Status
Available
Genres
Publication
Penguin Books (1994), Edition: First Edition, 359 pages
Description
The acclaimed novel of love and resistance during late 1930s China by Mo Yan, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature Spanning three generations, this novel of family and myth is told through a series of flashbacks that depict events of staggering horror set against a landscape of gemlike beauty, as the Chinese battle both Japanese invaders and each other in the turbulent 1930s. A legend in China, where it won major literary awards and inspired an Oscar-nominated film directed by Zhang Yimou, Red Sorghum is a book in which fable and history collide to produce fiction that is entirely new--and unforgettable.
User reviews
LibraryThing member baswood
Fields of Sorghum appears on nearly every page of Mo Yan's novel and it is no wonder because his characters; eat it, feed their animals with it, make wine from it, fight in it, die in it, take refuge in it, make love in it, keep warm from it, build houses from it and one bandit group actually live
This description of Sorghum is taken from wiki:
One species, Sorghum bicolor, is an important world crop, used for food (as grain and in sorghum syrup or "sorghum molasses"), fodder, the production of alcoholic beverages, and biofuels. Most varieties are drought- and heat-tolerant, and are especially important in arid regions, where the grain is one of the staples for poor and rural people. These varieties form important components of pastures in many tropical regions. Sorghum bicolor is an important food crop in Africa, Central America, and South Asia and is the "fifth most important cereal crop grown in the world".
Although there is a variety of sorghum called red sorghum I am guessing that Yan's book is called Red Sorghum because of the amount of blood spilled. Be warned this is an extremely violent novel and the reader is not spared any of the horrific acts that take place. It is set in rural China and follows the fortunes of a family from the 1920's to the 1950's and a little beyond. It was a bloody time to be alive with continuing warring factions amongst the Chinese groups and the Japanese invaders, who seem to wish to outdo each other in atrocities. For the most part the book deals with poor rural peasants and the bandit groups that fight with the local administrators and the Japanese, although the family featured are relatively wealthy as they own the local distillery and produce the most sought after wine in the area.
The story is related by the grandson and there are frequent time shifts as he tells the story of his grandfather's generation and his father's generation. This could have been confusing however Mo Yan refers to his characters by their generic family tree name as they relate to the narrator and so the reader can easily discover where he is in the timeline. This insider view of the world of rural China is brilliantly handled. Mo Yan places the reader right in the zone of the book and his writing outdoes Zola in its earthy descriptions of rural conditions. The smells, the sights, the feel of the environment in which his characters fight for their survival comes alive in descriptions that are as poetic as they are visceral, but there are a couple of times when I felt it was Mo Yan speaking rather than the grandson, for example:
"I sometimes think that there is a link between the decline in humanity and the increase in prosperity and comfort. Prosperity and comfort are what people seek, but the costs are often terrifying"
My immediate thoughts were; give me comfort and prosperity any day rather than the violent world in which Yan's characters live. I have to keep on talking about the violence because it is the single most affecting thing in the book. I never became inured to it and almost dreaded turning the page to discover what would happened to a character whose fate was in the hands of the bandits or the Japanese, (I hardly recovered from a passage early on in the book when one of the characters was skinned alive), There is little doubt that the levels of violence portrayed in the book were not too far exaggerated, but when the reader is invited to witness the colours and odours of someone having their brains beaten out in language that leaves nothing to the imagination, then it is probably up to the individual to decide on how much reality they can take. I got to the end of the book because there is so much fine writing, so much fascinating detail about Chinese rural culture and a story that is enhanced by the shifts in time method of the telling (and not just because it had been my choice for our book club read). Some of the action sequences linger long in the memory: the fight with the Japanese platoon around the river bridge, the battles with the dog packs and the attack at the funeral. I also loved grandmothers journey to her wedding.
If you want a reading experience that takes you into another world, but a world that seems all too real, then I would recommend Red Sorghum. Mo Yan invites you to feel people and their natures in the raw and the sometimes shocking outcomes that result from people being particularly brutal towards each other, must be part of that reading experience. A four star read.
