餘生

by Wu He

◆解構「霧社事件」的歷史神話；思索「劫後餘生」的生命滄桑！
◆第一本探討霧社事件歷史真相與人物滄桑的台灣小說長篇名作！
◆《餘生》法文版已於2011年6月在法國巴黎出版發行。

探討「賽德克族」歷史與人物滄桑最精彩動人的原創小說！
非官方版「霧社事件」真相思索之旅！

「霧社事件」的發動真相到底是什麼？莫那魯道果真是賽德克人心目中的民族英雄？
今天的人，如何理解霧社事件？這一事件對後代又會留下什麼樣的痕跡？而賽德克人的悲劇命運又會在我們的意識當中，喚起什麼樣的回應？

一九三○年，在台灣中部的深山裡，一個叫霧社的地方，因為日軍的侵擾，泰雅族賽德克原住民的領袖莫那魯道，帶領族人起而反抗日本統治者，但卻被日軍殘酷無情的血腥鎮壓。將近七十年過後，作家舞鶴來到當年戰敗後原住民被流放的川中島，試圖理解為什麼會發生這一血腥屠殺事件；隨著他在部落所訪所見的餘生，以及他對歷史與當代情境的思索，舞鶴將以自身的體驗，帶領讀者一起探索另一個非官方版的霧社事件真相思索之旅。

《餘生》是舞鶴以當代觀點重新思考一九三○年發生在南投的「霧社事件」及「第二次霧社事件」。此書主要寫三件事：(1)探尋「霧社事件」的正當性與適切性；(2)租居部落時一位姑娘的歷史追尋之旅；(3)在部落所訪所見的餘生。
全書夾議夾敘，將此三事反覆寫成一氣，其中有歷史的反省，有深刻的生命洞見。舞鶴解構霧社事件的歷史神話，思索劫後餘生的滄桑，或幽默，或嘲諷，或悲憫，自然流露的情感，形成一部動人心弦的美麗史詩。

【好評推薦】

「舞鶴是台灣文學史中的一個天才型作家。他熟悉台灣歷史的變遷，台灣庶民生活中的禮俗文化、政治、社會等背景，正確地掌握了台灣歷代民眾的生活動脈。」──作家葉石濤

「舞鶴是台灣文學最重要的現象之一，他的寫作實驗性強烈，他面對台灣及他自己所顯現的誠實與謙卑，他處理題材與形式的兼容並蓄、百無禁忌，最為令人動容。論二十一世紀台灣文學，必須以舞鶴始。」──評論家王德威

「舞鶴之於我們這一代的人，很像是淡水之於台北的存在，是一個可以逃遁、逃離的出口吧！我認為舞鶴在我們這一輩的創作者中，名列前三名。」──作家朱天心

「有評論家說舞鶴的文字是患有文字小兒麻痺症，但我在讀《餘生》、《鬼兒與阿妖》時卻可以看見那文字如水流瀑布般快意奔馳在紙頁上，而隨著文字的流動發出極好聽的音韻。
舞鶴的小說其實從未拒絕讀者進入，當我反覆讀著《餘生》，心裡突然明白身在島國的台灣小說家雖然許多人悲嘆「好像沒有什麼可以寫了」，但舞鶴筆下的川中島馬赫坡展現了如馬奎斯《百年孤寂》筆下神祕詭譎彷彿奇詭瑰麗的故事垂手可得的馬康多小鎮（此處並非指小說技法或意識型態，而是可能性，世上還有那麼多故事可說可寫而我卻視若無賭）。」──作家陳雪

「舞鶴以「田野」的雙腳感知島嶼上的未知土地，以手工書寫人心對自由的嚮往，以最無羈的聲音，追問歷史、社會、人性、欲望及其之於個體生存的意義。以一種永遠的批判立場，對台灣社會發出聲音──這是舞鶴生命存在的形式，也是他的文學的隱喻。」──中國社科院學者李娜

Genres: Fiction, China

303 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Birth Name: Chen Guocheng (陳國城)
Pen Name: Wu He (舞鶴)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_He_(...
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%88%...

Reviews

[Harrison · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a somewhat difficult and relentless book but I found it rewarding. The book rotates in cyclical fashion (perhaps not strictly) between three themes (which I am copying from the afterword): (a) the author's reflections on the historical event called the Musha Incident [霧社事件]; (b) the life of Girl, his neighbor on the reservation and; (c) vignettes of the lives of others ("remains of life") on the reservation. The author's observations in (c) often drive his musings in (a) which can careen into a sort of introspective madness, only to be snapped back to sobriety by (b).

The narrator can be maddeningly bookish, in contrast to the people he meets and interacts with (especially Girl). He's the narrator, so he's everywhere in the story, but he's also somewhat removed from it, like a listener, not a speaker. There is tension in the narrator between on one hand the pursuit of study, observation, analysis, understanding, exploration, freedom, and on the other hand the characters whose lives he becomes a part of and the world he lives in.

Given the narrator's somewhat ghost-like nature, the character named Girl stands out more strongly. She maybe feels the same questions as the narrator but her approach is the opposite. She is the source of movement in the story.

I enjoyed the stories from the various minor characters and also their outlooks, some being more memorable than others: nuns who live in a truck container in the mountain, Daya who dreams of restoring an old Mhebu inn, a curmudgeonly electro-fisherman, a possibly imagined monk who does nothing but meditate.

