Despite being a kind and generous landowner, Nao is deprived of land and sentenced to death in Land Reform Movement of 1948. It uses the nostalgic chapter form to develop stories based on the reincarnation of protagonist Ximen Nao from 1950-2000. The 550,000-word novel only took Mo 43 days to compete. There’s nothing wrong with that.”Ī novel by Mo Yan and Howard Goldblatt (July 1, 2012) If it has flaws, they mostly are those of ambition, of reaching further and higher than the material can bear. The Washington Post praises it as “broad and bold … It’s fiction in the grand, triple-decker tradition.

The female body, as the title suggests, recurs as the central image and metaphor of the book, which sheds light on the author’s consciousness of maternal instinct. The novel, narrated by the spoiled and frail Jintong - the ninth child (and first son) of the iron-willed protagonist mother - tells about how the mom endured every bit of hardship to give birth to, bring up and save the lives of her children and grandchildren from the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), through the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, the civil war, the “cultural revolution” (1966-76) and the post-Mao years. The San Francisco Chronicle considers it “a work of considerable political power and lyrical beauty”.Ī novel (Arcade Classics) by Mo Yan and Howard Goldblatt Mo Yan’s most stylistic and imaginative novel The Garlic Ballads, centered on the 1987 “garlic glut” revolt in Paradise county, portrays the lives of Chinese farmers in the 1980s from a humanitarian perspective.

A novel by Mo Yan and Howard Goldblatt (Nov 1, 2012)

Red sorghum novel