Ticketing new books ( 2004-01-15 09:00) (China Daily)
The move towards a market economy has wrought
dramatic changes on the nation's book market. Readers can now lay their hands on
a much greater variety of titles in a broadening range of new outlets, both
private and State-owned.
Wang Meng, a
well-known writer, is one of the hot figures at the annual Beijing Book
Fair. [China Daily]
Despite the fact that book publishing and distribution has become a lucrative
business, publishers must tap into the right marketing trends to attract book
sellers and the readers.
The annual Beijing Book Fair, a venue for publishers and book sellers to meet
and seal contracts, is always viewed as the bellwether of China's book market.
During the four-day fair, which ended this past weekend, the 1,440 exhibiting
booths of 554 publishing houses were surrounded by booksellers hoping to make
the right choices.
Among the novels and biographies of famous people, four books stood out,
showing great promise of hitting the best seller list this year.
Renowned writer
The first is "Green Fox'' (Qing Hu) by established writer Wang Meng,
published by the People's Literature Publishing House.
Wang's "Green Fox"
tops the best-seller list.
The public is getting quicker at forgetting the now unfashionable past
glories of the Chinese literary world.
But among our long-standing literary celebrities, Wang Meng is one of the few
who has managed to stay constantly in the spotlight despite his advancing age.
In the autumn of his life, the 70-year-old vice-chairman of the China
Writers' Association is enjoying a very pleasant sort of second spring in his
career.
It is nothing like the first and real "spring" of his literary career, when
he and a handful of others dominated the literary scene in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, but his name is still to be reckoned with.
Following four acclaimed novels collected as a "Season Series,'' published in
and after 1992, he presented his publisher what was to be his best-selling
memoir, "My Life Philosophy'' (Wode Rensheng Zhexue), in 2003.
His new novel "The Green Fox'' is hot off the presses and a little different
from his previous novels.
In the four novels of the "Season Series,'' and in his works published in the
1980s, the historical background dominates, and the characters"actions and ideas
grow out of the specific historical situations.
The historical setting is equally intrusive in "The Green Fox,'' but in a
different way.
"It was a time when people were listening to the songs of Teresa Teng
(1953-95), and TV channels had just begun broadcasting movies from abroad,''
says Wang in the book.
It was during the early days of the country's opening to the outside world,
when Teng's soft and soothing melodies and sweet and romantic lyrics offered a
change from the rhythmic march tunes whose lyrics were filled with political
jargon.
It was an age, said Wang at the release ceremony for the book, "when things
were in transition, and people were starting to meet their instinctive human
needs face to face.''
Such as the need for sex, a motif Wang seldom touched in his previous
writing, but which gets considerable attention in this novel.
The 1980s was a great decade, when the sense of individuality first awakened.
But it was also an awkward one. That's why Wang picked it as the setting for his
story.
"In an age of urgent, hence insensitive change, people's subtle private needs
are more likely to be ignored, and their situations rendered more pathetic and
more likely to arouse the sympathies of contemporary readers.''
In the novel, Wang portrays a heroine who is constantly thirsting for true
love and does not hesitate in letting her passion show. As a result, she is
anathematized by the people around her in her youth. Despite her overnight
success in literary creation, she still gets nowhere in her love life.
As the story moves forward, the heroine, Qiangu, metamorphoses into Qinghu,
or a green fox, a kind of lovelorn creature in ancient Chinese myths who often
crosses the border between human and animal seeking human love.
Both the green fox and the heroine embody the desire for forbidden love and
an inescapable sense of dislocation.
They are calculated to arouse mixed feelings of admiration, sympathy, and
maybe even a slight touch of repulsion in the reader.
The second book that is likely to attract many readers is "Report on the
Death Penalty'' (Sixing Baogao), by Pan Jun. It is also published by the
People's Publishing House.
According to the author, the book is "a blend of 80 per cent literary writing
and 20 per cent judicial case studies.''
In the novel, the writer discusses the issue of capital punishment.
Pan says it was the short film "Thou Shall Not Kill,"part five of Polish
director Krzysztof Kieslowski's "The Decalogue'' that first stirred his interest
in the subject.
