Posted by: Old Phoebe, 2005-6-11 1:00:16
After reading a post here, I went on to read this book and unexpectedly discovered a treasure. This was also the first time I had found such pleasure in reading a modern immortal-hero novel, a genre I had always thought of as a load of nonsense.
I thought that, whatever the literary form, the medium it required was, of course, words. Yet honing one's language was certainly not something that could be accomplished overnight. Elegance and vulgarity felt worlds apart, but in substance, the difference was often no more than a hair's breadth. Put plainly, it was merely a matter of arranging words differently. Of course, this comparison applied to authors with the same grounding in language.
The first impression Immortal Road gave was of beautiful prose-exquisitely beautiful prose. As one reader had essentially put it, its style used the blend of classical and vernacular language that had developed in fiction from the Ming and Qing dynasties onward. The author used this already thoroughly classical language to describe the realm of immortals-the Chinese realm of immortals-and naturally gave it an air of being beyond the dust of the mortal world. This was something many writers without training in classical Chinese could hardly force themselves to achieve. Here, the author had brought form and content into excellent harmony. Many readers might not understand the enormous difference involved. Look at all those immortal-hero works that were forever on the rankings: they, too, often employed a great many words to describe the immortal realms of our imagination, yet their efforts often brought little reward. If the language itself was unbearably vulgar, how could it portray an immortal realm's air of transcendence beyond worldly dust? A comparison only made the painstaking refinement of Immortal Road's prose stand out