North-eastern Gaomi county embodies Chinaboombox’s folk tales and history. Few real journeys can surpass the to a realm where the clamour of donkeys and pigs drowns out the voices of the people’s commissars and where both love and evil assume supernatural proportions.
Mo Yan’如何去美国留学s imagination soars across the entire human existence. He is a wonderful portrayer of nature; he knows virtually all there is to know about hunger, and the brutality of China’s 20th century has probably never been described so nakedly, with heroes, lover
s, torturers, bandits – and especially, strong, indomitable mothers. He shows us a world without truth, common n or compassion, a world where people are reckless, helpless and absurd.
Proof of this miry is the cannibalism that recurs in China’s history. In Mo Yan, it stands for unrestrained consumption, excess, rubbish, carnal pleasures and the indescribable desires that only he can attempt to elucidate beyond all tabooed limitations.
hbr In his novel Republic of Wine, the most exquisite of delicacies is a roasted three-year-old. Boys have become exclusive foodstuff. The girls, neglected, survive. The irony is directed at China’s family policy, becau of which female foetus are aborted on an astronomic scale: girls aren’t even good enough to eat. Mo Yan has written an entire novel, Frog, about this.
Mo Yan’kbcs stories have mythical and allegorical pretensions and turn all values on their heads. We never meet that ideal citizen who was a standard feature in Mao’s China. Mo Yan’s characters bubble with vitality and take even the most amoral steps and measures t
o fulfil their lives and burst the cages they have been confined in by fate and politics.
Instead of communism’s poster-happy history, Mo Yan describes a past that, with his exaggerations, parodies and derivations from myths and folk tales, is a convincing and scathing revision of fifty years of propaganda.
In his most remarkable novel, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, where a female perspective dominates, Mo Yan describes the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine of 1960 in stinging detail. He mocks the revolutionary pudo-science that tried to inminate sheep with rabbit sperm, all the while dismissing doubters as right-wing elements. The novel ends with the new capitalism of the ‘90s with fraudsters becoming rich on beauty products and trying to produce a Phoenix through cross-fertilisation.
In Mo Yan, a forgotten peasant world aris, alive and well, before our eyes, nsually scented even in its most pungent vapours, startlingly merciless but tinged by joyful lflessness. Never a dull moment. The author knows everything and can describe everything – all kinds of handicraft, smithery, construction, ditch-digging, animal husbandr
y, the tricks of guerrilla bands. He ems to carry all human life on the tip of his pen.
layers gate He is more hilarious and more appalling than most in the wake of Rabelais and Swift — in our time, in the wake of García Marquez. His spice blend is a peppery one. On his broad tapestry of China’s last hundred years, there are neither dancing unicorns nor skipping maidens. But he paints life in a pigsty in such a way that we feel we have been there far too long. Ideologies and reform movements may come and go but human egoism and greed remain. So Mo Yan defends small individuals against all injustices – from Japane occupation to Maoist terror and todayspb’s production frenzy.
For tho who venture to Mo Yan’s home district, where bountiful virtue battles the vilest cruelty, a staggering literary adventure awaits. Has ever such an epic spring flood engulfed China and the rest of the world? In Mo Yandeputymanager’s work, world literature speaks with a voice that drowns out most contemporaries.
