Malloy's "Candle embers" has 20 chapters, one page ***2 12. It took me about one night, one morning and one afternoon to see this for the first time.
What was it like for the first time? Well written. You will ask, how to measure this well. Measure? No, no, just reading it once can't reach the basic evaluation ability required by the text. Let's talk about feelings first Well, how do you feel?
It's like: I spent 20 yuan to go to 85℃, wanted to sit for an afternoon, only had a cup and ate a loaf of bread, but I met an old man there. He told me about his short, brilliant and lonely life for free.
Is it true?/You don't say. Of course not. Just an analogy. You know that. This book is borrowed from the library. I didn't spend a penny, but I condensed the fate of a writer and the motherland.
What do you mean? What does this novel specifically express and how is it expressed?
Well, that's a good question, when I finish the second time.
The first question: What does the novel express?
Plot generalization
At the beginning of the story, one morning, the general received a letter from his servant Although this letter is scrawled, rough and concise, it is a kind of waiting that permeates the years and has just responded. Conrad, the owner of the letter, was General Henrik's best friend when he was young. The general has been waiting for any news from Conrad. This class is 4 1 year for 43 days. Marquez smiled, friendship is not as good as love. Ariza and Fermin waited 5 1 year for 9 months and 4 days.
After reading the letter, the general immediately ordered the footman and nanny Nini to settle down and have a big dinner, because Conrad was finally coming.
At five o'clock in the afternoon, the general took a cold bath. Before that, he didn't eat lunch, only drank a cup of herbal tea. He has been lying in a dimly lit room, constantly thinking of his parents, his dead lover Christina, and of course, his resentment and suspicion of Conrad's betrayal.
At 7 o'clock in the evening, the general walked out of the room, accompanied by a ceremonial dignified atmosphere, through the long corridor, through the nanny Nini standing at the end of the corridor, through more than 40 years of dust and memories, and met the morning letter.
Ok, the pre-novel chapter 10 ends here.
The last chapter 10 can be summarized in one sentence: the dialogue at the dinner table. (Mainly, the general questioned Conrad around two questions, during which the general said more and Conrad said less. )
So, is it a novel with a very simple relationship between characters and a very simple plot? The time is one day, and the place is at the general's house. The protagonist is the general and his friends, and the thing is that friends who haven't seen each other for years meet again. That's right. So where is its profundity? I don't know, but I can guess first. Is there a standard answer to the interpretation of a text? Just kidding, forget the reading comprehension of modern Chinese since childhood and consider the second question.
The second question: How is the novel expressed?
Chapter 1 The general counted the time after receiving the letter. This is very interesting, because in our daily life, when we receive a letter from a friend, we will excitedly open it directly, instead of carefully calculating their separation time, even to 4 1 43 days a year. At the thought of the concept of forty years old, the aging and death expectation of the characters came out with this concept. What is certain is that at this moment, the life of the recipient is no longer young. Here, the letter sent by my friend forty years ago also left a suspense for the following. Who is the sender? His relationship with the recipient, why did he send such a letter at this time. Then read on, the sword goes to the wrong side. The author did not immediately introduce the sender according to common sense, but euphemistically and vividly described Nini, the nanny who was still with the general, and her parents who had already passed away in the second, third and fourth chapters.
The general's father is the captain of the imperial guard, with wealth, status and status. Besides, he also has a hobby-hunting. Why do you have this hobby? The novel explains, "The guard hunts because he can't destroy the world where others live like himself-strange cities, Paris, manors, foreign languages and living habits-so he kills roe deer, bears and elk."
Seeing this, I thought of a passage in Joyce's Portrait of a Young Artist. You can compare these two paragraphs. "I told you about those moments before," he said vaguely, and one of them gave birth to a soul. The birth of the soul is slow and unknown, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When a person's soul is born in this country, there are all kinds of traps to catch it and stop it from flying. What nationality, language and religion do you tell me? I have to fly out of these traps. "
I think a person's soul will always fly with the help of something, such as the carefree Dapeng bird in Zhuangzi and the Nine Wan Lifeng. Everyone has his own way to face reality and connect with his soul, but hunting belongs to the general's father. What about the way it belongs to the general's mother?
