血色浪漫

家国五部曲 #2

by 都梁

那是一个特殊的群体，他们的父母曾是高官和将军，他们曾是满怀激情的红卫兵战士，但是到了一九六八年，这个群体正在残酷的青春中茫然游荡，他们穿着家里箱子底儿翻出来的将校呢军服，在北京的街头成群呼啸，他们身怀利器，随时为微不足道的理由大打出手，他们“拍婆子”，他们看白皮书或灰皮书，他们有自己的一套仪式、礼俗和黑话，在“革命”的废墟上，一种独特的青少年亚文化悄然形成，他们是那个时代的周杰伦。没有炮火的年代，一代人的青春挥洒在武斗与呐喊声中，这是他们阳光灿烂的日子，他们的浪漫在血色昏黄中弥漫成昨日的记忆，我们在他们的故事中心随波动，却发现，青春不过是一场绽放到极致却结束得太仓促的事。钟跃民、袁军、张海洋、李奎勇……文革以前，他们只是一群普普通通的中学生，文革开始了，他们的命运也随之改变。

Genres: Fiction

544 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2004

Reviews

[Yong Liang · Rating 4 out of 5]

活在路上的人。

[SH · Rating 5 out of 5]

当年最爱 书架必备

[Graeme · Rating 2 out of 5]

It should have been a great read, and bits of it were good, but, overall, it rates barely two stars. It started well, by revealing a side to the cultural revolution that one doesn't usually associate with that time of collective madness: the period, perhaps a year or more, when the worst of the "movement" was passed, but before teenagers were sent down the to country to be rusticated. The novel depicts groups of teenagers, the relatively pampered children of officials, out on the loose; their parents were in detention of some sort, and there was no school or university to attend, so they created gangs, got into fights and chased girls (in a rather chaste way). The dialogue was stilted and the fights hammy, but there was a sense of freshness about the settings and atmosphere. But then it went downhill rapidly. Most of the heroes get sent down to the country, where they do unbelievable things (one of them decides to get serious and study, and somehow has access - during the late cultural revolution in backward northern Shaanxi no less - to a wide range of historical literature, including foreign books! Several of the heroes join the army. The depictions of army life are moderately tolerable, but then China invades Vietnam, though that country is not mentioned by name and you'd never know that China started it or that in reality it did rather poorly. However, the book's nadir is reached when the heroes separately make their way back to Beijing. Judging by their ages and what's already happened to them, it must be the mid-1980s, but the things they say and do feel like the late 1990s at the earliest, if not the 2000s. One senses the author knows he's tearing at the credibility of his setting, but he wants his characters to be running about doing the stuff people did in the late 1990s and he wants them to be in their thirties (the characters would be pushing 50 by the late 1990s), so he just makes it up. Anyone who lived in the China of the mid-1980s can only groan at the inaccuracies (did Chinese people really go about talking about "win-win" in the mid-1980s, and where did they find these groovy wine bars?). And by this point in the novel its single biggest weakness, that its main hero, 钟跃民, is simply insufferable, comes to the fore. It was only my determination to finish the book that allowed me to read on through page after page of his extraordinary wit, his brilliant feats of, well, everything, and his bumptious presumptuousness. Ah well, I did learn some useful new vocabularly, and the cultural revolution scenes add to own's sense of that time, but I'd hesitate to recommend the novel to any but the most dedicated.

[Henry Wu · Rating 5 out of 5]

血淋淋的现实中浪漫的理想主义。

这现实可以是混乱的群架、贫瘠的陕北农村、残酷的对越自卫战场，这浪漫化作青春、信天游、和勇气。

钟跃民是真正的精神贵族。读时几次泪目，但我感觉作者是收着写的。