le maître a de plus en plus d'humour (edition 2006)

Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012. The Chinese writer discusses his writing in the Preface of his collection of 8 short stories in Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh. The writer grew up poor in a rural area of China and was pulled out of school to help his family with their farming work. Mo Yan was lonely and developed a habit of telling stories about his observations of his sparsely populated environment. His incessant story telling caused his mother to wonder, if he ever stopped talking. This question produced a nick name, Mo Yan that means don't speak. During his farm work, he met a writer toiling in the fields as punishment for being a right wing agitator during China's Cultural Revolution. Mo Yan liked the descriptions of the writer's life related to writing stories and being able to afford three meals a day during times of famine and restrictions of individual freedom.

1. In this collection of short stories, the title story Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh is a tale of downsizing of old factory jobs to make way for new workers in a business-booming China. It also describes social hardships resulting from dramatic economic change.

2. Man and Beast is a story of intercultural redemption and forgiveness played out on an isolated mountainside on the island of Hokkaido.

3. Soaring is a fable of perceived beauty and ugliness and societal forces that lead to tragedy and deliverance.

4. Iron Child is a fable of persecution and resilience but final acceptance of inescapable human destruction.

5. The Cure illustrates the ultimate solution to societal problems that seems to haunt all totalitarian political systems. The ultimate degradation of the human spirit turns the solution into an identification with the aggressor.

6. Love Story is a tale of young love in the failed utopia of the Cultural Revolution in the middle decades of the 20th Century in China. In spite of the political insanity, human beings continue to procreate and evolve beyond temporary "absolute truths."

7. Shen Garden explores the meaningless life of a "successful" man who turns his back on the one love relationship that could have resulted in ego integrity rather than despair.

8. Finally, Abandoned Child is the story of a common occurrence in a country where the government mandates social engineering justified by the idea that family planning will curb natural evolution and allow the establishment of a Utopian society.

Mo Yan's handpicked set of 8 stories was first published in 2001 then re-released in 2011. He set the context in the book's Preface by writing that, "Looking back some forty years, to the early 1960s, I revisit one of modern China's most bizarre periods, an era of unprecedented fanaticism." China was burdened by "economic stagnation and individual deprivation."

Mo Yan's stories reflect his development as a writer starting in the 1980s "when China opened its door to the outside world, that we finally began to face reality, as if waking from a dream." In this volume of unique short stories, the reader can see in part why Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012. You can understand why some critics have labeled Mo Yan's style of writing as "psychedelic realism." ( )