"Master Series·Kafka's Pendulum"

Author: Ge Fei
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-11-01
Features: In the long river of history and culture, numerous great works have accumulated, nourishing future generations. What do successful writers and novelists read? Ge Fei, with the keen insight of a novelist and the rationality of a professor, guides us closer to the masters. The dialogue between Ge Fei and classic writers forms the motion of a pendulum. Tolstoy, Flaubert, Kafka, and García Márquez are at one end of the pendulum, while Ge Fei is at the other, where the pendulum begins to swing. The pendulum's movement in the dark reveals the worldly background of the novelist's existence, the difficulties of writing, and the arduous exploration between various identities. The dialogue between Ge Fei and classic writers is also a game of go, a meticulous and profound recapitulation with layers of mysteries. Outsiders see the spectacle, while insiders see the subtleties. When the subtleties lead to the marital bed, we face the soul-searching interrogation of a sudden silence, much like the abrupt stillness of a pendulum. — Li Hui
It must be a kind of idol worship that caused the avant-garde novelists to stop writing and switch careers: they consciously lowered their own altitude to pave the way for the masters. Their respect for the masters is consumed in their titles: enlarging the font size of quoted sentences from classic works, thereby obscuring the author's more important responsibilities. Let me explain what "paving the way" means: First, when indoor furniture attempts to mimic mammals in its movements but mimics crippled, awkward, or what is called "hopping" mammals, we must help it maintain a relatively stable and dignified state on the ground. This is when objects with thickness come into play, such as small wooden blocks, coins, folded paper, and books. "Paving the way" can also refer to a situation where books do not stand upright like they do on a bookshelf but are stacked high and low, pressed vertically against each other, like a stack of homework submitted in an elementary school classroom. In that case, the book at the bottom is inevitably the one that "paves the way." The Pendulum of Kafka is certainly of the latter type. Pressing it down are the classic works of the masters mentioned in the book: Anna