A Life Devoted to the Pursuit of Art

Every night the novelist engages in a struggle with himself in a small room, taking out soil from his heart as though he is digging a ditch… By following a young novelist in search of something, The Man Behind the Book connects the various pieces of Wang Wen-xing’s literary career: from the dense rows of book shelves in the library to the unevenly lined-up trees and forked roads, from his keen perception of art to his personal opinions. All this he takes and, as though sculpting a fruit stone carving of the mind, translates them first into markings, then into words. As such, Wang Wen-xing is a literary figure who believes in words, cherishes writing, and although slow in crafting his work, makes up for it with depth.

Family Catastrophe Shakes the Literary World

In 1960, Wang Wen-xing, together with Pai Hsien-yung, Ouyang Tzu, Chen Ruo-xi and other classmates at the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature (DFLL) at the National Taiwan University, founded Modern Literature magazine. His breakthrough work Family Catastrophe took eight years to complete, and was an immediate sensation after its publication in 1973. It was controversial in many ways. From its content, form and plot, to its structure and language, everything broke new ground in Taiwan’s literary scene. The novel was even labeled as “unorthodox” and “heresy”. “I do not seek to shock with novelty,” Wang said, “but to find a way out of a desperate situation.” Writer Chang Shi-kuo noted that “Family Catastrophe captured how attitudes had changed among the younger generation towards their elders, with far more poignancy than other works along the same vein.” Professor Yen Yuan-shu of the DFLL said of the novel: “The innovative use of language, the sense of immediacy, the realistic depiction of human interactions, the perceptive use of details, and the subtlety of style render it one of the few masterpieces of modern Chinese fiction.” When Backed Against the Sea was published, in two volumes, a quarter of a century later, it again drew the attention of the literary world and was considered to have pushed the modernist aesthetic to its extreme. Wang has already begun work on his next novel, with an indefinite completion date.

The Man Behind the Book is an attempt to allow audiences a glimpse into the interior world of Wang Wen-xing the modernist novelist by showing how others view him, how he reads his own work, and how he loses himself in a state of fervor when he writes. Known for his melodious voice, Wang not only shares his literary journey with host Tsai Shih-ping in the film, but also reads from Backed Against the Sea.

Director Lin Jing-jie

Lin Jing-jie’s movies have won numerous awards in the Asia Pacific Film Festival, Taipei Film Festival, Golden Horse Awards, and Golden Harvest Awards. In 2007, he took the International Critics' Week Award at the Venice Film Festival with his film The Most Distant Course. An erstwhile writer, he won the top prize for prose in the China Times Literature Awards and first place in the Unitas Fiction Writing Award for New Writers in the early 1990s.