Discovering Fiction
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Over the past twenty years, Chinese novelist Yan Lianke has emerged as one of the most important writers in the world. In Discovering Fiction, Yan offers insights into his views on literature and realism, the major works that inspired him, and his theories of writing. He juxtaposes discussions of the high realism of Leo Tolstoy and Lu Xun against Franz Kafka’s modernism and Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism, charting the relationship between causality, truth, and modes of realism. He also discusses his approach to realism, which he terms “mythorealism”—a way of capturing the world’s underlying truth by relying on the allegories, myths, legends, and dreamscapes that emerge from daily life. Revealing and instructive, Discovering Fiction gives readers an unprecedented look into the mind and art of a literary giant.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Everyone complains that we don't have any great authors and literary works that could do justice to our contemporary era, this ignores the fact that for a long time our literature has sought merely to describe reality, rather than to actively explore it," writes novelist Lianke (The Four Books) in this savvy work of criticism. Focusing on Western and Chinese literature, Lianke argues that fiction deals in four different "levels of truth." There's "societally structured truth," which "develops primarily in centralized states and under strong ideological systems"; "worldly experienced truth" based on shared experience ; "life-experienced truth," which allows authors to "analyze the depth of their corresponding era," as seen in, for instance, Anna Karenina; and "spiritual-depth truth," the most sophisticated and, Lianke argues, "deepest form of reality"—accomplished by Dostoyevsky. Lianke then turns to contemporary literature's use of "mythorealism," which "rejects the superficial logical relations that exist in real life to explore a kind of invisible and ‘nonexistent' truth." While some readers might find Lianke's categories overly simplistic, his framework is precise and well articulated. The result is a thought-provoking look at the state of literature, and how it came to pass.
