If life is only like the evaluation of first love works

Zhu, a famous literary critic, made an exception to preface the novels of the 1980s.

Foreword "Life is like first love"

bright red

This is a meaningful emotional record. Just like documentary photography, all the details in the novel are extremely real. It is not even like an art novel in a strict sense, but a private emotional file that can be read publicly, which provides important "data" for the social life history and becomes a glass window for us to observe this community.

This novel shows us the personal emotional history of people born in the 1980s. We can understand some emotional characteristics of this generation: nothing to do with state affairs, college classes, small romantic poems, and no traditional love letters. After a short love experience, it is a long and endless pain. In the war of love and being loved, request and rejection, escape and tracking, there has been a tortuous exercise of micro-power structure. The fidelity of its details has reached a surprising level.

In the novel, the war between two people is in full swing, as fierce as the turbulent world outside. Love, pain, waiting, stalking, spying, despair, drinking and crying, this sequence has fallen into a self-circulation without any progress. There are two kinds of time in the novel, one is the physical time of progress, and the other is the psychological time of stagnation, forcing the protagonist to rotate forever in tears of love and hate.

On the other hand, the love faced by the hero is completely different from the "common sense" obtained from literary narration. It is so indifferent and mediocre that it exudes an air of despair. This may be the truth of most love. The novel tries to tell us that first love is not wine, but a cruel mental smallpox, and only personal experience can produce the power of lifelong immunity.

"First Love" is also an intriguing mental medical record, recording a crazy adolescent riot. Maybe each of us has had this stupid love experience. The flower of hormones is in full bloom on campus for the first time, bright and full of charm, full of morbid and self-destructive passion, like an emotional sandwich of love plus narcissism and jealousy. For a beautiful woman, she either wants to kill someone or commit suicide. The hero said, "My love is as sweet as honey on the tip of a needle, but licking it with my tongue will sting my nerves." This relationship between the tip of the needle and the tip of the tongue and honey is a wonderful summary of the first love life.

In such pathological symptoms, intelligence disappears, leaving only Hu Si and nonsense. The hero said, "My heart is bitter than salt." This is undoubtedly an unreasonable statement, because the salty taste of "salt" has been misled into "bitterness". This misunderstanding of "salt" seems to be the proof of love hysteria patients. However, "salty" is the taste of tears, and tears are only the result of "bitterness". From the perspective of metonymy in semiotics, this sentence can be reasonably explained. This means that there is a sharper truth behind those seemingly crazy remarks.

As a core prop, the fruit knife keeps flashing in the whole novel. It is a real object and another metaphor, representing the lust of self-destruction. The hero runs on the blade and alternately indulges in the fanaticism of murder and suicide. Because of weakness, knives are constantly taken away and abandoned. In the end, it finished the final homework in a missing way. The nightmare of love ended peacefully. After two years of rage, the disease suddenly recovered and the protagonist walked back to the rational road. This is the common result of almost all adolescent psychosis.

"First love" is not only a record and medical record, but also a "no regrets record" of self-dissection. Memory is like a claw, tearing and dissecting those lost years mercilessly. The hero constantly blames himself and regrets, but keeps repeating his mistakes, while the girl keeps laughing at his "breaking his word". This repeated cycle of "mistakes/regrets" is the basic structure of the novel. But in my opinion, based on the protagonist's position of "youth without regrets", this novel should not be regarded as Rousseau's Confessions. Instead, it guards and maintains this crazy memory in a narcissistic way.

Beyond the double turmoil of spirit and body, the protagonist becomes "mature". Fortunately, he finally got out of the shadow of lovelorn, but on the other hand, this kind of turmoil and illness is the shortest and wonderful thing in our lives.

Undoubtedly, as long as we pass through the mirror of this novel, most readers can get a glimpse of it and return to the absurd and scarce youth.

Shanghai Xinzhuang in the early summer of 2009.

Zhang Xianliang, Zhu, Hainan and this city are all sincerely recommended.