Sorry, I have to write in English 'cos typing pinyin is too slow for my software. If you guys has a better Chinese software to recommend, I’d appreciate it.
1. After we begin to like and enjoy reading a novel, it's natural for us to read forward as quickly as possible and find out the final answer. Especially on blog where author posts daily, we might feel impatient to wait every day (I had this feeling, too). But that does not necessarily mean the author is digressing or off the mark. I guess the best judgment to this concern is: after author finishes everything, ask a new reader to read from beginning to end and ask him/her if he/she feel the author inserting many unnecessary stuffs. My feeling so far is -- the author is beefing up his story in a reasonable manner and I myself is convinced so far that overall the author is doing a good job in furnishing details to make his story trustworthy and vivid.
Quite the contrary, my objection (or, if you call it, my complaint) to the author is: he did not provide enough details on his characters to make them trustworthy. Actually, I hope or I'd like to ask him to provide more details, even if at the cost of making his novel lengthy. Specifically, I would really like to ask the author for more details on Ms. Liu Juan. What background does Liu come from? Why is she a perfect figure in the novel, which is usually unbelievable in our daily life. I mean, I have never met a girl, beautiful and smart and always topping her classmates in best colleges and always self-disciplined. As is well known, beautiful girls are distracted or allured by lads ever since they were young and are seldom focusing on studying. Why is Liu an exception? The author never explained or implied the reason. I am puzzled or not fully convinced. That is why I said, I like Yang XiaoJing, who is depicted very vividly in the novel. The author said he liked both Yang and Liu. But I am not convinced why he likes Liu because the author omitted details on Liu and did not make Liu’s image complete in the novel.
To author: don’t mistake my feedback as a complaint. It is just a tiny spot on the perfect jade in your novel.
2. The powerful of literature/novel is to tell readers the story is likely to happen in our daily life (that is the first definition of “Novel” by the famous Greek Philosopher Aristotle). When someone commits a mistake or a crime, the novel needs to describe the process. Why did someone do something wrong? What drove him to it? The reason could be personal (in that case, we may condemn the figure) or by the society (in that case, we might think the society forces a good woman become a prostitute so that we have sympathy for the figure and demand the society for a change) or others or multiple. In one word, the novel has to tell us explicitly or implicitly why someone did something unusually or wrong or evil. That is the power of novel. I think it worthwhile for the author to spend several chapters to describe why Zheng invented such a trick and how Xiao4 fell into assisting such a wrong-doing. I like reading the details that makes his novel complement.
3. The detailed description of Zheng’s ill-invented trick does not mean the author appraise this figure or his action. Actually, the author called him 混混 . Obviously the author dislike his actions and his behavior.
Before Wang Suo (the Beijing novelist) became famous, we always or usually thought the main character in a novel should be a hero or a decent gentleman or at least a honest person of integrity. Wang Suo wrote in his novels his major character as an average or below average person. Which is fine. We have accepted the fact that the major figures in novels could be anyone, hero or criminal, good or bad or evil. If the author choose his major character as a criminal, it does not mean the author praises or supports him/her. It is just a different angle of life the author to write in his novel. That is why I disagree on “作者反而津津乐道，让这篇小说的价值大打折扣。” The author needs to provide details in his novel. It is NOT 津津乐道。
