Although he is eighty years old, the writer Wang Meng's pen seems to be still young. His latest novel, Boredom and Madness, will be published in August. In the past 20 13, a newly revised 700,000-word novel "The Scenery Here" and a collection of short stories "I will be old next year" were published. Wang Meng, regarded as a "youth idol" of a generation, was recently interviewed by a reporter from China Youth Daily in Beidaihe. He smiled and said, "whoever is bored in youth is crazy in youth." Every generation of young people should cherish their youth. "
No one's youth is vegetarian.
China Youth Daily: Your Long Live Youth has influenced a generation of young people, but today's young people may prefer to read the works of Jing M.Guo and Han Han. Have you read the books of these two young writers?
Wang Meng: I think there are many books in Jing M country. He has his own requirements for words and sentences, and pursues the defamiliarization of language and narrative. He sent me the latest one, but the words in it are one size smaller than five, which I can't understand. In fact, this strategy is also right-you are too old to see young people's things.
China Youth Daily: Jing M.Guo's Tiny Times 3 and Han Han's Never See You Again are showing in the cinema.
Wang Meng: I have seen the first film of Tiny Times. If you ask it to be a work with profound thoughts and social significance, it will certainly not work, but at least it will attract many people's attention and be close to the psychology of young people. There are handsome men and beautiful women, hybrids, oh, so handsome that I am stupid. Many literary and artistic works represent the great era, and the performance of the small era is also good.
China Youth Daily: Young people will undergo great changes in every era, and the youth literature that can influence a generation must conform to the characteristics of that era. With the changes of the times, what kind of youth literature will become a classic?
Wang Meng: Not only is my generation different from that of Jing M. Guo, but there are also many changes in the middle. For example, The Beast is Fierce written by Wang Shuo, which is not the same as me, nor is it the same as Han Han in Jing Ke and Jing M.Guo.
Really good works have a strong sense of the times and are not limited by the times. For example, animals are fierce. Although they are written during the Cultural Revolution, they should be boring or boring, crazy or crazy, noisy or noisy.
China Youth Daily: Nowadays, young people regard Jing M Guo and Han Han as idols, and you were also the idols of young people when you were young. What do "old idols" think of "new idols"?
Wang Meng: I dare not say that I know young people too well. But every era has its own youth, and no one's youth is a vegetarian.
I don't agree to divide young people into post-80 s and post-90 s and label them with various labels. Today's young people have more information than we did then. In fact, the better living conditions now, the more troubles. For example, getting married, how simple it was then. We invited a dozen friends to sit down, grabbed a handful of peanut crisp dates, and weighed a catty of loose wine and half a catty of pig's head meat. This is a very luxurious wedding. Now it's a house and a professional wedding company, which is really troublesome.
People of different times have their own puzzles. So young people don't just want to enjoy themselves, and don't feel that they are the most unlucky.
Seeking spiritual resources from traditional culture and world culture
China Youth Daily: Now we always say that this is an era of faith collapse.
Wang Meng: In recent years, China has developed rapidly and its material level has improved rapidly. But it seems that its spiritual level has not kept up, and even been compressed. In the period of social transformation, some confusion and anomie are inevitable, but I am not so pessimistic.
It used to be said that people in China don't like reading, but I have also contacted young people and found that many people love reading. There is a problem in the media age, and everything is magnified. We should really worry about these things, but in the process, we should be able to find a way out.
China Youth Daily: You recently mentioned in the article "Talk about our spiritual resources" that we have a mentality of "cultural patriotism or cultural roots". What do you think is the root of our culture?
Wang Meng: China has encountered many conflicts, depression and pain in history, but China has not fallen for thousands of years. This year is the Sino-Japanese War. China was defeated in the Sino-Japanese War, but the country did not perish; After the Lugouqiao Incident, the country did not die. Now that China is in the era of globalization, it can emulate and make great achievements in national construction, which shows that China culture still has considerable vitality.
In my opinion, to find our own spiritual resources, we must rely on traditional culture and world culture. As Deng Xiaoping said, we should face modernization, the world and the future.
I will be old next year. Get up tonight to watch the World Cup.
China Youth Daily: Some people compare your new book Boredom and Madness to China's version of Confessions and Memories of the Past. What do you think of this work?
Wang Meng: At first, I wanted to name the novel Boredom and Passion, but the publishing house thought it was easy for readers to misunderstand that it was a theoretical book, so it changed it to Boredom and Madness. This is an avant-garde writing. Some people say that this is the product of my "writing madness". In fact, boredom and madness are a kind of spiritual creation.
China Youth Daily: It is generally believed that "boredom and madness" is a state of young people, which will become calm after decades of precipitation. The writer Tie Ning once gave you the title of "old boys". It seems that you are still very passionate.
Wang Meng: Boredom and madness have been written from the protagonist's childhood to his later years. Professor Gao Yuanbao of Fudan University said that after reading the first four chapters, I think I should be awarded the Children's Literature Award, but after reading it, I think I should be awarded the Old Age Literature Award.
I am still full of interest in this world, so every day is boring and crazy. For example, I get up in the middle of the night to watch the World Cup. I support the German team. They are as well-trained as machines. I also like tennis. Besides Li Na, I like Russian Sharapova best. I like math too. In June this year, the China People's Political Consultative Conference newspaper also published my conversation with several mathematicians about humanities and mathematics.