Q & A with Yan Lianke (阎连科): "Why can’t we produce the great works we crave in our time?"

https://u.osu.edu/mclc/2020/05/01/interview-with-yan-lianke/#more-33480

. . . as far as Chinese literature is concerned, while we have too much “experience that is not human experience”—too abnormal to be understood as experience commonly shared by human society—we cannot write a “Chinese novel” that is worthy of this “Chinese experience.” Our fiction is just too “nineteenth century,” and is too much like a novel. I certainly cannot do it myself, but I am very eager for Chinese writers, especially young writers, to write novels of an alien Chinese experience — a novel that is not a novel, and one that will add a little fresh blood to the history of Chinese and even world literature.

attached to: Yan Lianke

Comments

# 1.   

Great interview, but the English leaves me feeling we're missing a lot of nuance.

Can anyone provide online link for the Chinese original?

Bruce Humes, May 2, 2020, 12:36a.m.

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