Pain

Name: Pain
ISBN: 9787550275935

孙频Beijing United Publishing Co., Ltd. · ChinaDec 2017

4.0

Word count: 152K words
Chapters: 35
ISBN: 9787550275935

Report an error Find this book

Summary

This is a collection of five novellas. Each of the five stories attempts to dig into the deepest, most painful place in the human psyche and body, and then magnifies that pain indefinitely. These ugly, fearful, and helpless things that grow out of the human heart deeply pierce everyone who sees them. This is a collection of stories composed of small people living in different corners of life: perhaps a laid-off worker, perhaps a young university teacher, perhaps a mother desperately defending her intellectually disabled daughter, or perhaps an orphan trying to perceive this world through the body. Together, they converge into a story about life and hope.

Editor's review

Pain is one of the representative works of the young writer Sun Pin, and was recognized on Douban's annual high-score list of Chinese literature. This collection consists of five interrelated yet standalone novellas, which together explore the hidden and sharp "pain" deep in the hearts of modern people. Sun Pin's writing is cold and sharp, like a scalpel precisely cutting through the surface of life to reach the vulnerability, loneliness, and trauma in human nature that are ignored or deliberately concealed. She is not content merely to tell stories; she is committed to presenting characters' spiritual states and existential predicaments under extreme circumstances, and her prose has an almost cruel poetry and power.

The value of this book lies in the profound emotional and spiritual experience it offers. With her distinctive female perspective and keen psychological insight, Sun Pin portrays the inner worlds of different characters: marginalized urban people, intellectual women, young people returning to their hometowns. The characters in her writing often struggle between love and desire, dignity and compromise, escape and return, and their "pain" is both concrete physical or psychological suffering and a universal anxiety in the existential sense. Reading Pain may bring discomfort, but it is precisely this discomfort that prompts us to face the truths of life concealed by daily trivialities. For readers of serious literature, this is a work capable of provoking deep thought and touching the soul, displaying a rare narrative courage and intellectual depth in contemporary literature.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers who prefer serious literature and deep psychological portrayal
Readers who hope to examine the spiritual predicaments and emotional wounds of modern people through fiction
Literature enthusiasts who follow contemporary young writers, especially women's writing
Readers seeking to go beyond the story itself and engage in existential reflection

Not a good fit for

Readers seeking light entertainment and fast-paced plots
Readers who are more resistant to heavy, gloomy, or psychologically oppressive narrative styles

Reading tips

It is recommended to set aside relatively complete and quiet time for reading, so as to become deeply immersed in the emotional atmosphere and psychological space created by the work.
Try to understand the five stories as a whole and consider how they collectively construct the core theme of "pain" from different angles.
After reading, you may pause for a while to savor the impact and reflections brought by the stories, which may lead to new insights about yourself and the world around you.

About the publisher

Beijing United Publishing Co., Ltd. China · Founded in 1993

Beijing United Publishing Co., Ltd. is a publisher known for its literature and history titles, with 2,065 books in the collection. Its publishing covers foreign literature, contemporary Chinese prose and essays, history, folk literature, and cultural books. Its list ranges from Sima Qian's complete edition of the Records of the Grand Historian to foreign classics such as The Book of Disquiet, All Quiet on the Western Front, Snow Country, The Stranger, and Jean-Christophe, as well as modern Chinese works including Teahouse and Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk. Its authors and translators include Yasunari Kawabata, Fernando Pessoa, Erich Maria Remarque, Jin Xinyi, Zhou Miao, and Chen Chao. Public information is limited, but its catalogue reflects a balance between Chinese and foreign literary classics and historical and cultural works.

版权信息
CHAPTER 1 色身
01
02
03
04
05
06
CHAPTER 2 圣婴
01
02
03
04
05
CHAPTER 3 抚摸
01
02
03
04
05
06
CHAPTER 4 柳僧
01
02
03
04
05
CHAPTER 5 丑闻
01
02
03
04
05
06
后记我们的疼痛

FAQ

Are the stories in this book a continuous novel?

No. This book is a collection of five independent novellas. Although there is no direct plot connection between the stories, they are highly unified in theme (exploring pain, loneliness, and existential predicaments) and artistic style, together forming a complete spiritual world.

What is Sun Pin's writing style?

Sun Pin's writing style is known for being cold, delicate, and profound. She excels at dense and precise psychological description, and her writing is sharp, often confronting the darkness and vulnerability in human nature directly. Her narratives carry strong literary tension and speculative color, and have been praised for their "cruel poetry."

Is this book suitable as an introductory reading for understanding contemporary Chinese literature?

This book is highly literary and relatively heavy in theme, so it may not be a light introductory choice. However, for readers who already have some foundation in literary reading and hope to gain a deeper understanding of contemporary Chinese serious literature, especially the distinctive and intellectually profound strand among post-80s writers, this is a highly representative work.

Comments

Find this book

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

孙频 Author

Sun Pin is a contemporary Chinese fiction writer whose work focuses on lived experience and the complex terrain of human nature; public information about her remains limited. Nine of her works are included in the collection, spanning novellas and boxed sets. Representative titles include On the Wasteland, The Mermaid at the Center of the Water: Selected Novellas (Harvest Five-Year Collection 2018–2022), Yesterday's Ark, Pain, The Sailor Bound for Australia, Crack, the three-volume "Sun Pin Pain Trilogy" (Pain, Salt, Crack), and The Covenant of the Berrya. These works are often classified as social fiction and classic works, suggesting that her writing starts from concrete situations and, within the novella form, explores her characters' emotions and fates under the pressure of reality in a steady, pain-inflected style. Available materials are insufficient to confirm biographical details; readers may approach her narrative orientation and thematic concerns through the works listed above.