Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Your next book?
It’s a short novel of the early 20th century, by a not very well-known writer called Fu Lin, and it’s called Stones in the Sea. It’s one of the first novels where the writer says ‘I’. Of course, Shen Fu is also an ‘I’ narrator – it’s an autobiography – but that is quite unusual in Chinese literature, and among late 19th, early 20th-century novels this is the first where the writer writes about himself. This is a novel against the despotism of the family. It’s about two young people who get to know each other aged between eight and 12, and they’re in love, but then their families have to leave Peking at the time of the Boxer Rebellion, in 1898-1901. There is a description of the terrible flight of all these families from Peking to the South when the foreigners invaded, and they lose sight of each other during the travel. It’s the story of their qualms and their sadness, and the way their parents interfere, and the boy is married off to another girl, and then he realises the girl he loved is still alive, and he arrives close to her just when he is dying.
What is interesting in the novel, although it’s very sentimental, is the idea of individual freedom, and also the way the young people rebel against this domination of the family and the way they find other means to live. What is also interesting is that the parents are aware that their decisions are wrong, and they become conscious of that and there’s a shift in their mentality. In Shen Fu’s book he submits and tries to find independent ways, but he never rebels against the family; whereas in this novel they rebel – although they are overwhelmed by the weight of the family – and it’s about the birth of freedom. The characters realise how primitive the society still is, that it should be changed and cannot go on like this. It’s not political, it’s more in the way that people are living. And also in the style – it’s written in a language which is less conventional than most Chinese novels. Here it’s more driven by the feelings of the people and what the Chinese call the ‘feelings of passion’. So this book shows a change in the mentality.
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Marianne Bastid-Bruguière studied and taught at Beijing University in 1964-65. She joined the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris in 1969, where she is now Director of Research, with her own studies focusing on modern China. She has been a visiting Professor of Chinese Studies at Harvard, and in London, Tokyo, Kyoto and Beijing. She was on the executive committee of China Quarterly magazine for 25 years. She received the Légion d’Honneur in April 2010.
