MCLC: graphic novel Darkness Outside the Night

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: graphic novel Darkness Outside the Night
***********************************************************

For an excerpt from the novel, go to:

http://www.npr.org/books/titles/187048382/darkness-outside-the-night?tab=ex
cerpt#excerpt

===========================================================

Source: NPR (5/29/13):
http://www.npr.org/2013/05/29/187044910/for-chinas-youth-a-life-of-darkness
-outside-the-night

For China's Youth, A Life Of 'Darkness Outside The Night'
By Louisa Lim

Xie Peng, a 36-year-old Chinese graphic novelist, spent six years working
on his first book, Darkness Outside the Night. It's been praised by
China's first Nobel laureate for literature, Mo Yan, as inspiring people
on how to deal with life.

It's a psychological journey into the world of young Chinese: a world of
competition, stress and anxiety, but not necessarily one of politics. His
characters, children of the one-child generation, are anxious and
alienated.

It's a world Xie knows well: He works 12 hours a day as a computer-games
animator; overtime work eats up his weekends. Financial pressures bear
down on him, since he married recently and bought an apartment.

Darkness is a collaboration between Xie, also known as Eliparvic Xie, who
drew the pictures, and Hong Kong-based writer Duncan Jepson, who
contributed the words.

"It's kind of like a Sibelius tone poem, but it was very visual. It was
about anxiety; it was about frustration," Jepson says. "It was, at the
same time, about seeking something better, something beautiful, something
more human."

Highlights From Xie Peng Interview

On whether his generation is freer than his parents':

"In our generation, you are free, but things have to be purchased. Freedom
needs to be bought. Without money, you will have no freedom. Dignity also
needs to be bought. It's an illusion."

On the stress that young Chinese are under:

"Competition is very fierce. For example, exams are a competition with a
very low chance of winning. And at work, too, for example when I do a
project, there are many others doing the same project, so my chance of
success is very low; probably only 10 percent of the projects are
successful. In different eras, we suffer from different problems, and the
problem at the moment is massive stress."

On his favorite piece of work, "Hate," from Darkness Outside the Night:

"It's about a character walking outside. He was stabbed by a dagger thrown
at him. He didn't know where it came from, so he put the dagger in the
bag, which he carried slung 'round his chest. He was assaulted again and
again, and he kept each of the knives. Eventually, when he was tripped
over, he was stabbed to death by the knives inside his bag. This tells a
story that during life, we meet with problems that come out of nowhere.
But if you keep holding grudges and you cannot discard the hatred,
eventually the hatred will kill you."

On his next work:

"This work is from my younger years. Now I'm drawing my adult anxieties.
It's not the same character. The work I'm preparing now is the story of a
failed superhero, who finds himself back. I don't know when I'll be
finished because I'm working very slowly. Since we have so much overtime,
I work for 12 hours a day, and at the weekend I also have to work. So I
don't have time for drawing."

On why he doesn't expect to be popular in China:

"There's a common tendency among this generation to castrate their own
thoughts. They automatically don't think about negative or complicated
thoughts. They're factory farmed, like chicks in a chicken farm. After
birth, their lives are regulated like that, and some boundaries can't be
crossed. As long as you don't cross them, you will live very happily."