Fat Charlie

 《Anansi Boys》 actually has a serious and profound core. The core question in the discussion is about how boys grow up, and this question has more or less plagued everybody’s growth process. It is related to a struggle between self-power, how to deal with negativity during growth, and how to get rid of pessimism, sadness, 

timid and overcautious, low self-esteem, etc. All of these black struggles that 

always hang over my heart from time to time,

《AnansiBoys》 is not cumbersome or gorgeous, but it hits the depths of the soul. 

Fat Charlie is not an enviable character. However, in the description of fat Charlie, 

more people find themselves as familiar. Like fat Charlie, they are timid and overcautious, inferior, overwhelmed, and they are afraid of others’ attention, failed to accept other people’s ridicule, they are more willing to curling up on a comfortable

sofa to live passively. At a certain moment, they felt that they had just done something inappropriate, and they wanted to make a hole in the ground and go down. 

The truth is exactly the same. Most people in life are as ordinary as fat Charlie, so 

ordinary that we are too lazy to look at him, and dislike saying hello to him. 

In our daily life, countless fat Charlie walks by our side, living a three-point line of 

life. 

Yes, everyone  is looking forward to a radiant and charming self, but unfortunately, 

more often, people have to face the conflict between their inner expectations and the external environment, and we accept a fact that is not so pleasant: Oneself is often 

ordinary, unattractive, inconspicuous in the crowd. 

In our own mind, oneself is the center in the world; however, in front of the world, 

individual may be smaller than sand... 

If there were no spider classmates, then fat Charlie might repeat the same life for the rest of his life and treat it as a normal life with peace of mind. The arrival of the spider changed everything. In the end, fat Charlie subverted his past self. 

It is often the charm of literary works that arouses the resonance of readers through 

the projection of the individual’s emotions and destiny and deep depiction. 

Neil Gaiman uses spiders as a catalyst to invade fat Charlie’s life, to help fat 

Charlie to achieve self-transformation. He used sharp and delicate brushstrokes to portray the inner world of fat Charlie. However, unfortunately, in real life, no one

is so lucky to have a spider that suddenly comes to fulfill this great mission. 

Many times, the change of life trajectory is only in one thought. People are never afraid of short-lived failures. People are afraid of being accustomed to mediocrity, 

taking mediocre life for granted, and treating themselves as scorned and manipulated by others, Regarding the personable person as out of reach, when an individual gets used to all of this in his mentality, he has become a true loser. Without spiders, we must also create our own spiders by ourselves. Only in this way can we break the shackles of life. 

The cognition and positioning of oneself is an extremely important topic in the process of personal growth. Everyone has two selves in their bodies. One is as sensitive and cautious as fat Charlie, who is constantly self-doubt, and the other is as easy as a spider. Behind the ups and downs of 《Anansi Boys》 and the two characters with very different characteristics, fat Charlie and Spider, reveal the preciousness and difficulty of breaking through the shackles of self-denial in the process of personal growth. This is the most important enlightenment 《AnansiBoys》 to every reader.

A Mirror

In the first part of Harry Potter, there is a mirror that allows people to see the deepest desires in the heart. In that mirror, Harry saw his parents, who died when he was one year old, standing next to him.

Can the things in that mirror be chosen? On the surface, the answer seems to be no. Although many people have resisted, it is undeniable that part of our own destiny is indeed set before birth. Although destiny is not a choice, people can still choose what kind of person they become.

Harry could not choose his destiny to be an orphan at one year old, and sadly, although we could not choose our own destiny, we were constantly exerting a possibly decisive influence on the fate of others. A prediction made by the female divination teacher, if Voldemort did not hear, Harry would not lose his parents.

We may influence the fate of other people, especially our descendants and those who like us. This is not a good thing, nor can it bring any compensation for our own failure to control our own destiny. Because this kind of influence rarely brings good results. What makes people entangled is that except for the weird and unknowable part of fate, the other parts seem to be caused by other people. This is a fact that people must be soberly aware of.

But it is not to promote nihilistic determinism.

Destiny is something that cannot be changed in our lives, or that has already happened. Who our parents determine our genes, the subjects we may be good at, our figure, our skin color, our appearance, where we were born, and the people we will meet early in life.

Harry and Voldemort seemed to have countless things in common, anyone who had read them knew. They seem to be inextricably linked in their lives because of the returned curse. Everyone can say that Snakeman has a huge determination to prove himself and become stronger. They are orphans without parents, and they can even see each other's brains occasionally.

