Shen Fuyu was born in rural Shen Village in southeast China, and grew up in a family of farmers. At the age of 18, he left home and drifted around the country, working at a variety of jobs--porter, clerk and schoolteacher--and began his writing career. He graduated from Nanjing University in 1996 and has been working as a journalist for 20 years, and has published more than a dozen books. He now lives in Paris. The Artisans: A Vanishing Chinese Village, translated by Jeremy Tiang, was recently published in English by Astra House. It is a collection of interlinked stories about 15 artisans in his home village.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
The Artisans is about a disappearing Chinese village, a painting of characters spanning over a century.
On your nightstand now:
Proust's In Search of Lost Time. The more reality makes people anxious, the more it will make them feel the slow pace and beauty of time.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Shi Nai'An's Water Margin. For a young boy from the countryside, like myself, this book opened up a vast, legendary and heart-pounding world.
Your top five authors:
Plato's Republic. It gave me an insight into the origins of Western culture.
Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe (Memoirs from Beyond the Grave). Elegant writing and historical depth, like a beautiful cathedral.
Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. This is a forceful epic, full of magic. It is full of temptations.
Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. It makes one feel what a beautiful thing it is to be a human being.
Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. He shows us the extent to which mankind can create darkness and cruelty.
Book you've faked reading:
Tolstoy's War and Peace. The lengthy and detailed descriptions, the slow-paced dialogues: I never felt I could finish it.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. This is a masterpiece of environmental ethics. In a poetic voice, it tells us how the earth is filled with a deep awareness of life and a richness of feelings.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I only buy books that attract me for their content. If two books are the same inside, I might choose the one with the prettier cover.
Book you hid from your parents:
When I was a child, I had to hide almost all of the novels I read from my parents. They did not want me to read anything besides textbooks. They thought it would slow down my studying, that it was not the proper thing to do. Any books they found would be confiscated.
Book that changed your life:
Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian. This book made me understand how to truly live with meaning. It made me keep hope through the toughest times.
Favorite line from a book:
"Study Heaven and Mankind, through the prism of time, understand changes of past and present, become your school of thought." --from Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian
The meaning here, I believe, is focused on personal development and the forming of one's own opinions and thoughts. It really emphasizes how--through exploring nature, society and history--one comes up with unique points of view and can reach a meaningful life.
Five books you'll never part with:
Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian
Zhuang Zhou's Zhuangzi
Plato's Republic
Proust's In Search of Lost Time
Ralph Waldo Emerson's collected essays
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. This was the first collection of short stories by a non-Chinese writer I ever read. After finishing it, I felt that each story had another layer of meaning. The seemingly independent characters are inextricably linked in multiple ways, and they give an ordinary small town some extraordinary charm. I read it again and again. Later, my own writing would be greatly influenced by this book.