Buncha Girl

A girl with seven names meets a young man who only speaks to trees. A story of pure love, rural legends, and forest devastation sweeps all the major awards in Taiwan's literary world. Mo Yan commented, "Such writing is truly astonishing."
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Editor's Choice: "The Bangcha Girl" is a masterpiece by Gan Yaoming, a representative Taiwanese writer born in the 1970s, following his seminal work "Killing Ghosts." From "Killing Ghosts," "The Bangcha Girl," and "The Summer When General Winter Came," Gan Yaoming recounts nearly a century of Taiwanese history in these three novels. Gan Yaoming has won nearly every major literary award in Taiwan and is considered a representative figure of the "New Localism" movement in Taiwanese literature. His works are diverse and varied, excelling in imaginative fantasy and delicate depictions of reality. He blends elements of Minnan, Hakka, Mainland Chinese, and Indigenous cultures, earning him the reputation of a "writer of many faces" and earning Mo Yan's praise for his "successful writing."
Since its publication in Taiwan in 2015, "Bung Cha Girl" has swept all major Taiwanese literary awards. The author undertook extensive research for this book, making numerous trips to Lintian Mountain in eastern Taiwan, the setting of the story, collecting a wealth of indigenous myths and local folklore. She also interviewed local loggers, firefighters, train drivers, and bartenders, amassing a wealth of knowledge about logging operations, life in the huts, and the art of lumber transport. This enabled her to effortlessly recreate the story's context in a playful, vibrant, and colorful style, without a trace of artificiality.
"The Buncha Girl" takes place on Morishaka, a logging farm encompassing sixty-eight mountains and over forty million trees. Here, there are three-thousand-year-old trees nearing their end, sambar deer captured for sale, yellow dogs carrying the souls of clouded leopards, and people scarred physically and mentally. In this beautiful forest home, Gu Axia, embodying the resilience of wild grass, and Pajiru, who persists in dialogue with nature and avoids logging with chainsaws, confront the island's tragic and profound history. "The Buncha Girl" presents readers not only a simple and enduring love story but also, like a fable, a tender song of intertwining sobs between nature and humanity.
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◎ Introduction "How long have we walked?" "One sun, one moon, one river, six mountains."
In the turbulent 1970s in Taiwan, Gu Axia, an Amis girl who had witnessed the darkness of human nature, hid in a restaurant stairwell for five years. One day, she finally followed the autistic, mute "Knife Killer" Pajiru to his new home: the forest farm "Mori Shaka." Together, she raised funds to reopen the school, visited schizophrenic veterans, mourned teachers who had been politically victimized, and encountered the spirit of faith that embodies the need to save lives. Facing various challenges: torrential rain and wind, forest fires, and mountaineering blizzards, these ordinary people used their lives to compose legendary stories of perseverance and tenderness.
The book also describes the tragedy of the White Terror of Chiang Kai-shek's regime and the crazy deforestation of mountains and forests after the advent of the chainsaw era, presenting a side view of that little-known period of island history.
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◎ Celebrity recommendation: Such writing style is amazing!
Nobel Prize-winning author Mo Yan, when considered within the context of Taiwanese fiction history, suggests that "The Buncha Girl" may even possess a monumental significance: perhaps it signals the impending arrival of a third major wave of realism in Taiwanese fiction. (The first occurred in the 1920s, with the emergence of modern literature; the second, following the local literature debates of the 1970s, marked the rise of local fiction until the lifting of martial law and the impact of "postmodernism.")
——Literary critic Zhu Youxun "The Buncha Girl" is like a Taiwanese version of Forrest Gump, showing great ambition and writing power.
The texture of poets Luo Zhicheng and Gan Yaoming's novels possesses a vibrant luster while also harboring a gentle emotion. In terms of narrative technique, they fully demonstrate the linguistic charm of their "storytellers." "The Buncha Girl" is undoubtedly a work that challenges oneself and reaches new heights in the art of fiction.
Novelist Ho Ching-yao embeds grand narratives and historical events within the timeline of his novels, creating a compelling narrative without being artificial, a test of skill. Gan Yaoming's "The Buncha Girl" possesses a very gentle storyline, and I believe its allure lies in the atmosphere of the writing. While Gan Yaoming's past works reveal poetic language, as well as the use of slang and dialect, his new work is restrained and transparent.
Taiwanese literature researcher Chen Mingrou: After reading "The Buncha Girl," I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Gan Yaoming not only had a rich and happy childhood, but also an adolescence filled with curiosity and practical adventure, and entered adulthood with a passion for life and a thirst for knowledge. This is reflected in the novel, resulting in a style and content that both continues and repeatedly breaks new ground, with a sense of childlike fantasy and profound worldliness. Beneath the laughter and joy lies a vast body of knowledge and simple yet profound wisdom.
—Badai, a Taiwanese aboriginal writer
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◎ Award Records☆ Selected for the 2017 Frankfurt Book Fair Taiwan Pavilion Book List☆ 2016 Taipei International Book Fair Grand Prize☆ The 6th Dream of the Red Chamber Award Jury Award☆ 2016 Golden Tripod Award for Literature Book☆ Novel Gravity: 20 Chinese Novels on the Chinese International Internet Platform 2001-2015☆ 2015 China Times Open Book of the Year☆ 2015 Taiwan Literature Golden Classic Award

2018-11-01

文化发展出版社

Houlang, Houlang Literature

680

9787514223408