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in it. I felt right at home with this aspect of the novel because where I live I am surrounded by Maize fields, which like sorghum grows incredibly quickly and produces dense fields of tall plants well above head height. In the summer it becomes home to the wild boar population, but I don't believe bandits live in it.This description of Sorghum is taken from wiki:
One species, Sorghum bicolor, is an important world crop, used for food (as grain and in sorghum syrup or "sorghum molasses"), fodder, the production of alcoholic beverages, and biofuels. Most varieties are drought- and heat-tolerant, and are especially important in arid regions, where the grain is one of the staples for poor and rural people. These varieties form important components of pastures in many tropical regions. Sorghum bicolor is an important food crop in Africa, Central America, and South Asia and is the "fifth most important cereal crop grown in the world".
Although there is a variety of sorghum called red sorghum I am guessing that Yan's book is called Red Sorghum because of the amount of blood spilled. Be warned this is an extremely violent novel and the reader is not spared any of the horrific acts that take place. It is set in rural China and follows the fortunes of a family from the 1920's to the 1950's and a little beyond. It was a bloody time to be alive with continuing warring factions amongst the Chinese groups and the Japanese invaders, who seem to wish to outdo each other in atrocities. For the most part the book deals with poor rural peasants and the bandit groups that fight with the local administrators and the Japanese, although the family featured are relatively wealthy as they own the local distillery and produce the most sought after wine in the area.
The story is related by the grandson and there are frequent time shifts as he tells the story of his grandfather's generation and his father's generation. This could have been confusing however Mo Yan refers to his characters by their generic family tree name as they relate to the narrator and so the reader can easily discover where he is in the timeline. This insider view of the world of rural China is brilliantly handled. Mo Yan places the reader right in the zone of the book and his writing outdoes Zola in its earthy descriptions of rural conditions. The smells, the sights, the feel of the environment in which his characters fight for their survival comes alive in descriptions that are as poetic as they are visceral, but there are a couple of times when I felt it was Mo Yan speaking rather than the grandson, for example:
"I sometimes think that there is a link between the decline in humanity and the increase in prosperity and comfort. Prosperity and comfort are what people seek, but the costs are often terrifying"
My immediate thoughts were; give me comfort and prosperity any day rather than the violent world in which Yan's characters live. I have to keep on talking about the violence because it is the single most affecting thing in the book. I never became inured to it and almost dreaded turning the page to discover what would happened to a character whose fate was in the hands of the bandits or the Japanese, (I hardly recovered from a passage early on in the book when one of the characters was skinned alive), There is little doubt that the levels of violence portrayed in the book were not too far exaggerated, but when the reader is invited to witness the colours and odours of someone having their brains beaten out in language that leaves nothing to the imagination, then it is probably up to the individual to decide on how much reality they can take. I got to the end of the book because there is so much fine writing, so much fascinating detail about Chinese rural culture and a story that is enhanced by the shifts in time method of the telling (and not just because it had been my choice for our book club read). Some of the action sequences linger long in the memory: the fight with the Japanese platoon around the river bridge, the battles with the dog packs and the attack at the funeral. I also loved grandmothers journey to her wedding.
If you want a reading experience that takes you into another world, but a world that seems all too real, then I would recommend Red Sorghum. Mo Yan invites you to feel people and their natures in the raw and the sometimes shocking outcomes that result from people being particularly brutal towards each other, must be part of that reading experience. A four star read.
