Bi Feiyu, scrittore del dolore e del destino

Bi Feiyu has long been one of the best-kept secrets in Chinese literature. It was only recently that his writings were started to be translated into Western languages. Winner of the 2010 Man Asian Literary Prize with Three sisters and of the Mao Dun Prize 2011 for Massage, Bi Feiyu is one of the author basking into the limelight of the Chinese literary stage. This dissertation aims at giving an exhaustive portrait of the Chinese writer by means of his most notorious publications and through the translations of two of his short stories, Torrential rain and The days of the lovers. Because his masterpieces were only recently made available for a Western public, the research was conducted mainly on Chinese critical reviews, articles published in Mainland's literary periodicals and interviews to the author. In the first part of my thesis, I offer a chronological excursus about Bi's short stories and novels. According to his writing style and the contents of his works, the critics divided his bibliography into two phases: an ¿historic-allegoric¿ phase and a ¿realistic¿ phase. The first one, corresponding roughly to the first half of the Nineties, is characterized by the influence of the Avant-garde experimental writing and the preponderant concern for the philosophical discourse on History and Fate. Then, I open a brief digression on the inaccuracy of the definition of this period's production as metaphysical in Western sense. The ¿realistic¿ phase of the second half of the Nineties shows a perceptible change in Bi's trend: he abandons the philosophical thinking to embrace a more ¿down-to-earth¿ approach to reality. Daily life, the most insignificant details of the mundane routine become the center of his attention. The psychological portrait of the character, the unexplored depths of their subconscious is another feature of this period. After being confronted with the critical analysis of his works, I try to propose a personal analytical approach. First, I describe his controversial relationship with the world of literary criticism, then I make an effort to demonstrate that the division of Bi's works into separated stiff periods does not reflect the effective evolution process undertook by the writer. In the light of some recurring features crossing the whole time frame of his production (such as the theme of pain and fate, the humoristic language, the tendency to use a poetic writing style etc.), continuity and gradualism, rather than division and sudden change, best define the evolution of the writer's metamorphosis. Ascertained that any subdivision is a ¿subdivision of convenience¿, that is to facilitate the study of Bi's changing process, I pinpoint three periods which, in my opinion, better suit his maturation: a ¿philosophical phase¿, coinciding with the first years of the Nineties (I say philosophical and not historical because History does not disappear from the following works), a ¿realistic phase¿, lasting approximately from 1995 to 2005 and a ¿contemporary phase¿, going up to present, which differs from the preceding one for the urban and modern setting of his books. Lastly, I analyze Bi Feiyu's language structure and style, pointing at his unique use of poetic language and the methods he uses to build humour. In the appendix, the translations of Torrential rain and The days of the lovers can be found. Being directly faced with how the writer's construct meaning and sentences was of great help to understand his writing style. To conclude, the portrait coming out of my dissertation is that of an author with a peculiar and independent style, unkeen to be associated with any literary movements. Extremely sensitive, with a constant focus on daily life and people's psyche, Bi Feiyu is one of the contemporary leading actor of the literary world.