"Silent Mountains" Author: Peng Jianbin Publisher: Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House

Peng Jianbin's latest collection of novels.

It writes about the humble characters encountered in the wandering career of a salesman: their strong difficulties, stunned struggles, meaningless yearnings, silent frustrations and endurance, and the young, confused love.

A heart-stirring and moving "history of spiritual breakthrough" about a tiny individual.

*

Most of the eight short stories collected in this book were written by Peng Jianbin in the past two years. These novels are mainly based on his career as a salesman from his early twenties to his thirties, with literature (reading and writing) and love as the secondary lines. They describe how young people who have just entered society struggle and yearn in hardship, make futile efforts in the dual foreign land of body and spirit, and finally choose to endure quietly. In the writer's writing, the hometown carrying childhood memories is becoming increasingly desolate, and the relatives who are deeply trapped in fate are still wandering in silence and working hard in despair; there are also those insignificant lives who are tossing in the dust for their livelihoods. They are "sleepy in spirit, bleak in future, but always have animal-like smiles on their faces"...

The author uses almost cruel sincerity and calm and detached language to salvage those ordinary but precious lives from the nothingness of reality and endow them with dignity of existence in the world of literature. These works can also be seen as the author's spiritual autobiography, a "spiritual breakthrough history" about a tiny individual that has been fortunately preserved in the cracks of the grand narrative of our time, which makes people both happy and sad.

*

*

Peng Jianbin's novels have a contradictory duality. On the one hand, they face the reality of life firmly, and on the other hand, they are fleeting and ethereal, like scattered feathers flying in the night wind, or like a lonely stone rolling down the hillside. Through the sharp opposition of the two poles of reality and fiction, the author embodies Kafka's stubbornness, loneliness and emptiness, as well as the sharp exploration and questioning of life.

——Award Speech of the 17th Dianchi Literature Award

*

I have read those seemingly more bizarre, more outrageous and more talented works of Peng Jianbin, but what impressed me most was still the article "Crystal" in the book, which is for those who are looking for crystals in loneliness and distress, for those Salinger-style, crystal-like teenagers who do not want chaos.

——Li Jingrui

*

"I hope you are healthy and not afraid" is so good! Only when two people meet will they spend so much effort to write letters, and they can come and go freely. In the WeChat era, there will no longer be such love letters.

——Tseng Ka-wai

*

Peng Jianbin is the kind of author who, no matter what he writes, feels like he is writing his own spiritual autobiography. His self is not reflected in the content, but very vividly in the language, form and style.

——Hu Anyan

*

At present, I feel that no one has written about the life of our generation so realistically. Many of Peng Jianbin's novels are works of art. His works go beyond the so-called autobiography. Perhaps they can be understood as a mockery and love of life itself in any era and any living condition.

——He Pan

Peng Jianbin, pen name Sinqiqi, was born in 1982 in Guiyang, Hunan. His published works include "I Went to Chandlerville to Attend a Dance" and "The Book of Improper and Double Love". His latest work is the collection of short stories "Silent Continuous Mountains".