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LibraryThing member almigwin
This is a very moving and beautifully written story, but it contains unbelievable amounts of violence. It begins with the arranged marriage of a beautiful 16 year old girl to a leprous boy from a wealthy family of distillers. The girl is attracted to a bearer of her sedan chair and they have a
handsome sturdy bearer murders the leper and his father leaving his sweetheart in charge of the distillery. She becomes a very successful businesswoman, and her sweetheart works for her happily. The novel proceeds through civil war, and the occupation of the Japanese. The descriptions of murderous thuggery is epitomized by the skinning alive of the family retainer/business overseer. There are scenes of dogs eating corpses, and fields of the dead too many to bury who are thrown into the river. This book has more violence than any I have ever read, but it is written in a very poetic although not flowery style. Here is a story of war where the battlefields are right in the center of village life, and where the armies begin as your friends and neighbors, then as the alien invaders. If you have a strong stomach for violence, it is a powerful book. It may also reflect the realities of those wars. Civil war in China only ended in 1950. Mo Yan lived in the province he writes about. I cannot tell how much is fiction and how much is history, but I think it is a great book.
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passionate encounter in a field leading to the birth of the protagonist. Thehandsome sturdy bearer murders the leper and his father leaving his sweetheart in charge of the distillery. She becomes a very successful businesswoman, and her sweetheart works for her happily. The novel proceeds through civil war, and the occupation of the Japanese. The descriptions of murderous thuggery is epitomized by the skinning alive of the family retainer/business overseer. There are scenes of dogs eating corpses, and fields of the dead too many to bury who are thrown into the river. This book has more violence than any I have ever read, but it is written in a very poetic although not flowery style. Here is a story of war where the battlefields are right in the center of village life, and where the armies begin as your friends and neighbors, then as the alien invaders. If you have a strong stomach for violence, it is a powerful book. It may also reflect the realities of those wars. Civil war in China only ended in 1950. Mo Yan lived in the province he writes about. I cannot tell how much is fiction and how much is history, but I think it is a great book.
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LibraryThing member Larxol
Red Sorghum was the first of Mo Yan’s books to be translated into English, but somehow I didn’t get to read it until I’d already read all the others. It was not his first published work in Chinese, and it is in no way a tentative first novel – he shows an audacious and fully developed
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narrative voice. Telling a multi-generation story set around the years of the Japanese invasion, he refuses to be tied down to sequential time lines, but strings together the short vignettes that have become a trademark of his style in the order that suits his artistic purpose, like multi-colored beads on a string. He has an obvious affection for the people and place that he writes about. His work will keep it from being lost forever. Show Less
LibraryThing member pajarita
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For about eight years (1937-1940), northeastern China was occupied by Japan. This brutal invasion occurred coincidentally within the 23 years of the Chinese Civil War (1927-1950). For someone who might not be at least superficially familiar with the appalling
But for someone like Mo Yan, who was born and raised in Shandong Province (completely taken over by Japan), it might constitute family memory and cultural history.
Red Sorghum is at least a work of historical fiction. But it appears much more than that.
Told as a first person narrative, this tale betrays the nationalism, racism, and sexism of that fictional narrator, permanently marked by his times and traumatic heritage. An individual of a later 20th century Chinese lifespan, this man’s experience of that earlier time is found through flashbacks of family memory that play out in bits of seemingly disjointed montages. But as the book progresses these bits assemble in the readers mind into a more complete picture.
The manner in which Mo Yan organizes these bits and pieces are masterfully presented so that the reader is at first transported by a poetic lyricism that emotionally tears the heart so, that the reader is now as deeply in love with the land and the region as would be a native.
The many characters are flawed but humanly seductive such that one becomes attached to them as though they are family—despicable but endearing. We become bonded to these folks and their homeland. Mo Yan’s prose is so well crafted that it is this beauty that enmesh us into this world.
We are now trapped.
We are trapped because it is this region and these people who are doomed to participate in this particularly tragic and grotesque portion of 20th century history. Mo Yan sees to it that we are complicit with them and experience with them this horror.
And his very powerful prose that so beautifully describes each flower and star and fish and drop of dew—also describes in awful detail every part of the horror these souls find themselves a part of.
These details are not easy for a reader to experience. And they last longer than many readers will want to endure. But these Chinese protagonists represent real people who were subjected to much worse for decades.
How would we react in such a time? Would we be heroes? Would we be bastards? Would we even survive? Who would we be afterwards?