But as Dumbledore emphasized many times. The Sorting Hat once wanted to assign Harry to Slytherin, but Harry chose Griffindor himself.

The child in the prophecy might have been Neville, but Voldemort himself chose Harry.

This is the intersection of life. Your choices are actually limited, and there is actually only one way you can choose. Your possibilities keep disappearing as the time of life decreases.  

  Even the two people who had the same miserable childhood chose two completely different paths.

Don't give up your life at the intersection where you are no longer young. At this time, the time when I can take more and more control of my life has just begun. 

  What do you see in the mirror? What we see is what we want, the person we most want to be in our hearts. It is a dream, one of the few things that can absolutely be in our hands. Even if a life tortured is better than death, we can also decide whether the self seen in the mirror is warm or chilling.

A small Hobbit

There is a word used to describe the style of《The Hobbits》, which is quiet humor, In accordance with the description of hairy feet and small men for the hobbits, satire their conceited behavior without mercy, rendered the characteristics of small men that stubborn, patient, proud, greedy for treasure and pride for talent, so that the elves feel cheerful and naughty and so on. It may not make you laugh, but it will make you smile from beginning to end. I think it's also an extremely important part of The Hobbit. In Tolkien's world, in the struggle between the gods who create the world and the Morgoth, the world seems grand, just like a raging river without stopping, and the music of Eru Ilúvatar always seems magnificent, it is not known that such magnificent music also contains the Hobbits, the tiny existence of Shire, and even at some occasion, they are at the center of Valar's attention at this moment. Power-worshippers don't even have a chance to enjoy listening to the ＂pu＂＂pu ＂sound of the kettle when the water boils - it's full of cherishing for home and daily life, insight, and appreciation of small things, the existence of things like Morgoth, sadly they ignored it, but arrogantly trying to dominate the large music and the much complicated than themselves.

When Bilbo's house was crowded with dwarves in a mess, he heard the call of the greater thing, but he hesitated. Many times we can't say exactly what's the certain content in this call, maybe it's a touch, maybe it's just a commotion. It always means taking risks. Perhaps the wizard can be sure that the world will end up in a big reunion, but he can't guarantee Bilbo's safety for returning. The Hobbit would have thought that the evil dragons would not fly over their heads as long as they stayed in Habistun stand aloof from worldly success; that is his own wishful thinking about safety illusion. Because the Middle Earth world is a life-and-death relationship between honor and common whole, a small butterfly fan wings will cause deep vibration. Bilbo struggled for this all night, and in the end, the nature of the adventure won by a narrow margin.

In Tolkien's world, the nature of adventure is not the same as being completely impulsive. Bilbo has heard great legends since he was young, and some of his ancestors have personally participated in the war. Elves, treasures, and evil dragons, three of them have not been seen for a long time, are not fabricated. But this is often enough to impact a person's heart, make him produce an unsoilable yearning, and even willing to betting on life. Because it belongs to something that is "greater than us" and we cannot be indifferent to it unless our nature is extinguished.

Bilbo regretted his decision countless times when he went on the road, lamenting in his heart, "Why should I do such a stupid thing!" "How I wish I were still in the warm and comfortable bottom hole of the cave! He wasn't a hero, and at first, the dwarves looked down on him, said that he did not seem like a free thief, he was more like a grocer. Only Gandalf insisted that Bilbo was the best candidate for the free thief. After reading it, we'll admit that Gandalf is smart, but at the start of the adventure, Bilbo is just a man who goes out and forgets to bring a handcuff. He was chosen as a bugler and was about to take part not only in a treasure hunting, but also in a great battle, but at this point, he knew nothing. Bilbo was both excited and shy, and among the complaining dwarves and the wizards, he looked back from time to time to his hometown behind him, and from time to time to the unseen lonely mountain. He couldn't understand the whole story, but relied on the blessing of the reader's identity -- we could.

Sometimes I suspect that these stories, which exist to provide a perspective with us on our own lives, reminding us that we are not authors in a complete story, but we have a great writer, and we can take risks with a little self-awareness, and although there is no doubt that they will be in danger, the story is not a story of nihilism with a head- and end - it blends epics, adventures, wars, suspense, humor, friendship, and love, and we know from the beginning that it will be a big reunion story.

