Mo Yan. Wow! Any other readers?

[Joseph Tracy]

Just a note to say that I finished the novel a week ago and it builds to a rich, savory and exciting conclusion. The story teller is a soldier become playwright sending letters  to his publisher and the novel ends with his play based on the story in the novel. The play is, as drama should be, intensely dramatic.  So art comments on art commenting on more than half a century of Chinese history. 
> On Jan 30, 2017, at 12:59 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> 
> I’m taking breaks from that now almost universal affliction of the demonic T- Rump chewing on my brain by the daily pleasures of home maintenance, by doing art  and by reading a book called ‘Frog' by Mo Yan, beautifully translated from Cinese by Howard Goldblatt.   The storyteller in the novel is the nephew of a woman obstetrician whose life is followed from childhood under Japanese Occupation through early Maoism, the cruelties of the cultural revolution, to contemporary China. The darkest aspect of her life is the enforcement of the one child policy.  This topic is weighty, the enforcement clearly un-natural  and I have no personal clarity concerning it, but it seems to embody so many of the questions that face us on this crowded and abused planet. 
>   I grew up in California with Japanese and Chinese friends, a mother fascinated by East Asian culture, and a fair number of trips to Chinatown. I study tai-ji with a Chinese woman and teach Qigong tai ji to a small group and regularly study chinese art. So love, fascination, some modest practical discipline , and deep respect for the culture , but far from in depth knowledge . But I can tell that the translation catches the bluntness and intense energy of  conflict, family and dialog among Chinese people. His writing is relentlessly lively, real and unsentimental, and fiercely humane. 
>   Mo Yan has won the Nobel and the Newman prize for Chinese lit. His world is dense, alive, credible  with cruelties and magic,  always savory, and full of hope and heart. If you haven’t read this amazing writer, he is a rare and gifted artist.
> 
> Mo Yan is his pen name and means “Don’t Speak”.  He is best known for the novel "Red Sorghum”, also a film.
> 
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