As Second Grandma observes:
"You revere heroes and loathe bastards, but who among us is not the 'most heroic and most bastardly'?
This book is lyrically beautiful and mercilessly horrific. But this story could be told in no other way.
For about eight years (1937-1940), northeastern China was occupied by Japan. This brutal invasion occurred coincidentally within the 23 years of the Chinese Civil War (1927-1950). For someone who might not be at least superficially familiar with the appalling
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conditions of these two wars of attrition fought upon a countryside already devastated by poverty and organized crime, it might appear that this book contains far too much gratuitous horror.But for someone like Mo Yan, who was born and raised in Shandong Province (completely taken over by Japan), it might constitute family memory and cultural history.
Red Sorghum is at least a work of historical fiction. But it appears much more than that.
Told as a first person narrative, this tale betrays the nationalism, racism, and sexism of that fictional narrator, permanently marked by his times and traumatic heritage. An individual of a later 20th century Chinese lifespan, this man’s experience of that earlier time is found through flashbacks of family memory that play out in bits of seemingly disjointed montages. But as the book progresses these bits assemble in the readers mind into a more complete picture.
The manner in which Mo Yan organizes these bits and pieces are masterfully presented so that the reader is at first transported by a poetic lyricism that emotionally tears the heart so, that the reader is now as deeply in love with the land and the region as would be a native.
The many characters are flawed but humanly seductive such that one becomes attached to them as though they are family—despicable but endearing. We become bonded to these folks and their homeland. Mo Yan’s prose is so well crafted that it is this beauty that enmesh us into this world.
We are now trapped.
We are trapped because it is this region and these people who are doomed to participate in this particularly tragic and grotesque portion of 20th century history. Mo Yan sees to it that we are complicit with them and experience with them this horror.
And his very powerful prose that so beautifully describes each flower and star and fish and drop of dew—also describes in awful detail every part of the horror these souls find themselves a part of.
These details are not easy for a reader to experience. And they last longer than many readers will want to endure. But these Chinese protagonists represent real people who were subjected to much worse for decades.
How would we react in such a time? Would we be heroes? Would we be bastards? Would we even survive? Who would we be afterwards?
As Second Grandma observes:
"You revere heroes and loathe bastards, but who among us is not the 'most heroic and most bastardly'?
This book is lyrically beautiful and mercilessly horrific. But this story could be told in no other way.
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LibraryThing member MusicalGlass
Time circles forward and back in a multi-generational story of rural China in the mid-20 c. The translation renders some of Guan Moye’s prose into clichés, and the symbolism of sorghum in the fields is overdrawn, but the depredations of war and the routine violence of peasant life are
Yuengling Black & Tan
Brooklyn Lage
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convincingly conveyed.Yuengling Black & Tan
Brooklyn Lage
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LibraryThing member jasmyn9
This is supposed to be on of the great works by a Chinese author but I could just not get into it. The timeline jumped in odd ways introducing people without telling the reader who they were. There was too much graphic violence, which I understand is what really happened, but it made me skip large
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passages to not have to read it. I couldn't quite finish the book. I put it down about 2/3 of the way through. I only got that far because the reading was for a class. Surprising enough, once the essays were all turned in our professor told us she really doesn't like the book either. Makes me wonder why she couldn't select a more enjoyable title. Show Less
LibraryThing member auraesque
I read this for class and enjoyed it much more than I thought it would. Beautiful prose excellent story.
LibraryThing member Garp83
I read this book solely because Mo Yan had just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I had also just come off a couple of Murakami novels that were top shelf and I wondered what something else from that side of the globe might be like. I was the driving force for my "book 'n beer club" to select it.
