Description de l’éditeur
Frogs is a richly complex new novel about China's one-child policy by Mo Yan, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2012.
A respected midwife, Gugu combines modern medical knowledge with a healer's touch to save the lives of village women and their babies.
After a disastrous love affair with a defector leaves Gugu reeling, she throws herself into enforcing China's draconian new family planning policy by any means necessary. Her blind devotion to the party line spares no one, not her own family, not even herself.
Spanning the pre-revolutionary era and the country's modern-day consumer society, Mo Yan's taut and engrossing examination of Chinese society will be read for generations to come.
'Mo Yan deserves a place in world literature. His voice will find its way into the heart of the reader, just as Kundera and Garcia Marquez have' Amy Tan
'One of China's leading writers . . . his work rings with refreshing authenticity' Time
'His idiom has the spiralling invention and mytho-maniacal quality of much world literature of a high order, from Vargas Llosa to Rushdie' Observer
Mo Yan was born in 1955 in Gaomi County in Shandong province, China. He is the author of various novellas and short stories and numerous novels including Red Sorghum, The Republic of Wine, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and The Garlic Ballads. In 2012 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Howard Goldblatt is the award-winning translator of numerous works of contemporary Chinese into English.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, Yan (Red Sorghum) is one of China's most visible and controversial writers. In his latest novel, he depicts the implementation of China's national family planning policy and its effect on the inhabitants of a rural village. Through the letters of Wan Zu, aka "Tadpole," Yan charts the village's rise from the lean years of the early 1960s, when children ate coal to alleviate hunger, through the boom years of the aughts, with BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes common sights on former mud roads. Midwife Gugu, the aunt of Tadpole and determined Communist Party member, doggedly supports the modern one-child policy and in doing so attracts the wrath of villagers slow to disregard tradition and superstition. When Tadpole's wife, Wang Renmei, becomes pregnant after illegally removing an IUD, Gugu performs an abortion, during which Renmei dies. Subsequently, Tadpole marries "Little Lion," Gugu's assistant at the commune health center. At an advanced age and through unconventional means, Little Lion gives birth to a long-awaited boy, who inspires Tadpole to write a long-planned play entitled Frog which concludes the novel and dramatizes the themes of modernization, obstetric policy, and the bonds of family. Goldblatt's translation is inviting, while Yan's tale deftly explores the human toll of national policy and historical forces.
