Chinese Journal of Literary Criticism

No.4, 2021

The Emotional Crisis of Our Time: Reading Dong Xi’s Echoes

(Abstract)

Zhang Li

Dong Xi is a pioneering and exploratory writer who always tries to see through the appearance of the times and write from people’s hearts, and his new novel, Echoes, is a thought-provoking work. In the form of a detective story, the novel draws on Ran Dongdong’s emotional encounters to write about the other side of life in our time, the dark power of the “imperfect victim” and the emotional life and logic of contemporary people. Perhaps Echoes does not tell us what real love and real emotions are, but it is a profound account of our hesitation, entanglement, weakness and insecurity in the face of love, and a real account of the emotional crisis of our time.