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美国纽约时报迩来评郭敬明的文章，声称郭是最成功的我国作家，引述如下。我们雅鉴。
下文包括高频托福词汇或词组，主张翻开金山词霸“屏幕取词”功用，把鼠标放在单词上，中辞意思就可以主动出来，这样可以边阅读，边学习或许温习托福词汇。要是能联系着王玉梅词汇书，把有关的单词再穿插找出来，那就非常好了。
坚持究竟，学习开心！
The most successful writer in China today isn’t Gao Xingjian (高行健), thewinner of the 2000 Nobel Prize, or even Jiang Rong(姜戎), the author of thebest-selling novel “Wolf Totem,”(狼图腾) just released in the United States. It’s24-year-old Guo Jingming, a pop idol whose cross-dressing, image-obsessedpersona has made him a sensation in a country where the Communist dictatorshipadvocates prudery and heterosexuality. Thousands of teenagers — his readers arerarely over 20 — flock to Guo’s signing sessions. Some post frenzieddeclarations of love on his blog: “Little Four, I will always be with you!”(Guo’s nickname comes from “fourth dimension war,” a random quotation he foundin a magazine.) Alongside adoring letters addressed to “Big Brother Guo,” theauthor posts pictures of himself half-naked in the shower, in his underwear orswathed in Dolce & Gabbana accessories and Louis XIV-style shirts.
Guo is hardly universally beloved. Last fall, he was voted China’s mosthated male celebrity for the third year in a row on Tianya, one of the country’sbiggest online forums. Yet three of his four novels have sold over a millioncopies each, and last year he had the highest income of any Chinese author: $1.4million.
The most critically acclaimed Chinese novels of recent years — “WolfTotem” (a parable about the death of Mongolian culture and a veiled critique ofthe Cultural Revolution), Yu Hua’s “To Live,” Mo Yan’s “Republic of Wine” —generally use their characters as vessels for broad social and politicalcommentary. But Guo’s novels focus on the tortured psyches of his adolescentcharacters, who either nurse their melancholy by sitting alone for long hoursunder trees and on rooftops, or try to blunt it with drinking, fighting andkaraoke.
“My main goal is to tell the story well and have everyone like it,” Guosaid recently in a telephone interview. Which isn’t to say he traffics entirelyin escapism. For all the over-the-top melodrama and brand-name dropping, hisnovels’ contemporary urban settings, Guo said, are far closer to the reality ofhis readers’ lives than the harsh countryside of China’s modern classics. Andhis frothy novels, though often denounced as “chain-manufactured writing,” doreflect social issues in their own way. The editor of Guo’s first novel, “Cityof Fantasy” — about the 350-year-old prince of an Ice Kingdom who is forced tokill his younger brother to protect the throne — told one of China’s leadingnewsweeklies that he had decided to publish the novel because it would appeal tothe lonely children of China’s one-child generation.
Guo is the most successful of a dozen young celebrity authors who makeup the “post-’80s” generation, some others of whom have also achieved book salesin the millions. This group includes the high school dropout and professionalcar racer Han Han, 25, who derides China’s inefficient educational system in hisnovels and regularly insults older, more established artists on his blog, andZhang Yueran, 26, whose novel “Daffodils Took Carp and Went Away” features abulimic girl who falls in love with her stepfather, is mistreated by her motherand is sent off to boarding school.
While the Chinese government frequently jails dissident writers orforces them into exile, it mostly ignores the antics of Guo and the otherpost-’80s writers. For all their flamboyance, they exemplify the social idealsof the new China — commercialism and individualism — said Lydia Liu, a professorof Chinese and comparative literature at Columbia University. They “don’t poseany threat,” Liu said. “They collaborate.”
Tao Dongfeng, a professor at Capital Normal University 首都师范大学 inBeijing who has harshly criticized some post-’80s writers for their lack ofsocial conscience and their reliance on overblown fantasy elements, said youngfans see authors like Guo less as writers than as “entertainment idols.” “Whatthey write isn’t important,” he said. “What’s important is Han Han’s looks, thecars that he drives.”
