Red Sorghum
A Novel of China
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4.3 • 18 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The acclaimed novel of love and resistance during late 1930s China by Mo Yan, winner of the 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the way that Chinese landscape painting reshapes the viewer's perspective by offering not one but many focal points, this singularly forceful contemporary Chinese novel reinvents the notion of chronology. The narrator, a young man from the provinces, relates the intertwined histories of the Sino-Japanese war of the 1930s and of his parents and grandparents. A few key episodes serve as recurrent motifs: murders counterpoint battlefield massacres; women are raped by their saviors and by enemy soldiers; the community leader punishes gamblers and thieves with floggings, while the Japanese flog a saboteur as a preamble to skinning him alive. Mo Yan turns these events over and over, introducing each a fragment at a time and exploring their significance as they pass from one character's experience into another's memory. At first Yan's insistence on graphic and gruesome descriptions and his interest in bodily functions make the novel rough going. Eventually, however, his emphasis on the ignoble becomes a protest against the universal tendency to idealize the past. Instead, Mo Yan recreates a world defined by brutality and extends its horizons past wars and cultural revolutions; the ultimate cruelty emerges as oblivion. A memorable achievement.
Customer Reviews
Not my cup of tea
Maybe this is the naïve thoughts of a 16 year old, but I found this novel excruciating at times! The plot was very jumpy. It was exciting because the ideas click in your head like a puzzle, but the cons outweigh the pros for me by an acute degree.