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I really wanted to like the book. In fact, I did enjoy the first third of it, but after that I had to force myself to read the rest, hoping against hope that he would stop referring to sorghum on every page and that the novel would actually go somewhere. The writing wasn't bad, and at first I was reminded of a cross between Cormac McCarthy and John Irving, but that didn't last long. As it turned out, I felt like either the translation was bad or the book just wasn't very good. At the end of the day, Murakami is ten times better on every level. I truly don't understand the positive reviews for this book -- for me it was absolutely nothing special at all ... Show Less
LibraryThing member Hebephrene
My view is perhaps poisoned by the NY Review of Books article about Yan's disinterest in standing up to the Chinese authorities. Through that prism I found Red Sorghum to be a crude piece of propaganda. The technique was to tease us with a dramatic event - the ambush of a Japanese convoy - and then
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digress to give us the back story of the village. Sorghum was the pervasive and repetitive metaphor. And by repetitive I mean repetitive. Yan dedicates his considerable descriptive abilities to the physical and that is where he excels but the story - which I could not finish (and that is rare) was bodice ripping melodrama in which all were bad or good. Over the 75 pages I read I felt I was in the hands of a narrator whose was intent upon pleasing (me?) (the authorities) someone and would resort to extraordinarily obvious techniques to achieve it. Cumulatively, it became unbearable. Show Less
LibraryThing member BooksForDinner
Family history, folk tales, superstition, myth, tradition; a wonderful, strange, horrible, violent book. And I do mean violent. I am reminded of Garcia-Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude a great deal—a multi-generational fantastic novel—though this one demands even greater attention as it
I have a new habit—reading at least one work from the new Nobel Laureate each year. Not sure if I will read another from Mo Yan, as I had a bit of a rough go due to the violent nature of the work. I appreciated his way of presenting the characters as not good, not evil, just people doing what they felt they had to in difficult times, but I sometimes found it overwhelming.
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skips around chronologically throughout.I have a new habit—reading at least one work from the new Nobel Laureate each year. Not sure if I will read another from Mo Yan, as I had a bit of a rough go due to the violent nature of the work. I appreciated his way of presenting the characters as not good, not evil, just people doing what they felt they had to in difficult times, but I sometimes found it overwhelming.
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LibraryThing member mgiampaoli
Wow. some of the greatest sentences I've read. Earthy.
LibraryThing member Algybama
One of the slowest of slow-burns around. The back-and-forth temporality does nothing but annoy until the very end, when the final few chapters retroactively supply the missing emotional core of the novel, and a few characters who suffered terribly at the beginning finally became sympathetic. It’s
While I would agree with critics that the descriptions of nature are deeply felt and observed, it’s Mo Yan's naturalistic similes that take the cake in terms of style. But they're still nothing in comparison to the glory of his narrative structure.
Highly recommended for people who appreciate nonlinear stories.
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a powerful emotional twist of an ending, since they suffered before you cared for them, and suddenly you’re confronted with your own lack of affect and compassion throughout 400 or so pages of pure misery. It’s one of the oddest endings I’ve ever read; it basically sacrifices the entirety of the story’s drama in order detonate it all at the end.While I would agree with critics that the descriptions of nature are deeply felt and observed, it’s Mo Yan's naturalistic similes that take the cake in terms of style. But they're still nothing in comparison to the glory of his narrative structure.
Highly recommended for people who appreciate nonlinear stories.
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LibraryThing member flashflood42
Copied from another's review: "Over decades that seem but a moment in time, lines of scarlet figures shuttled among the sorghum stalks to weave a vast human tapestry. They killed, they looted, and they defended their country in a valiant, stirring ballet that makes us unfilial descendants who now
The setting for the novel is the author's native village of Northeast Gaomi Township in the province of Shandong near the tip of the Chinese peninsula that points toward Korea. Most of the events in the novel take place between 1923 and 1941. During the first part of that period the region was loosely governed by one of China's many warlords. In 1937 the Japanese occupied the province, leading to years of violent repression and resistance.
The narrative timeline is complex. The first-person narrator revisits his home town in the 1980s to construct his family's history. He begins his account in 1939 as his father, a teenage boy at the time, is preparing to participate in a partisan ambush of a Japanese convoy. This battle will be the central event in the novel. The story then shifts back to 1923 for the marriage of the narrator's paternal grandmother. These shifts in time occur frequently throughout the novel as though the principal characters are remembering their past, with the 1939-1941 timeline being the principal one.
