heh, the WP story is basically a re-topped re-wrap of Steven Moore's 2008 review of Life and Death are Wearing Me Out. I assume this is the Steven Moore who works at Dalkey Archive and is responsible for herculean efforts to publish great literature from America and other parts: <br>
<br><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Life-Death-are-Wearing-Out/dp/1559708530">http://www.amazon.com/Life-Death-are-Wearing-Out/dp/1559708530</a><br><h3 class="productDescriptionSource">From The Washington Post</h3>
<p> Reviewed by Steven Moore</p><p>To encompass the
ideological insanity of Mao Zedong's policies and the unimaginable
horrors he inflicted on the Chinese people requires a boldly
unconventional style. That need has been filled by this wild man of
Chinese fiction: Mo Yan -- a pseudonymic phrase meaning "Don't speak."
Over the last 20 years, Mo Yan has been writing brutally vibrant
stories about rural life in China that flout official Party ideology and
celebrate individualism over conformity. (How he has escaped
imprisonment -- or worse -- I don't know.) He also flouts literary
conformity, spiking his earthy realism with fantasy, hallucination and
metafiction. </p><p>His previous novel, the voluptuously titled Big
Breasts & Wide Hips, revealed the horrors of Chinese life during the
first half of the 20th century; his new one, the exuberantly
imaginative Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out, covers the second, even
worse half. The story, which revives the Buddhist notion of
reincarnation, begins on Jan. 1, 1950, in hell. Lord Yama, king of the
underworld, is examining a benevolent landowner named Ximen Nao, who was
brutally executed two years earlier (like thousands of landowners) so
that his land could be redistributed to peasants. Frustrated that Ximen
will not admit any guilt, Yama punishes him by sending him back to his
village in the form of a donkey.</p><p>Ximen remains in that form
for the next 10 years, witnessing the Land Reform Movement and the
disastrous Great Leap Forward that killed tens of millions of people
(and an unrecorded number of Chinese animals -- the novel reminds us
this Earth belongs to them, too). The donkey is angry at first when he
learns his trusted farmhand Lan Lian has married Ximen's concubine, but
he's mollified as Lan carries on as a fiercely independent farmer, the
last holdout in collectivized China. The donkey is killed during the
great famine, accompanied by appropriate animal imagery: "Then the
famine came," Mo Yan writes, "turning the people into wild animals,
cruel and unfeeling. After eating all the bark from trees and the edible
grass, a gang of them charged into the Ximen estate compound like a
pack of starving wolves." Ximen is reincarnated next as an ox, then a
pig, a dog, a monkey and finally -- on New Year's Eve 2000 -- as a
child. On his fifth birthday, the child and elderly Lan Lian get
together and, taking turns, narrate the novel we've just read.</p><p>It's
a grimly entertaining overview of recent Chinese history. As a "wise
German shepherd" summarizes it, "People in the 1950s were innocent, in
the 1960s they were fanatics, in the 1970s they were afraid of their own
shadows, in the 1980s they carefully weighed people's words and
actions, and in the 1990s they were simply evil." But brave individuals
emerge as the true heroes; aside from the animal reincarnations of Ximen
Nao, these include Lan Lian for refusing to give in to communal
pressure, and his son Lan Jiefang, who defies convention by abandoning
his legal wife (from an arranged marriage) for a woman he loves, ruining
himself in the process. The most colorful individual is the novelist
himself, who pops in and out of the story, usually to the annoyance of
the other characters.</p><p>But I don't want to leave the impression
that this is a gimmicky book that makes light of recent Chinese history.
Born in 1955, Mo Yan endured the worst of it -- he, too, was so poor
that he ate tree bark -- and there are descriptions that will shock
readers into realizing this is no literary game. Indeed, reality keeps
outrunning the author's satire. Near the end of the novel, a born-again
capitalist devises a Cultural Revolution theme park, as tasteless as a
Nazi theme park in Poland. And yet there are now Cultural
Revolution-themed cafés in China, favored by urban hipsters with an
almost American ignorance of history. </p><p>Mo Yan offers insights into
communist ideology and predatory capitalism that we ignore at our
peril. This "lumbering animal of a story," as he calls it, combines the
appeal of a family saga set against tumultuous events with the technical
bravura of innovative fiction. Catch a ride on this wheel of
transmigration. </p><p><br>Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
</p><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 4:08 PM, Erik T. Burns <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:eburns@gmail.com" target="_blank">eburns@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
A-also, according to the WP report, there's a talking dog.<br><br>Maybe Mr "Don't Speak" is China's TRP...<br><br>"It’s a grimly entertaining overview of recent Chinese history. As a
“wise German shepherd” summarizes it, “People in the 1950s were
innocent, in the 1960s they were fanatics, in the 1970s they were afraid
of their own shadows, in the 1980s they carefully weighed people’s
words and actions, and in the 1990s they were simply evil.”"<br><br>This also sounds TRPesque:<br><br>“He’s bawdy when he wants to be. Big and bold, lots of adjectives, and
long sentences. The visuality is incredible. When he describes a scene,
he does it with every tool in his box. He turns things on their head and
makes them be something they could ever be in real life. In Mo Yan’s
hands, even the most horrific scenes have a great beauty to them.”<br><br>a-and this is by far the most elegant sentence I've ever seen used by a reviewer to casually admit he hasn't actually read the books in question:<br>
<br>"A sense of Mo Yan’s work emerges from the titles alone: “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1611457076?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1611457076&linkCode=xm2&tag=washpost-books-20" target="_blank">The Garlic Ballads</a>,” “Explosions and Other Stories,” “The Republic of Wine,” “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1559706716?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1559706716&linkCode=xm2&tag=washpost-books-20" target="_blank">Shifu: You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh</a>,” and “<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1611453437?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1611453437&linkCode=xm2&tag=washpost-books-20" target="_blank">Big Breasts and Wide Hips</a>” (all published in the 1990s)."<div class="HOEnZb">
<div class="h5"><br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 4:02 PM, Erik T. Burns <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:eburns@gmail.com" target="_blank">eburns@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I'd be one of the last people to complain about literature being rewarded for being complex.<br>But how does Jonathan Franzen feel about it?<div><div><br><br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">
On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 3:55 PM, David Morris <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:fqmorris@gmail.com" target="_blank">fqmorris@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/chinese-fiction-writer-mo-yan-wins-nobel-prize-in-literature/2012/10/11/ca4795a2-13a0-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_story.html" target="_blank">http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/chinese-fiction-writer-mo-yan-wins-nobel-prize-in-literature/2012/10/11/ca4795a2-13a0-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_story.html</a><br>
<br>
The WP article convincingly connects his writing to GGM's magic<br>
realism. The only (tenuouis) WF connection I can surmise is his<br>
confronting prevalent social pressures of China.<br>
<div><div><br>
On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 9:28 AM, Johnny Marr <<a href="mailto:marrja@gmail.com" target="_blank">marrja@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
> It's not the most tenuous pairing of names I've ever encountered. They're both renowned for their fragmentary narratives.<br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br>