He made up his mind to write about it when he heard of the death of Sun
Zhigang. Sun, a 23-year-old graphic designer from Central China's Hubei
Province, who was wrongly detained by the police in Guangzhou and beaten to
death by some of his detainees in March last year. The case resulted in the
abolition of the decades-old regulation about detaining and sending home urban
vagrants and beggars without residence permits.
A generation younger than Wang Meng, Pan Jun was one of the key members among
the so-called "avant-garde writers'' who appeared in the mid-1980s and for a
time enchanted Chinese readers with their experimental, subjective works.
With their focus on experiment, these writers often ignored basic storylines
and closely-knit plots. As a result, the trend flagged and eventually folded in
the early 1990s when the experiments ran out of steam, leaving a number of major
young writers of this camp with nothing more to say.
Pan was not one of them. After a dormancy of about five years, he entered a
very productive period in 1996. In the year 2000 alone, eight different
publishing houses published a total of 18 of Pan's works.
According to critics, Pan's works vividly describe the contemporary lives of
ordinary people in times of change, calamity and misfortune, revealing the
writer's concern over the wide range of social issues.
Biographies
Biographies remain arguably the most popular category of books in the market.
Two biographies that are likely to sell well are "She Came from the Sea'' (Ta
Cong Haishanglai) and "My Three Lives'' (Sansheng Sanshi).''
"She Came from the Sea'' is a biography of Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing)
(1921-95). The book is to hit book stores later this month, timed to coincide
with the broadcast of its TV adaptation.
Chang, perhaps the most ingenious, eccentric and charming female Chinese
writer of the mid- 20th century, led an elusive private life that must have
frustrated potential biographers.
"Chang avoided talking about herself even in her private writings. The words
left by her, published or unpublished, throw little light on her life. And she
was not a sociable woman; there is not very much we can get from those who
chanced to know her,'' said Wang Hui-ling, the Taiwan biographer who spent three
years "pasting together the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of Chang's life.''
Wang took on the challenge.
"I learned the taste of sleepless nights from the job,'' said Wang, who was
also the scriptwriter for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,'' and a TV series
about Xu Zhimo, the famous Chinese modernist poet.
From Chang's writing, and from the little and sketchy knowledge the public
has of her private life, Chang is conceived as a woman who marvelously combined
high spiritual pursuits with shrewd earthly wisdom.
Wang's testimonial further reinforces that impression.
Compared with "She Came from the Sea,'' "My Three Lives'' presents a persona
far less singular and phenomenal, but perhaps more affecting.
It is the autobiography of another renowned Chinese female writer based in
the United States, Nieh Hua-ling, whose books include "Mulberry and Peach: Two
Chinese Women,'' among others.
The book, published by the Baihua Literature and Arts Publishing House in
Tianjin, will arrive in bookstores this month.
Chang and Nieh have some fairly obvious similarities: Both were born in the
1920s to illustrious families that were disintegrating, both left the Chinese
mainland around 1949, and both spent their later years in the United States.
But the two lived different lives in almost every other way.
When Chang had already made herself a legend in 1940s"Shanghai, Nieh,
homeless and impoverished, was driven by the war to move among the towns and
cities along the Yangtze River, sometimes alone, sometimes with her widowed
mother and three younger siblings.
"I spent almost all my youth along the Yangtze River running from war,'' says
Nieh in the book.
Nieh moved to Taiwan with her family in 1949. She soon rose to fame with her
subtle, thoughtful writing.
However, she also had to endure political persecution, as her editor had a
run-in with the ruling Kuomintang.
"Those days were the darkest time in my life,'' says Nieh.
Then one day in 1963, she met the man who later turned out to be the most
important person in her life. Paul Angel, an American poet, after a prolonged
and persistent courtship finally became her husband in 1971 and brought her to
the United States.
In contrast to Eileen Chang, whose personal emotional life seemed always at
low ebb except for a short romance when she was 23, Nieh's 21 years of marriage
life with Angel before he died in 1992 were the very incarnation of marital
euphori.
And contrary to Chang's silent American years, Nieh leads an energetic and
fruitful social life in the United States.
The International Writing Programme, initiated by The University of Iowa with
the suggestion and active support of Angel and Nieh, has become an important
meeting ground for international writers, including those from China.
Nieh describes herself as having lived three lives as a tree, with roots in
the Chinese mainland,trunk in Taiwan, and leaves and branches in the United
States.
