Cover News Reporter Zhang Jie.
The writer Lu Nei spent ten years creating several ** with "Lu Xiaolu" as the protagonist: "Young Babylon" was published in "Harvest" magazine in 2007, "Follow Her Journey" was published in 2009, "Angel Falling" was published in 2013, and "Seventeen-year-old Hussar" was published in 2018.
Many readers were deeply impressed by the protagonist of the series, "Lu Xiaolu": he was a technical school student and later entered a saccharin factory as a worker. But his heart is not in the factory, he loves literature and art, and he is a literary young man who writes poetry. In the light stories of boys and girls described in the road, absurdity is mixed with reality, frolic meets solemnity, and "Lu Xiaolu" shines with a poetic sense of youth, which makes many people have deep resonance, and this series has also become a "book of youth" for a generation of readers.
Sharing session: Ma Boyong, Mao Jian, Lu Nei (from right to left).
In 2023, Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House will launch a new edition of the four works of "Young Babylon", "Follow Her Journey", "Angel Falling" and "Seventeen-year-old Hussar" under the name of "Follow the Road Series", which is also the first time that these four works have been published as a complete series, with a total volume of more than 70 million words. On December 17, 2023, the sharing session of "The Path of Our Times-Follow the Road in the Road" was held in Shanghai. Lu Nei and Mao Jian, a professor and senior literary critic of East China Normal University, and Ma Boyong, a writer, launched a unique literary dialogue.
Lu Xiaolu" is a loud ** character.
Because of Lu Nei's excellent narrative skills, many readers love the teenager "Lu Xiaolu", just like the unruly teenage male protagonist in youth films. When people open their mouths to tell the story of Lu Xiaolu, they find that they are actually talking about their own youth. For a long time, "Lu Xiaolu" became almost another name for the writer's road. If the time in ** will continue to grow, "Lu Xiaolu", who was born in the early 70s, is now 50 years old. But "Lu Xiaolu" is in **, forever young.
Road Follower Series (Set of Books).
The image of "Lu Xiaolu" is deeply rooted in the hearts of the readers. More than ten years have passed since the publication of "Young Babylon", and Lu Nei is still often asked: Who is this "Lu Xiaolu"?Is it himself?The standard answer in the road is: Lu Xiaolu is like a friend of mine. It's 2023 now, and Lu Nei said that now he feels that "Lu Xiaolu is a bit like my son, or like my nephew".
Good literature is the art of language, but also the art of shaping classic characters. The good ** will still contribute their own classic characters to literature. A good character image can entrust the author with all the perceptions of the world, life and himself, and is closely connected with the creativity of the **family.
Mao Jian said that there are very few particularly loud literary figures at present. mentioned a lot of good long stories**, and they don't quite have a distinct character. But the "road path" written by Lu Nei is very loud. When posting a preview of this event on the Internet, many people said "Wow, Lu Xiaolu", as if they were sincerely calling out the characters they once loved. In Mao Jian's view, creating good characters is a rigid need for literary and artistic works, such as the two hottest TV series "Hurricane" and "The Long Season" this year, the roles of Gao Qiqiang and his sister-in-law in "Hurricane" are impressive, and "The Long Season" has created a particularly good middle-aged and elderly character.
Mao Jian: Readers identify each other by their "juvenile sense".
After the first publication of Young Babylon, Mao Jian read it. Now that it has been reprinted, she has reread it. Mao Jian is from Ningbo, Lu Nei is from Suzhou, both of them are post-70s, "I and Lu Nei are contemporaries, and the people in Lu Nei ** are all people I am familiar with, none of them are heroes, they are all people with nicknames, and they are very similar to people of my same age. Watching this series is like watching your own youth. There is a very strong point, that is, we still have those youthful feelings that we can't get rid of, and we will be with them until death. This sense of juvenility is particularly clear in the ** in the road. Including the movie adapted from "Young Babylon", it also reflects this sense of youthfulness very well. Different people can recognize each other with this sense of youth, which is the greatest comfort or commemoration given to me by the 'following series' in Lunai. ”
As a senior film critic, Mao Jian has very in-depth and detailed observations about film and television works, and her comments are often to the point. In particular, she mentioned that Lu Nei's description of love is very sincere, "Love is the best test paper of an era." There is no love in contemporary literature and art today. Although a film and television drama will be marked as a romantic drama or something, there is actually no love in it. The love in the road ** is not like love, but it is particularly beautiful. ”
Group photo at the scene.
Ma Boyong: It is very difficult to capture the times with literature.
Ma Boyong revealed that he looked at the ** in the road as early as 2007 when he first joined the work. Reading this book at the time, I didn't feel like it was happening in the South. I feel that it is a kind of detachment from the regional color, neither the Jiangnan water town in the Chinese narrative, nor the northwest style, not at all. I was born in a small town factory in the north. "Young Babylon" is a thing that happens everywhere in a Chinese factory. I am familiar with all the things that happened to Lu Xiaolu, and I myself was born in a factory and had similar things, and there were almost the same things. For me, it's not a particularly regional**.
The story in the "Follow Series" takes place in the 90s of the 20th century, and Lu Nei's grasp of the atmosphere of the 90s in ** is also praised. Ma Boyong, who was born in 1980, shared his feelings about the 90s of the 20th century, "Time has become very fast, and the environment around me has also changed very quickly, and the most impressive time is probably 1997. I was studying in Guilin at the time, and I would go back to my hometown in the north every summer, and every year I went back to my hometown changed, the speed of the train and the environment in the train were changing. Every six months, the things of interest will change, consumption Xi, environment, and concepts are changing. This change is a challenge for writers. Because writing about an era requires precipitation, condensation, and exploration, but when the era becomes too fast, and there is often no time to stop and observe, it has disappeared, has become a different appearance, and even the memory is not very clear. Therefore, it is very difficult to write literature in the context of the 90s, because this era is changing too fast and too difficult to catch. ”
What kind of opportunity prompted the road to start telling the story of the road path?Questions like this sent Lunai's mind back to 2006. In the summer of that year, because of the Football World Cup, there was more free time on the road, so I went back to my hometown in Suzhou. This time, he found that a factory that he had seen every time he returned to his hometown was about to disappear. It was the factory where he used to work, and there was a girl in the factory that he liked back then, but later lost contact. "It occurred to me that I should write the story of the factory in the 90s. This is the origin of the first installment in the "Follower Series", "Young Babylon".