The general's mother is a countess. They fell in love at first sight at a party when the guards were messengers in Paris. Love is like the snow on the streets of Paris at that time. At first, those famous buildings, crowded people and national, ethnic and class attributes that can distinguish people seem to have fallen into the temptation of some passion in this naive, pure and poetic imagination storm, forgetting the selfishness, arrogance and prejudice in the depths of human nature. But anyway, the general's mother and his father fell in love at that moment. what is love ? The reason you have always had is no longer so clear, and your heart no longer listens to logical dialogue. The countess resolutely followed the captain of the Guards from France to Hungary, where his motherland is located, before she realized that she hated her husband's hobby, hunting. She forbade and stayed away from everything in the manor that reminded her of hunting. She loves music and Chopin, and she likes to play the piano in the moonlight when her husband is always thinking about his prey.
In the fifth chapter, we see the general growing up in such a family, looking for love and care in the blood of France and Hungary, and looking for spiritual direction. In the end, he inherited the demeanor, nobility, obligation and vanity of a soldier from his father. I don't get enough love from my mother, and my desire for love is strong. In the general's youth, he often had a fever and cough because of loneliness, until he met Conrad who slept next to him in the military academy.
It is worth noting that until now, our chapter 5 has a tendency to respond to the foreshadowing of chapter 1. Starting from the sixth and seventh chapters, the author begins to explain the relationship between the general and the sender.
Shan Duoer described the intimate relationship between them like this.
They have everything, clothes and underwear. They share a bedroom in the manor and read the same book together. They discover the secrets of Vienna and the forest together, study together, hunt together, ride horses together, cultivate the morality of soldiers together, and experience social life and love together.
Side: the ridicule of their friendship at school didn't last long; Everyone soon got used to it and felt it was a natural phenomenon. Even when people mention them, they have combined their names into a couple and called them "Mr. and Mrs. Henrik", but people no longer laugh at this relationship. There is something gentle, serious, unconditional and tragic in their relationship, and this light of friendship disarms the mockers. In any crowd, someone will be jealous of this relationship. Man's greatest desire is selfless friendship.
However, no matter how good friends are, there will always be differences. There will always be a time when I need to face the world independently and examine where I come from and where I am going. If we really want to know a person, we have to know his childhood in his life history and what kind of family behind him supports his own growth. It's a pity that General Henrik never thought about this before he first went to Conrad's house. He only knows that Conrad's father is a small official and his mother is Polish. He didn't know the details of his friend's house until Conrad said for the first time, "If I need new harness, they will have to stop eating meat for three months." If I tip the waiter at dinner, my father will have to stop smoking cigars for a week ... When I tip your servants, I am spending money from their lives. Their life is very difficult. " The general feels that the original integrated people now seem to have an unspeakable division. Conrad should learn to forgive Henrik's wealth, and Henrik should forgive Conrad's poverty. The general's mother loves Conrad more than the general's father, because they also love music. When two people were sitting in the hall and playing Chopin's Fantasia of Polonaise together, the general and his father seemed to be in another world. If the general's ignorance of Conrad's family is the first difference they realize, then music also has the meaning of "one person repels the other". The general didn't understand why Conrad only turned pale when he heard music, even if it was very ordinary music. In the general's view, playing music is just to get rid of troubles and embellish life, but Conrad's understanding of music is just the opposite, not to get rid of troubles, but to arouse people's inner passion and guilt, and to make people's lives more real in their own hearts and consciousness. Unfortunately, the general didn't have any personal feelings at that time. Conrad didn't honestly express his views to his friends.
Isn't this a generalization? How does the author express it? Yes, this is a more specific generalization, but I have to do it, because how to express a novel is how to arrange writing. I just summarized the first eight chapters. Now we can briefly look at the time arrangement in writing. I think Shan Duoer is a master who can write "time". Chapter 1 tells that a general received a letter in reality, which happened in reality. But the author was a good friend 40 years ago, which gave time and history weight and vivid color.
Chapters 2 to 7 are all memories. Explain when Nanny Nini came to the general's house, explain the general's father and mother, and explain Conrad, another protagonist of this novel. What is the relationship between memory and reality? Zhang Ailing has a sentence in Love in a Fallen City: "If you knew me before, maybe you will forgive me now." But after reading this novel, it is precisely this sentence that seems to have no weight. To outsiders, our general and his friends have established an indestructible friendship since childhood, but do they really know each other that well? Do they really have no external or internal factors that make one person think that he can never get close to another person? This is not a criticism of the depth of Zhang Ailing's thought. In the novel text of Love in a Fallen City, this sentence is depth, not here. Why? Because a text is an independent individual, it has its own internal emotional logic and life experience. The novels written by excellent novelists present such a thing. Therefore, personally, sometimes when we are talking about the deep ideological realm of this novel and the shallow ideological realm of that novel, we'd better think about whether the author can only write like this here, because it is in line with the character characteristics and destiny of the characters in the novel.
