Wang Meng on Novels: "Breeze" Series, Volume Two

Author: Wang Meng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-10-01
Features: The reason why a novel is a novel is precisely because it speaks much yet does not speak directly. It offers not a simplified proposition but a real and hypothetical life, a life that is poeticized or absurdified, natural or distorted. Live like life, recall like memory, feel like feeling, experience joys and sorrows like joys and sorrows; yet it is also a different kind of joys and sorrows, one refracted through the unique lens of the individual's mind, uniquely brewed and created, thus artifying life, memory, feeling, and joys and sorrows. It provides an experience, a sensation, wisdom, and passion—more often, confusion, something indescribable, yet not a cheerful proposition itself. If the best-selling "autobiography" of Mr. Wang Meng today discusses his philosophy of life, then this exquisite work on the essence of novels can be said to represent his novel aesthetics and philosophy of art.