Shen Congwen's collection of novels

I first knew Shen Congwen from his work Border Town.

I visited the library last week and suddenly came across a book called Eight Horses, written by Shen Congwen. I glanced at the back cover of the book, and there was a quatrain on it:

I found it meaningful, so I borrowed it.

This book contains 13 short stories by Shen Congwen, which are as follows:

The main content of the first one has been expounded in the review of Eight Horses, and then I will briefly summarize the general content of the remaining works.

Husband is mainly about what a rural man saw and heard and his psychological struggle when he went to the city to find a wife to support his family by selling S. It shows us all kinds of stereotypes and customs that violate human ethics and the loss of dignity when people are not civilized and conscious.

A Woman in the City tells the story of an ill-fated woman. After a series of changes, her psychology changed, from a simple, beautiful and generous woman to numbness and distortion through experiences in different places at different times.

The characterization in Baizi is very simple. The sailor Baizi earns money by labor. After a while, he will have a tryst with JN in the diaojiao building. After a night of fighting off his love, the dangers, depression and embarrassment in reality are all forgotten by Baizi, and a new goal has been formed: earn more money and come back after a while. With the love of men and women living at the bottom of society, the author shows the natural, comfortable and beautiful life form of Xiangxi people, and presents a pure, frank, healthy and natural human nature.

"Your Life" is about a short-time worker of Wuye's family who secretly loves Jin Feng, the 16-year-old daughter of Pushi, selling groceries, on the bridge. Jinfeng's father once went to her mother's house to eat a wedding banquet and killed a snake. The fortune-teller said that Jinfeng was a heavy character, and she suppressed her parents and her husband.

Although Guisheng has a crush on Jinfeng, he is a little nervous about fortune telling and has never taken any action. Finally, one day, fearing that Jinfeng would be robbed by others, Guisheng took action and went to the market to buy some things needed for proposing marriage.

but when he passed the bridge again, he found that he had been beaten to it by the fifth master (because he often lost money in gambling, he believed that others needed to take a woman who had not sprouted). The last two fires and the disappearance of your life are thought-provoking.

Guisheng is simple, down-to-earth and kind, but superstitious and cowardly, and he has a deep bone marrow servility. His weakness can be said to be a major reason for his love tragedy.

To be honest, I didn't understand the article "The Day Before I Flee", as if a person living in the army was thinking deeply about his life when he met different people the day before he fled? Or the boredom of military life? Or inner loneliness ...

minions ..............................................................................

The story of the storyteller is similar to close encounter of mahjong's model, a person who often tells stories to others eventually becomes the protagonist of another story, so as to satirize those who have fallen into it but don't know it.

In another country, the narrative method is ingenious. Through the correspondence between a woman and a mountain king, it tells everyone that as a mother, she has been living in a dilemma that she wants her daughter to be happy, but she is afraid that her ancestral grave will be planed, and her prospective son-in-law (mountain king) is fierce. However, imagination always comes to imagination, but the fact is that the mountain king has made a positive result, and her daughter is also very happy: her son-in-law is a mountain king to the outside world, but she is a sheep in front of her daughter.

Three Men and One Woman: Three men are me (monitor) in the army, a fellow bugler, and a young boss of a tofu shop. Three people fall in love with a woman at the same time-in fact, it's just the daughter of the official family next door to the tofu shop, and a beautiful woman in her thirties (15 years old, just getting married). It's just a glimpse from a distance, looming, and the squad leader and sentry just want to take a look at it, so as to make an excuse to always go to the tofu shop and make friends with the young boss, often to please the two dogs raised by women, so as to feel some impossible connection.

Later, it was said that the woman swallowed gold and killed herself, and then the grave was stolen. Only the events in the perspective of the parties, only speculation, no reason. It can be guessed from the article that the young boss of the tofu shop did it, because he really disappeared that night. Maybe he believes that the gold-swallowing person can be revived in seven days, maybe he just wants to have the woman he loves alone, or maybe they have privately decided for life (but the woman's family should have promised her to someone else for the benefit, so she swallowed gold, which is not mentioned in these articles, but it can be guessed), who knows.

Festival: This is a satirical novel, especially the sentence at the end of the article: X city is full of wolves, because a large number of children die and people are killed every day in the yamen, so the food for wolves is not as poor and rare as that for the poor.

Xiao Jing of Guizhou: The author uses metaphor to express people's numbness and even whitewash peace; Some people are not numb, but it is more painful to see clearly. Because of helplessness, that deep sense of powerlessness makes you know that it is useless to complain, but your heart is unwilling, so it also expresses the author's deep sense of powerlessness.

A Mother: It mainly tells the story that a mother is full of guilt, self-blame and bewilderment in the face of her husband's love. Because their only child turned out to be the flesh and blood of her and another man, who used to be a guest of their family. Her husband was always busy outside, and he was very relieved to let his wife and guests stay at home for a long time, and let her try her best to make the guests free. It can be said that in this tragedy, her husband also has an unshirkable responsibility, but these pains can only be borne silently by his wife alone.

Some of these novels are easy to understand, while others are not. This may be because I don't know much about the background of that time. .