circle,” has her manuscript stolen. Publishers claim to have been threatened or insinuated by high-profile, well-positioned figures to tear up publishing contracts and maliciously create the appearance of lost manuscripts. This is a destruction. A despicable attempt to stifle the truth. Not just a stack of paper, but the words, words, and thoughts in it. “If you don’t take action, you’ll never get your novel back.”
But it’s not just a matter of manuscripts being stolen and plagiarized. Through writing, Fleur wants to break the curse and save herself. Think of her opponent as the devil incarnate. They’ve got energy, they’re manipulative, and they’re outrageous bastards. But more importantly, dear Fleur, what kind of life path are you going to take?
“I started thinking about the atrocities done by Doddy, Sir Quentin, Levison Doe, against me and my novels.”
“I immediately decided to stop thinking about it. That’s it. Turn the page.”
“This time, as always, as I meditate, a plan of action arises in my head.”
Flair moved, unlike her whole-hearted writing of her novel in the first place. When she realized what she was facing, she wrote more determinedly. She fights back by writing novels, where reality and fiction are intertwined. How the characters are written in the novel will lead to their endings in reality. I appreciate the wisdom of reality and the fiction of reality. It is not black and white punishing evil and promoting good, but a judgment, a determination, a will. “I’m an artist, it’s a belief, a belief that I haven’t wavered, then and ever. So on that day in September 1949, I stood on that road in Hyde Park, There were three facts that miraculously centered on me, and I moved on in a good mood.”
Someone dies and the villain wins the first game. The situation seems to be spiraling out of control. But in those corners outside the main storyline, something is changing. Friel has accomplices, several equally committed, almost enthusiastic supporters. In the novel, these people are all living their own lives, Solly, Edwina, and a part of Wally. They seem to have opened a copy in the game, and where the strong spotlight of the plot can’t shine, they have Live your own little life with taste, enjoying every second, those more trivial, but more real time. They don’t brag, don’t take things too badly, and aren’t blindly optimistic, they value facts more. Occasionally shouting twice in front of Fleur is just a performance to entertain others. Like Fleur, they value action more. It was them who helped Fleur rewrite the ending. So the wicked died. must die. Death is the beginning of the novel and the end of the wicked. The accomplices have no emotional reaction to this ending. They already knew it, and they are more like testing themselves-what you do and choose at this moment is your life itself.
I often listen to a piece of What Are You Doing The Rest Of Your Life that Bill Evans recorded live in Berlin in 1972. There have been many moments this spring when I should have asked myself the sentence in the title of this piece, but I didn’t. I just wake up at six every morning, sit at my desk, turn on my computer, and write my novel. The characters are waiting for me. When I get tired of writing, I stop. Food, chores, meaningless but important things, and family, were waiting for me. The next day, the third day, day by day, I live my life. Then the end of spring, the Dragon Boat Festival hanging wormwood calamus. I walked to the road of the community, looked up at the long-lost unobstructed sky and sun, and reached out to something unknown.
“I thought about what I could have for dinner: tin of herring roe on bread, and instant coffee and milk. It was a good dinner for Mrs Edwina’s age, and it was for me too. Canned herring roe and coffee were my little treasures, when food was strictly rationed.”
The lockdown is over.
I reread “Deliberately”, happily. As a souvenir, I reread the last sentence of the book several times, “In this way, I stepped into my heyday, and since then, God forbid, I have happily embarked on the road of my life.”
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