what an extraordinary story teller Yan is. this is the second novel of his I have read, and though I think I preferred 'life and death are wearing me out' this was also just amazing. magic melds with time as the story meanders through peasant life 100 odd years ago. timelines criss-cross generations, war and peace, love and betrayal, beauty and ugliness, but it doesn't really matter as you float along with them all. ( )

This book, which I believe is Mo Yan's first novel was originally published in serial form in five parts. It is the story of three generations of the rural Shandong family, largely narrated by the grandson of the family, but primarily featuring the father and grandfather of the family. Most of the story focuses on the exploits of the father (then a young teen) and the grandfather (Grandfather Yu), a former bandit, during the Sino-Japanese war of the late 1930's. The father and grandfather were resistance fighters against the Japanese, but there was often frequent and intense on-going conflict among various rival Chinese groups warring at the same time.

The book is gory, violent and brutal, yet at the same time it is often lyrically beautiful. There are vivid descriptions of the landscape, particularly of the sorghum fields and rivers surrounding the village. Red sorghum from the fields are used by the Shandong family to make the wine that provides the family with their livelihood. But the sorghum fields are also blood-soaked, forming "a glittering sea of blood," and littered with the bones of the violently killed.

The story is told non-chronologically, which I sometimes found confusing. Someone who died chapters ago, suddenly reappears in a pivotal role, for example, and this took some getting used to. The book is also permeated with elements of folk tale and myth, mostly unfamiliar to me, which again affected my reading experience.

In awarding Mo the Nobel Prize, the Nobel Committee stated, "Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspective, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and oral tradition."

This is another book I found difficult to read, and it also took me much longer than usual to read. In particularly the ongoing graphic violence and constant bloodshed sometimes began to grate at me. However, I do think it is an important book to read, and it was a complex, kaleidoscopic and unique book. So it is one I do recommend.

4 stars ( )

Molti hanno parlato di Mo Yan comparandolo a Marquez, ma non mi pare di condividere questa idea.
Marquez, nel suo mondo (Macondo), oltre a racchiudere la vita di un popolo ci trasmette quell’aspetto fantastico che non troviamo in Mo Yan. Per aspetto fantastico intendo il lato magico che travalica l’ordinario.

In Mo Yan ho trovato piuttosto un legame con l’idea del rapporto tra la terra e l’uomo presente nella letteratura russa (pocva).
La terra come luogo dove si nasce e si muore: terra di rinascita, terra dove si ritorna, terra dove si cammina, terra da cui cresce cio’ che ci sostiene…
La terra di Mo Yan non e’ quella che inginocchiandoci raccogliamo con le mani per poi sbriciolarla e lasciarla cadere, ma quella terra che inginocchiandoci baciamo (come navigatori che sbarcano in terre sconosciute).

Alcuni brani:
Quando fu tirato su, la testa gli ricadde a sinistra e poi a destra; la crosta di sangue somigliava alla strato di fango lucente sedimentatosi sulla riva del fiume, poi seccato al sole, crepato e spaccato. (46)

Arrivato all’argine si sedette. Guardo’ a oriente, poi a occidente, guardo’ l’acqua che scorreva e le anatre selvatiche. La vista del fiume era splendida, ogni filo d’erba acquatica era vivo, e in ogni spruzzo d’acqua si celava un segreto. (79)

A sud del monte Baima, a nord del fiume Moshui cresce ancora un fusto di sorgo rosso puro, devi cercarlo a ogni costo. Tienilo alto quando correrai verso il tuo mondo invaso dai rovi e percorso da tigri e lupi, perche’ sara’ il tuo talismano e anche il totem glorioso del nostro clan, il simbolo della tradizione di Gaomi! (471)
( )

I persevered to the end but honestly, I should have abandoned this book. I found the graphic descriptions of war, famine and atrocities ranged from unpleasant to nauseating and the back and forth timeline didn't seem to add anything to the plot. Perhaps there's a message in this to today's Chinese readers that I didn't get - I hope so because otherwise this book is just wallowing in misery and disgusting images. ( )

A family in rural China in the 1920s and 30s confronts banditry, civil war and the Japanese occupation. Mo Yan plays with the timeline to force us to read this as a novel about individual people, not abstract historical events, and there's a lot of local colour — most of it red and cereal-based — grim wit, and human resilience in the face of overwhelming odds.

Inevitably, given that it's dealing with times in which civil order had broken down in the face of barbarism and competing factions, there's a lot of violence. Mo Yan places at least one act of extreme violence at the centre of each chapter, and each one is described in loving and often grotesque detail. I'm guessing that the idea is that we are supposed to realise how the incessant piling up of shocking detail is desensitising us to what is going on, in something like the way it might if we were confronted with it in real life, but after a while it just started to feel vaguely pornographic.

I can see the importance of this book, and it probably goes a long way to explain how China works and why the current Chinese government is so authoritarian and so extremely allergic to any sign of disorder. But, from the perspective of my particular squeamish, western, liberal ivory tower, it's not really a book that I would ever want to read again or to recommend to anyone else. ( )