Though the characters' proper names are given, they are chiefly referred to by relationship as "Granddad," "Grandma," "Father," "Little Auntie," etc., thus reaffirming the narrator's invisible presence. Grandma, a remarkably strong and free-spirited woman, inherits a distillery while still a teenage girl and proves more than equal to the task of managing it. Granddad, a large and violent man, begins his career while still a boy by murdering his mother's lover, then alternates between manual labor and banditry until emerging as a feared guerrilla warrior after the Japanese invasion. The relationship between these two is both passionate and tempestuous.
Violence and passion prevail in this story of remarkable heroism, brutality, treachery and suffering. When the Chinese partisan bands aren't fighting the Japanese, they are fighting each other for control of weapons and food supplies. The primitive, defiant individualism and amorality of Granddad and his contemporaries brings to mind the Old West of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.
Mo Yan's style of writing verges on magical realism, with its sensuality and capriciousness, but there is nothing disarmingly "magic" about it. The environment is a real as it can be, with every scene oozing blood, sweat, mud, pus, sap or semen. Red Sorghum is a harrowing, earthy and unforgettable immersion in the violent and tragic lives of its characters.
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occupy the land pale by comparison. Surrounded by progress, I feel a nagging sense of our species' regression." Thus the narrator of Mo Yan's novel states the theme of Red Sorghum.The setting for the novel is the author's native village of Northeast Gaomi Township in the province of Shandong near the tip of the Chinese peninsula that points toward Korea. Most of the events in the novel take place between 1923 and 1941. During the first part of that period the region was loosely governed by one of China's many warlords. In 1937 the Japanese occupied the province, leading to years of violent repression and resistance.
The narrative timeline is complex. The first-person narrator revisits his home town in the 1980s to construct his family's history. He begins his account in 1939 as his father, a teenage boy at the time, is preparing to participate in a partisan ambush of a Japanese convoy. This battle will be the central event in the novel. The story then shifts back to 1923 for the marriage of the narrator's paternal grandmother. These shifts in time occur frequently throughout the novel as though the principal characters are remembering their past, with the 1939-1941 timeline being the principal one.
Though the characters' proper names are given, they are chiefly referred to by relationship as "Granddad," "Grandma," "Father," "Little Auntie," etc., thus reaffirming the narrator's invisible presence. Grandma, a remarkably strong and free-spirited woman, inherits a distillery while still a teenage girl and proves more than equal to the task of managing it. Granddad, a large and violent man, begins his career while still a boy by murdering his mother's lover, then alternates between manual labor and banditry until emerging as a feared guerrilla warrior after the Japanese invasion. The relationship between these two is both passionate and tempestuous.
Violence and passion prevail in this story of remarkable heroism, brutality, treachery and suffering. When the Chinese partisan bands aren't fighting the Japanese, they are fighting each other for control of weapons and food supplies. The primitive, defiant individualism and amorality of Granddad and his contemporaries brings to mind the Old West of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.
Mo Yan's style of writing verges on magical realism, with its sensuality and capriciousness, but there is nothing disarmingly "magic" about it. The environment is a real as it can be, with every scene oozing blood, sweat, mud, pus, sap or semen. Red Sorghum is a harrowing, earthy and unforgettable immersion in the violent and tragic lives of its characters.
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LibraryThing member pathogenik
This is the most heartbreaking book. It made me cringe all throughout. I will write a proper review later; for the moment, I am overwhelmed.
LibraryThing member HadriantheBlind
Saw the movie, read the book. The film, as colorful and vivid as it is, covers only the first two chapters.
This is a multi-generational story of a family in the Shandong countryside. One might be tempted to label it 'magical realism', but this is all set during the Japanese invasion, and life,
Mo Yan also experiments with story structure, flitting back and forth in time. He doesn't let any chronology build up, but instead lets the collection of memories make an impression upon you. The family member who had his skin ripped off comes back several times, and, dare I say, his fate hits you more.
