《平凡的世界(普及本)》是一部现实主义小说,也是小说化的家族史。作家高度浓缩了中国西北农村的历史变迁过程,作品达到了思想性与艺术性的高度统一,特别是主人公面对困境艰苦奋斗的精神,对今天的大学生朋友仍有启迪。这是一部全景式地表现中国当代城乡社会生活的长篇小说。作者在近十年问广阔背景上,通过复杂的矛盾纠葛,刻划了社会各阶层众多普通人的形象。 This book is a realistic novel, and a novelized family history. The writer condensedly depicts the course of the historical changes in rural Northwest China, and the work reaches a high degree of unity of ideological content and artistic quality; especially, the protagonist's arduous struggle spirit in the face of difficulties is still enlightening to university students today. This is a full-length novel that panoramically shows the urban and rural social life in contemporary China. Against a broad background of the recent ten years, the author, through complicated contradictions and entanglements, portrays the images of the masses of ordinary people at all levels of society.
Lu Yao (Chinese: 路遥), born Wang Weiguo (Chinese: 王卫国), was a Chinese writer. He was born on 3 December 1949 in Qingjian County, Shaanxi Province, and died on 17 November 1992. He had six siblings and grew up in a very poor family. He began writing novels when he was a college student, and graduated from Chinese Department of Yan'an University in 1973. After graduation, he became an editor of Yanhe magazine. In 1982, Lu Yao published his novella "Life", which was made into a film in 1984. It was at this time that he started to become well-known across China. In 1991, Lu Yao finished his most famous work, Ordinary World, which won the Mao Dun Literature Prize. His writing was closely related to his own life and experiences, and focused mostly on young people from his native Shanbei striving to change their lives.
After more than 5 months, I am finally done with this book. Reading this book has been exhausting, and it's entirely unclear whether that's been because of the amount of time it's taken me to finish it, the fact that Chinese is my less comfortable native language or something else. Despite this, Lu Yao's book describes what its title proclaims - the ordinary, the day-to-day of life, and how beautiful it can all be. While the story is set in rural China of the 1970s and 80s, a context that is not super familiar or relatable to me, the connections between characters, the emotions that arise from life events, happy or sad, and the ideals and struggles and tragedies and dreams... all of that, capped with elegant writing and breathless imagery, has made me feel some type of way about myself, my life and how I fit into the world around me. The world that Lu Yao creates is ordinary but full of meaning and wonder, and by reading his words, I find that I am coming to understand the beauty in the life I'm living, however ordinary, today.
If you ask what kind of spirit Chinese people have that makes themselves out of poverty in the 1980s and has earned them respect ever since, this book has the answer. I cried over the stories where this generation of people, no matter how much pains they suffer, never lose the hope, always stay positive, and ultimately create a better country. This is how steels are tampered. This is the wealth of China.
I read it long time ago when I was a teenager. Actually I don’t like the whole story about a rural family. Their fates are too legendary. The name of the novel should be changed to the dramatic world.