Anyway, it's a book narrated by a moody writer who spends his days walking around and seeing things and spends his nights writing and/or drunk, the main character is a similarly troubled woman whose quest has brought her to seek her ancestral land and people, the subject matter is the "remains of life" of an aboriginal tribe on a reservation in Taiwan and how they connect to a historical event seventy years in the past.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book is basically a guy rambling on and digressing about a massacre of indigenous people in taiwan back in the colonial period under the japanese empire. there's a bunch of reviews on here complaining that the style is hard to understand but it isn't really, the sentences are very long and have lots of commas but the actual phrasing and so forth is almost understated, maybe too much so for my taste. at first i thought the book wasn't nearly neurotic or obsessive enough but then there's all these parts where he starts talking about sexual practices or the shape of breasts out of nowhere, which is pretty cool. big shout out to the translator who said that "there was often a temptation to “simplify” things: to add conjunctions to help the narrative flow, to sneak in commas to break up long clauses, to clarify convoluted structures by making the inner meaning more legible. Ultimately, however, I decided against half-measures. This is a work of experimental fiction, and I wanted passages that were challenging or just plain weird in the original to feel just as challenging or weird in translation"

[Krystal · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was an experience! While I learnt a great deal about incidents of Taiwanese genocide and wandered upon insights along the way, there was a great deal of rambling. It felt very long.

[Mandy · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is an immensely challenging read and one which I found ultimately too much for me. Without the excellent and essential introduction I would have been completely at sea. As it was, having that to guide me, plus some internet research, I ended up understanding what the book was about but still didn’t find it an accessible one and I gave up about half way through. It’s considered a “milestone in Chinese literature”, winning numerous awards, and I can accept its place in literary history, but I’m not a fan of literary modernism anyway and seeing it compared frequently to Ulysses didn’t encourage me. What I did find worthwhile, however, was learning about the Musha Incident, around which the book is based, a little known uprising in Taiwan against the Japanese colonisers. Unfortunately this wasn’t enough to keep me persevering with this long, fractured and rambling text with its nearly complete lack of full stops. A book for the literary scholar or academic, perhaps, but not one for the general reader and not one for me.

[Cat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, jeez... this was a difficult one to read. The writing style just turned me off, but I kept at it, skimming some parts as I went a long. Sorry. it was just too , too much. But the story behind this story was just heartbreaking. I took Japanese history in college for a quarter, sadly I only took pt. 1. I wonder if the class would have covered the atrocities committed by the Japanese? So sad.
I received a Kindle ARC from Netgalley in exchange for a fair review.

[Joy · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 stars

Reminiscent of Faulkner and Joyce in some ways for an American reader, and also of the postmodern meta fiction writers of the 1960s and 70s. The cultural commentary can be difficult to find due to the artistic choices. I can see it appealing to a small demographic of academics.

[Daisy Hoo · Rating 4 out of 5]

不是這個版本，但也是王先生編的。
餘生，劫後餘生，姑娘，出草，政治犯抗，政治性出草。

[Brooke Salaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A truly unique and I thought quite wonderful piece. The narrator (a Han Chinese) has travelled to and now lives in the remote reservation of Riverisle in the mountains of Taiwan among the indigenous descendants (remains of life) of the Musha Incident. This refers to a headhunting (ceremony? Ritual? Political action?) lead by Mona Rudao in the 1930’s that attacked the Japanese overlords who had come to rule over them and exploit their resources. The narrator interviews various residents about their memories and interpretations of what happened and becomes particularly close to “Girl” the granddaughter of Mona Rudao. This small community represents the displaced from the original populace who were forced from the area of the “incident”. Many who did not die outright in fighting killed themselves and or their children from fear of what was to come, so a huge percentage of the populace died as a result. The survivors continue to suffer from this legacy but the author sees their individuality through the rampant alcohol use, that he also doesn’t shy away from, prostitution, and other modes of existence that are marginal to what counts as success in the dominant culture of Taipei. The area is still plainly beautiful in its mountain remoteness although the environmental degradation is taking its toll in ill-planned construction projects of roads, bridges, etc. that have encroached on what once must have been even more stunning in the time of “the incident”. Haunting and moving.

[Fanny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Une lecture très émouvante,pas toujours aisée à cause du manque de ponctuation. Mais on s’y fait et on ne lit plus mais on écoute Wuhe nous raconter son histoire.
Taïwan de sang et de larmes…..
Ce récit est le cœur de Taïwan qui bat et continue de battre.

[Timothy Frasca]

Mind-bending stream-of-consciousness, dense but clear. A single paragraph for 300 pages, but you know exactly where you are. Shades of Saramago and, I suppose, Joyce, stunning.

[Kai-Te Lin · Rating 4 out of 5]

可能因為事先有心理準備，因此讀的時候並沒有想像中那麼晦澀難讀；確實整本小說完全沒有分段、只出現一個句號在結尾這件事乍看之下還是挺怪異的，作者把民族誌踏查、個人思索等不同的文體全部放在一起，小說主要有三個部分：作者對於霧社事件的思索、作者陪同鄰居姑娘攀溯而上尋訪祖地、作者在部落裡四處探訪聽到的霧社事件後的餘生群像。霧社事件究竟是「政治性的反抗殖民」還是「大型的出草儀式」，這個疑問貫穿小說。於形於裡，整本小說閃爍著奇特的特質，注定會在文學史上留名。

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll have to read this one again. Not that I found it particularly hard to understand, despite its avant-garde style (basically it's one paragraph with minimal punctuation), but it has so much going on - being simultaneously a work of fiction, history and philosophy. Remains of Life seems ask this: In our post-colonial era, after all of the atrocities, what's left of dignity? And was it ever really important? Wu He has spent a lot of time thinking about that, and his conclusions seem to suggest that he has come to believe it'd be better for the rest of us to go walking in the mountains instead.

[Krystal · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was an experience! While I learnt a great deal about incidents of Taiwanese genocide and wandered upon insights along the way, there was a great deal of rambling. It just felt very long.

[!Tæmbuŝu]

Recommended by The Complete Review

[Ann Theis]

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