This is also a novel of extreme contradictions, and a sort of warm irony. The transitions of events are jarring. Elaborate family funerals, rotten bodies, love stories, people's heads exploding, red sorghum wine.
There is a final metaphor here. The author/narrator returns to his home village, and the 'red sorghum' has been replaced by a green pasty substitute. The curtain has changed, and something is missing.
An impressive book, and one which gives a discerning look at the past, as ignoble and beautiful as it can be.
This is a multi-generational story of a family in the Shandong countryside. One might be tempted to label it 'magical realism', but this is all set during the Japanese invasion, and life,
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already hard due to banditry, becomes even more gruesome. For example - in the first 40 pages, one family member is skinned alive.Mo Yan also experiments with story structure, flitting back and forth in time. He doesn't let any chronology build up, but instead lets the collection of memories make an impression upon you. The family member who had his skin ripped off comes back several times, and, dare I say, his fate hits you more.
This is also a novel of extreme contradictions, and a sort of warm irony. The transitions of events are jarring. Elaborate family funerals, rotten bodies, love stories, people's heads exploding, red sorghum wine.
There is a final metaphor here. The author/narrator returns to his home village, and the 'red sorghum' has been replaced by a green pasty substitute. The curtain has changed, and something is missing.
An impressive book, and one which gives a discerning look at the past, as ignoble and beautiful as it can be.
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LibraryThing member AnnieMod
Originally published as 5 separate novellas, the novel can feel a bit disjointed in places - the main timeline in each of them is slightly different and that changes how the story inside of each segment works. But the novel has a unified overall structure - each of the stories weaves in and out of
But it is not just a historical novel - it weaves in a lot of mythology into the narrative. Sometimes it is hard to draw the line between the real and the unreal and between the mythological and the historical. Add the constant shift between the timelines (and in one of the chapters in the viewpoint - the story about the dogs is so full of allusions and metaphors that I was never sure if it is part of the novel really or if it was added just as a commentary. On the other hand, it actually connects with the main story and allows some additional comparisons and insights which add to the tapestry of the novel).
In a way, it is as much the story of a family as it is a story of a country. From Grandma, still proud with her golden lotuses (bound feet), through the rebels fighting against Japan (although it seemed to fight more internally than with the imperial army) and into the modern times, the family changes as China changes. That's where the story really shines - the family sounds unconventional but is connected to the traditions of the times in so many ways that you can almost see where the traditional turns into a new thing. It is this constant change that ends up the main thread that connects the disjointed parts of the story - and a lot of that change was almost hidden into the colors through the story - keeping track of what colors are mentioned and where helps with the understanding of the story. These two threads, the constant change and the colors, are there to the very end - from the ghost of the Second Grandma who makes a point to come back from the grave to condemn the narrator for spending so much time in the city to that very last stalk of red sorghum which somehow survived the change to higher yielding varietals - it all came back down to tradition and change, to the new and the old. And depending on how you want to read certain parts, you may get a different idea of which side the narrator (or the author) is on.
It is not an easy novel to read through - between the time jumps (some predictable, some feeling as if the author wrote the stories and then cut them into pieces and just inserted one into the other in random places), the constant stories starting with their ends (we were told what happened before we were told the story of that event) and the gory details in some parts of the story, it required a certain state of mind. Keeping track of the various stories became easier as the novel progressed and as the reader gets more familiar with the people (some of which had different names in different periods - and the author made the distinction clear so one had to follow these and connect the dots when the timelines intersected), the story started to feel less of a jumble. But sometimes it still seemed more like a literary exercise than a novel - while the story is in there, the modernistic style felt a bit too overwhelming. It adds to the uneasiness that the novel projects and was probably designed with that in mind but I wonder if a bit less jumbled story, even if it was still not completely linear, would not have served the underlying story better. But considering that it was published in the form of separate stories in various magazines and that it is the first novel of the author play somewhat into this - the different chapters/novellas have their own internal cohesiveness.
