Shenghuo yu Mingshi

《Life and Fate》 enters the narrator’s account as more than a book: a sentence in it becomes apparent evidence that A loves her, and the rest of the volume recedes into the time-filling labor of waiting between their meetings.

The Book as Evidence

During conversations, the narrator’s attention escapes its usual indifference only when people discuss A, his work, his country of origin, or places he has visited. A description of a Havana nightclub holds her because, ten years before she met him, A had been sent to Havana and might have visited that same place. The speaker believes her attentive listening is prompted by the description; privately, she is testing it against the imagined geography of A’s life.

Her reading works in the same way. Passages about relationships between men and women arrest her attention because she hopes they can teach her something about A and lend credibility to what she wants to believe. In 《Life and Fate》, the line “people in love kiss with their eyes closed” supplies a simple test: A kisses her that way, so she concludes that he loves her. Literature does not independently confirm the relationship; the narrator selects and interprets a sentence through the desire it appears to validate.

Reading Between Meetings

The sentence briefly transforms reading into a form of emotional proof, but its force depends on the narrator’s circumstances. Once she has found the passage, the rest of the book becomes what nearly everything else has been for a year: a means of filling the time between two meetings. The novel is both a source of an intensely personal interpretation and one more object subordinated to the rhythm of the affair.

That rhythm reaches beyond reading. The narrator has no future except the telephone call that will arrange their next appointment. She tries to remain at home, knowing A knows her working hours, and avoids running the vacuum cleaner or hairdryer lest their noise prevent her from hearing the telephone. Each ring raises hope; when the caller is someone else, hope collapses into dejection and even resentment toward the person on the line. A’s voice ends the jealous wait so abruptly that she feels she has passed from madness to sanity, while recognizing the disproportion between the voice itself and the importance it has acquired in her life.

Memory, Writing, and the Reader

The later account makes clear that the affair reorganizes not only attention but the narrator’s sense of time. She can recall concrete markers of the relationship—the October riots in Algeria, the hazy heat of July 14, 1989, and buying a blender in June on the day before a meeting—yet cannot attach particular pages of her writing to the rain or political events occurring while she wrote. Living through passion and writing about it produce fundamentally different experiences of time.

She began writing about waiting roughly two months after A’s departure, without remembering the exact day. At first, she wanted to remain in the age of passion, when choices as ordinary as a film or lipstick were directed toward one person. Writing translated the effect of A’s existence on her life into words intended for readers, not for him; it did not, she insists, amount simply to writing a book about him or about herself. The movement from private experience to a text for others also exposes the vulnerability of that account: she knows she cannot predict what readers will make of it, just as she once used a sentence from a novel to make an uncertain relationship seem legible.

The narrator frames this writing with a deliberate gap between composition and reception. At the time of writing, she imagines that only she can see the pages and that public readers may never arrive; an accident, death, war, or revolution might intervene before then. That imagined delay lets her write without contemplating consequences. The book’s later address to readers therefore changes the status of the private evidence she has gathered: what once sustained belief and filled time becomes a public record of how passion shaped her attention, memory, and life.