Empty mountain

Author: A Lai
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features: Ten years after The Dust Settles, A Lai's new novel has been released, truly a case of "ten years of effort for one sword." A Lai's new work stands as a twin peak of artistic thought alongside The Dust Settles. The structural art and grand design of the novel represent A Lai's new exploration in art, presenting a completely different style from The Dust Settles. If The Dust Settles features a closed structure and a complete story, the new work, in order to portray the significant theme of "the secret history of a village," adopts a shared culture and background, with different people and events forming a stereoscopic contemporary Tibetan rural landscape. This is known as the "petal-like" structural approach. The author's realistic attitude in "portraying the secret history of a village" is extremely clear—it is neither of a single ethnic group nor pastoral, legendary. The author has profound cultural, religious, natural, and social experiences with Tibetan villages. Calling it "secret history" does not mean disclosing its mystery but rather revealing the ignored and numb pain through special techniques. It is precisely for this reason that the novel has formed a grand scale. The significant and solemn theme, the substantial and profound content, and the structure that the author masterfully controls offer deeper reflections on humanity and nature, politics and culture, and the harmony and progress of religion and society. This is a powerful realist work filled with masculine beauty, sweeping away the current literary scene's decline, triviality, and decay. Empty Mountains depicts six stories that took place in a Tibetan village called Jicun from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, with nearly thirty main characters. The book consists of two parts: Scattered with the Wind and Heavenly Fire. Scattered with the Wind tells the story of a bastard named Gela and his somewhat mentally impaired mother, who rely on each other, suffer endless humiliation, and ultimately die unjustly. Heavenly Fire describes a sorcerer named Dogi, who witnesses the changes in the surrounding world during the Cultural Revolution amidst a forest fire.