I am still not entirely sure if I liked the novel. There is enough in it that I enjoyed so I am not sorry that I read it but I found it heavy going in places where I least expected. It could have used some notes and a glossary - while some elements were supposed to be explained in the novel (and they were), the initial audience of the novel would have recognized some of the references in the Chinese text.
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different timelines (sometimes multiple times on the same page) and ends up fitting like a puzzle - every part of the stories fit in its own place and by the time you finish the novel, you have the story of a family from the early 20th century to the 80s. It is heavier on the earlier part of the stories - the story of Grandma in the 20s and the Father's story in the 30s and early 40s dominate the story; the story of the narrator which spans the 60s-80s are there mostly for comparison and in short notes. The more you know of Chinese history, the more you will get from some of these glimpses into these periods -- without at least a basic idea, some of their importance can be lost. But it is not just a historical novel - it weaves in a lot of mythology into the narrative. Sometimes it is hard to draw the line between the real and the unreal and between the mythological and the historical. Add the constant shift between the timelines (and in one of the chapters in the viewpoint - the story about the dogs is so full of allusions and metaphors that I was never sure if it is part of the novel really or if it was added just as a commentary. On the other hand, it actually connects with the main story and allows some additional comparisons and insights which add to the tapestry of the novel).
In a way, it is as much the story of a family as it is a story of a country. From Grandma, still proud with her golden lotuses (bound feet), through the rebels fighting against Japan (although it seemed to fight more internally than with the imperial army) and into the modern times, the family changes as China changes. That's where the story really shines - the family sounds unconventional but is connected to the traditions of the times in so many ways that you can almost see where the traditional turns into a new thing. It is this constant change that ends up the main thread that connects the disjointed parts of the story - and a lot of that change was almost hidden into the colors through the story - keeping track of what colors are mentioned and where helps with the understanding of the story. These two threads, the constant change and the colors, are there to the very end - from the ghost of the Second Grandma who makes a point to come back from the grave to condemn the narrator for spending so much time in the city to that very last stalk of red sorghum which somehow survived the change to higher yielding varietals - it all came back down to tradition and change, to the new and the old. And depending on how you want to read certain parts, you may get a different idea of which side the narrator (or the author) is on.
It is not an easy novel to read through - between the time jumps (some predictable, some feeling as if the author wrote the stories and then cut them into pieces and just inserted one into the other in random places), the constant stories starting with their ends (we were told what happened before we were told the story of that event) and the gory details in some parts of the story, it required a certain state of mind. Keeping track of the various stories became easier as the novel progressed and as the reader gets more familiar with the people (some of which had different names in different periods - and the author made the distinction clear so one had to follow these and connect the dots when the timelines intersected), the story started to feel less of a jumble. But sometimes it still seemed more like a literary exercise than a novel - while the story is in there, the modernistic style felt a bit too overwhelming. It adds to the uneasiness that the novel projects and was probably designed with that in mind but I wonder if a bit less jumbled story, even if it was still not completely linear, would not have served the underlying story better. But considering that it was published in the form of separate stories in various magazines and that it is the first novel of the author play somewhat into this - the different chapters/novellas have their own internal cohesiveness.
I am still not entirely sure if I liked the novel. There is enough in it that I enjoyed so I am not sorry that I read it but I found it heavy going in places where I least expected. It could have used some notes and a glossary - while some elements were supposed to be explained in the novel (and they were), the initial audience of the novel would have recognized some of the references in the Chinese text.
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LibraryThing member thorold
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
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.
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— 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.
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LibraryThing member leslie.98
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
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readers that I didn't get - I hope so because otherwise this book is just wallowing in misery and disgusting images. Show Less
LibraryThing member leslie.98
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
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readers that I didn't get - I hope so because otherwise this book is just wallowing in misery and disgusting images. Show Less
LibraryThing member arubabookwoman
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
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
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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
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