Empty mountain.2

Author: Alai
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-01-01
Features: Ten years after When Dust Settles, Alai's new full-length novel has been released, truly a case of "ten years of effort for one sword." Alai's new work stands alongside When Dust Settles as twin peaks in artistic thought. The structural art and grand design of this novel represent Alai's new exploration in art, presenting a completely different style from When Dust Settles. If When Dust Settles features a closed structure and a complete story, the new work, due to its major theme of portraying "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 attitude in "portraying the secret history of a village" is extremely clear—it is neither singularly ethnic nor pastoral, nor is it legendary. The writer 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 a special technique. It is precisely because of this 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.