Such things are certainly important to the authorsthemselves. I met with Guo last summer in a newly built upscale area on theoutskirts of Shanghai, in the offices of Ke Ai (a homophone of the Chinese wordfor “cute”), the entertainment company he established in 2004 to produce teenageliterary magazines like “I5land” and “Top Novel.” He enthusiasticallydemonstrated his encyclopedic knowledge of “American Idol” and his excitement atseeing the “Transformers”变形金刚 movie. An hour before the interview, I had phonedto ask if I could take his picture. He politely refused, saying an hour wasn’tlong enough to prepare. “My fans worry about whether I look good, what clothes Iwear,” he said. “There’s no way around it.”
All of Guo’s novels include a shy, mysterious hero who gets good gradesand whose life otherwise parallels aspects of the author’s own. Guo was born inthe southwestern city of Zigong, to an engineer father and a bank clerk motherwho encouraged him to write. In 2001, when he was still in high school, Guo wonfirst prize in a national essay contest sponsored by Mengya magazine. A shortversion of “City of Fantasy” — written, he told me, as relaxation therapy duringhis exams — was later published in the magazine and went on to sell more than1.5 million copies in book form.
Guo’s second novel, “Never Flowers in Never Dreams,”梦里花落知多少 a lovetriangle featuring harmless forays into the Beijing underworld, was publishedwhile he was studying film at Shanghai University. It sold 600,000 copies in itsfirst month. Soon after, Guo was accused of plagiarizing the novel from ZhuangYu’s “In and Out of the Circle.” In 2006, a court ordered him to pay $25,000 toZhuang Yu and to apologize. Guo paid the judgment but refused to apologize oradmit any wrongdoing. The press was outraged, calling Guo “Super PlagiarismBoy,” a play on “Super Voice Girls,” the Chinese equivalent of “American Idol.”When the author Wang Shuo, famous for his best-selling novels about Beijingdrifters and lowlifes published in the late 1980s and early ’90s, denounced Guoas an “out-and-out thief” with “no sense of decency,” Guo replied that it wasonly “normal for the previous generation to discipline the latergeneration.”
Guo remains unbothered by the episode. “A lot of people who criticizeyou, they haven’t read your works, they really don’
t understand what this thingis, so I don’t pay attention to those opinions,” he told me.
Neither, apparently, do his fans. While the case was still in process,Guo produced a musical album, “Lost,” a thin spread of guitar and piano underlyrics about young love, performed by singers chosen in a national competitionhe organized. It sold 400,000 copies. Last year, his novel “Cry Me a River,”about the ostracism and suicide of a pregnant high school student, sold amillion copies in 10 days.
Guo may have survived charges of plagiarism and bad writing, but todayhe faces what may be a more dangerous threat: even younger writers. The past fewyears have seen the rise of a group of teenage authors, sometimes called the“post-’90s” generation. Four years ago, 9-year-old Yang Yang received $150,000for his novel “The Magic Violin,” about a young boy who is befriended byenchanted objects after his father disappears. It sold 100,000 copies. He hassince published three more books and last year signed a contract for a 10-bookseries. Last month, Yang Daqing’s “Story of the Ming Expedition,” a novel aboutthe Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592, supposedly written when the author was13, hit bookstores. And 14-year-old Tang Chao’s second novel, “Give My DreamBack,” about unrequited love and suicide, was recently published with a firstrun of 50,000 copies.
Over the phone, Guo spoke dismissively of these potential rivals. “Idon’t really know much about them,” he said. And they certainly don’t seem to beinterfering with his plans. Guo’s next novel, “When We Were Young,” about fouruniversity students, arrives in stores in October. And next year, he plans tohold a national competition for young writers and to design his own line ofstationery.