The “Hometown” of Black Americans

 After reading the whole book, I find this book is not to my taste, probably because I have read a very similar "Harry Potter" series. When reading this book, I always compare it with the Harry Potter series. Perhaps it is my inherent impression that this book seems to be less than satisfactory compared with Harry Potter, but I feel some other social highlights in this book.

  Sunny Nwazue, a native-born African-American, seems to be born with a kind of contradiction. She is the youngest sister in a Nigerian family, but she is also the only one born and raised in New York. All her family members have brown skin, while she "accidentally" has white skin. When she returns to Nigeria, her accent, skin color and behavior show that she is an outsider all the time--even this is her "hometown".

This reminds me of the Chinese people born in the United States. Although they have the appearance of the Chinese people, the education and culture they have received since childhood have made them very different from the Chinese people born in China. And once they return to their "hometown", they are doomed to feel out of place everywhere. 

How to divide a nation? Whether a nation is divided by race or culture is still a controversial issue in the present world, but when the "contradictions" in this book occur in many places in real life, the answer to this question cannot help but make people ponder.

A Nameless Woman

 

"I" am a biologist studying transition ecosystems, a hypnotized explorer, a freshly infected person.

  a woman, a “widow”, a nameless creature with dark, cold memories.

This is the person we focus on. Our knowledge of her is quite limited. She may be a bit paranoid, indifferent, occasionally harsh, and have an abundance of untimely perceptions. She liked a deserted swimming pool and turned it into a pond. Her husband died of cancer of the whole body. One night, she saw him opened the refrigerator and drank a carton of milk, and so on. None of this prevents us from treating her as our friend. Like us who just intervened in the story, she has no retreat and can't restore the truth by tracing back the information flow that was cut off, so our situation is similar: it has no "name" and is waiting to be "named"; It has no answer, waiting for the outside world to respond to various questions.

It's like the setting of a puzzle game: The leading role woke up in a strange place, drunk, drugged or just knocked down, dazed, and with amnesia (it even uses the name of an enemy or the beer logo as its own name). We are on the same starting line as "I", or our speed is sometimes a little faster-but unfortunately, the front is still unknown. There are not only hypnotic words of psychologists, but also in-vivo transformation of text spores. The experience collected by "I" for us may be canceled at any time. We have to stand on such an unstable foundation and endure the inexpressible and lingering "nameless" state.

"Non-linearity" is the first word I remember in the book, which can be used to describe the imbalance we feel about the whole story.

As a member of the exploration team, my task seems to be to explore and exhaust an active/passive isolated closed environment. However, in the process of pushing outward, we found that the colorful jungle vegetation and the crying like animals are too thin (just like some perfunctory stage scenery), which cannot provide a deep and exploitable space. So we can only look up or down for extension. The sight seen in the underground tower has an unreal surreal feeling, while the sight seen in the lighthouse is clear and real. The underground tower is in the darkness of the ground, and the lighthouse is on the ground by the coast. Up and down, bright and dark, real and virtual constitute two fulcrums, and the characters in the book swing back and forth between these two fulcrums. "

  What secrets can be hidden in my barren and desolate memory? Maybe all my memories are secret-maybe all these are delicious.

The "crawler", the spokesperson of the X area, probably feels this way. It has a human body, and then turns the consciousness and memory it swallowed into "words", like indigestible seeds daubed the walls of the underground towers. Those disorderly and chaotic sentences give us a horrifying experience, like the plague, like nails, withered hands, and slices of the heart, like the fanatical sermons of the red-eyed monks. They themselves seem to have a dark ritual sense, belonging to a certain religion that is destined to be unsaved.

 But "I" is like a small piece of bait or, more accurately, a "God" tied to a string and thrown into a cage.（The other end of the string was in the hands of the southbound bureau. The vibration of every tooth rub makes managers who hold their breath to listen shudder.）The savage animals in the cage eat my body respectively because my blood and flesh are holy blood and holy communion, which contain spirit and consciousness, as well as the basic functions of words……

Therefore, one exploration team after another is a group of edible and undeveloped enlighteners, who unconsciously contribute mature brains and cultivate civilization in the enlightenment stage——Wait. We have not yet confirmed whether the X area is "ignorant". Perhaps its expansion posture is only "defiled" by the observation of external low-level civilization, which means that it wants to teach us something we don't know; It is also possible that it is more "ignorant" than we thought. It will cut a hole in the belly of the world and drag all people into the filthy torrent.

