Gender Relations in Kjell Askildsen’s A Lovely Place From the Perspective of Chinese Yin-Yang Theory

A Lovely Place(2019)is a collection of the Norwegian writer Kjell Askildsen’s short stories that is translated from German into Chinese by Yang Zhizi.It contains 18 short stories,whose male characters are mainly analyzed by researchers.The paper argues that female characters are playing an indispensable role in compensating the males’life stories and enlightening their worldviews according to Chinese Yin-Yang theory.The females can be classified into the following three groups in terms of their important relations to the males.Firstly,the female is the male’s companion in a certain part of the latter’s life.Secondly,the female facilitates the male’s intellectual growth either spontaneously or purposefully.Thirdly,the female struggles for independence to set an example for the male.The female characters in A Lovely Place present such femininity as beauty,energy,nostalgia,sentimentality,motherhood,etc.,stimulate the males to reflect on their own identities and fulfill their muscularity,and function as the genuine protagonists in the collection as far as the gender relations are concerned.