Ok, back to chapter 8, here we jump from memory to reality again. The beginning of chapter 8 is described as follows:
"The general change my clothes. He changed his clothes alone; I found a beautiful dress from the closet and looked at it for a long time. He hasn't worn a uniform for more than ten years. " He made a gesture of waiting for the coming guests. Note that the questions left in Chapter 1 should be answered here. Why did this guest mail it first? Is he afraid of the general's refusal? If so, why is he afraid? Do we know the answer now? A: I don't know. But what we read in the novel is that after reading the letter, the general was worried that the guests would not come and sent someone to pick him up by car. This is very intriguing. What happened between them?
Maybe we can put chapters 9 to 20 together. Conrad came, and General Henrik received him. They ate and talked over a blue candle. This conversation is now almost a review of the past, a question from one person to another. At first, I asked about their life after separation, and here I began to talk about their time, the turbulent war years. The general chose to serve the motherland, while Conrad retired to the tropics. But after World War I, the general's motherland disintegrated and Conrad became a British citizen. The concept of their shared motherland in memory no longer exists.
Then they started talking to the general's wife Christina. She left, too. The general talked about how he faced the loneliness and meditation after his best friend and his wife left. How many years of loneliness and meditation, 4 1 year. Here, Shan Duoer seems to throw a question to readers: If a person has enough wealth to care about poverty and enough leisure time to ponder the philosophy of human nature, but has no friends around him and lost his lover, is he still a happy person? To tell the truth, I was a little confused when I saw chapter 13. Why does the general ask the essence of friendship again and again, and ask the guests again and again? If you are betrayed by your best friend, will you continue to express your anger or forgive? What exactly is the problem between him and the visitor? Shan Duoer finally began to write. It turned out that while hunting, the general thought Conrad wanted to shoot him, but later he gave up the move and left.
This is amazing, because Conrad didn't shoot directly in front of the general, but shot in the back. In other words, the general may have guessed maliciously, but Conrad left after this hunting and never came back. When the general went to a friend's house (Conrad had never invited the general to go before), he found that his wife had just arrived. He immediately felt that his wife knew this place better than he did, and predicted that she had been here many times before. Betrayal made a sound, followed by anger. But this betrayal was discovered after the shooting. Why does the general think Conrad wanted to kill himself the moment his prey appeared? Why didn't he choose to run away when he felt that he was about to be hunted by his friends?
When fate comes directly to one of us in some way, it seems to be calling his name. From the depths of anxiety and fear, there will always be some magic, because one does not just want to live at all costs, no, but wants to thoroughly understand and accept one's own destiny, at all costs, even at the risk and destruction. Because the general wants to find a truth about friendship. See if my friend really wants to kill him.
So, what is the truth of love? His wife Christina, the general thinks he knows everything about her. He thinks she loves him, because when she met him, she was alone with a silent, sick old man who lived by musical instruments, music scores and memories ... Now, the general gave her marriage and honeymoon and took her to Paris and Rome. Christina certainly believes that she loves me very much. Later, I learned that she didn't love me, and she didn't love me during that time; Just grateful. She even gave him a diary full of surprising confessions. "You are hopeless because you are conceited." She also wrote that she met a man who followed her in Algiers and she wanted to go with him. I don't think one person really wants to talk about everything so hard to another person. Perhaps the reason why he talks about everything in such a fragmented and frank way is precisely to avoid directly talking about the key and essence of the matter. I didn't think of this during my honeymoon, or even when I read my diary later.
Well, now it's back to reality. My friend who fled 40 years ago is back, and I can finally ask those questions that I have been wondering. It's just that Christina, sandwiched between two people, is gone, and so is the country they once served and guarded.
Two questions
The two questions that the general has been waiting for for more than 40 years: 1 are his own illusions and he made a mistake. Or are you, my best friend, really trying to kill me? ? 2. Did Christina betray me with you?
Now it becomes: 1. Does Christina know that you tried to kill me when you were hunting that morning?
2. With our shrewdness, arrogance and superiority, what have we won? Isn't the painful infatuation with this long-dead woman the real content of our life?
However, Conrad did not answer these questions in the end. In fact, during the inquiry, the general had a diary that Christina recorded at that time, which could have been opened. While opening the contents of the diary, Conrad's answer was compared with it. But the general chose to burn it because it was meaningless.
In this way, a conversation about friendship betrayal, love betrayal and two old people who died in their old country but survived has now become a book about death. What's the point of death finally taking away all the memories before our lives?