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In a subtle language that transcends regional dialect without having lost its distinctive ways of seeing, Bi Feiyu, a rising star of Chinese fiction, guides his readers and fictional characters through the complex intersections of vulnerable individual lives and the historical forces that dictate their unfolding.
In Bi Feiyu's novels, there is an obvious but seldom fully elaborated desire: that the narrator or the writer could guide readers to notice him, to listen to him with rapt attention. He seems keenly aware that it is difficult if not impossible for a single person to utter his voice in this world and be heard by the crowds without being misunderstood.
Of course, all authors have a similar desire, a profound drive to seek affirmation from oneself as well as others. This desire can be satisfied in writing, since the act of writing contains the expectation that it will be read and listened to. Furthermore, the writer will nervously look forward to the realization of such expectations. Every author is a child awaiting the attention and appreciation of his parents.
But on this issue, Bi Feiyu is the exception to the rule.
In fact, Bi Feiyu is not a writer particularly suitable for translation. The novels of Bi Feiyu, if reinterpreted in another language, must be reduced to perhaps only half the meanings they posses in the original, for his novels in Chinese give Chinese readers a deep impression. And these readers can clearly make out his tone, Bi Feiyu's own singular tone.
Of course, many writers have developed their own tone, which at times becomes a well-known path toward particular points of view and feelings about the world. For those writers in China still enjoying fame since the 1980s, which might be called the Chinese golden age of literature, the secret of enduring power lies in the fact that their tone does not only belong to themselves but has become a new paradigmatic voice that is later used and overused in the modern Chinese literature that follows.
For a writer, this can be both a great fortune and misfortune. While the writer impacts his nation's language, he is also dissolved and digested by the vast ocean of that language. The causes and effects of this...