Impermanence

Impermanence

For thousands of years, due to the great differences between the eastern and western civilizations, when civilizations began to blend, some people who wandered between the two cultures felt interesting, but others felt frightened. In the 20th century, after the world was connected by Westerners after the industrial revolution, Koizumi Yakumo was such a traveler who wandered between eastern and western cultures. Through his novels in which the Stories and Legends of Ghosts and Gods are narrated in the East, what I see is not the cultural differences, but the common breath of Eastern civilization. Many of the stories in Stories and Legends of Ghosts and Gods actually borrowed historical stories, including Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio 500 years ago, and Extensive Records Compiled in the Taiping Years a thousand years ago; Even in the Tang Dynasty, which can be traced back to 1,200 years ago, Japan has studied the culture and system of the Tang Dynasty for a long time in history; but the Japanese have added their own culture and style to the stories they have borrowed from. Those familiar stories show the living conditions of ancient Japanese ministers, warriors, businessmen, farmers, and other classes, and the books are full of their emotions and various living conditions. The talented blind pipa artist in Hoichi the Earless was almost taken to hell because of his amazing pipa skills；The lactating mother exchanges her life to pray for the recovery of her child. The "cherry blossom tree" that blooms on February 16 each year is a manifestation of this maternal love；There are also snow girls, raccoons who become faceless women, mermaid, spring water that can rejuvenate people, and greedy wives greedily drink spring water and finally become a baby ... To sum up, among ghosts and gods, people in the East have faith in reincarnation and karma in the impermanent world.  

Aside from all the horrible or strange stories, the short stories in the Stories and Legends of Ghosts and Gods are like dark red camellia flowers blooming in the shade, giving off mysterious, mysterious, delicate, and mournful beauty in the shade, like the flowers on a dark kimono, showing impermanence through ghosts, gods and monsters.

The reincarnation of human nature

  All human history can be summed up as a vast history of human nature.

Through the fog of vicissitudes, the author takes us back to the Age of Machine 18th century, where billowing dense smoke rises everywhere with damp haze. More somber than the weather is the vampire Louis' memories of his first half of life.

Lester, Claudia, and Amadio—all three, like Louis, are key figures in the book. The life and death entanglements, love, and hate between them four for more than two centuries showed us the mutual alienation and interdependence between people. Sartre once said, "Others are hell." Darwin, however, insisted that man is a social animal. So under the above kind of estrangement and dependence, different people repeatedly read this story with tragic color and each one of readers has their own unique insight.

The vampire described by the author is transformed from people with profound humanization feature. For them, all emotions are amplified, everyone pays attention to different affective factors. Different emotional concerns also cause them to have different thinking, therefore, contradictions and conflicts arise. Everyone wants to change the other to make the "whole world" going on for his or her own needs: Lester wants to change Louis' "useless" sympathies so that each killing will be less disturbing; Louis wants to change Lester's love of killing in order to save himself from suffering from compassion for human; Claudia wants Louis to abandon Lester so that he can be fully her own; Amadio wants Louis to give up Claudia and always keep her company. Each one of them has their own mind, nobody never said a word but they seem to reach a tacit understanding.

Finally, in order to escape the harm brought to him by the repeated killing of Lester, Louis chose to leave Lester. For retaining Louis, Lester turned five-year-old Claudia into a vampire and made her their common daughter. Meanwhile, in order to change Louis' compassion for human beings, Lester trained Claudia to be a "natural killer"— put Claudia up to play with the prey ferociously and then drain their blood in an attempt to corrupt Louis. As she grew older, Claudia began to resent Lester for ruining her whole childhood. Of course, she also hated Louis, but she needed someone to take care of her. So Claudia killed Lester and took Louis by herself. But when they arrived in Paris, they met Amadio, where Claudia was extinguished by the sun and transformed into a statue. Louis, who filled with remorse, set off with Amadio on a journey to find their same peers.

We read about the selfishness, arrogance, cruelty, and greed of human nature in this book; in contrast, we also see the desire for love and good, discontent, and melancholy with the status quo and the wish of go-beyond-oneself, even the care and love of others from vampires. Throughout history, human beings have gone through many disasters caused by greed. But the more we witness the kindness and love in human nature, the more glory of human nature we look forward to seizing in the future — even in such an endless cycle and reincarnation.