Frog
A Novel
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3.6 • 8 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES TOP BOOK OF THE YEAR
WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK
“Mo Yan’s voice will find it’s way into the heart of the American reader, just as Kundera and García Márquez have.” —Amy Tan author of The Joy Luck Club
From the Nobel-prize winning author of Red Sorghum and one China’s most revered writers, a novel exploring the One-Child Policy
Before the Cultural Revolution, Gugu, narrator Tadpole’s feisty aunt, is a respected midwife in her rural community. She combines modern medical knowledge with a healer's touch to save the lives of village women and their babies. Gugu is beautiful, charismatic, and of an unimpeachable political background.
After a disastrous love affair with a defector leaves Gugu reeling, she throws herself zealously into enforcing China's draconian new family planning policy by any means necessary, be it forced sterilizations or late-term abortions. Tragically, her blind devotion to the Party line spares no one, not her own family, not even herself.
Once beloved, Gugu becomes the living incarnation of a reviled social policy violently at odds with deeply rooted social values. 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.
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.
