Today’s most revered, feared, and controversial Chinese novelist offers a tour de force in which the real, the absurd, the comical, and the tragic are blended into a fascinating read. The hero—or antihero—of Mo Yan’s new novel is Ximen Nao, a landowner known for his benevolence to his peasants. His story is a deliriously unique journey and absolutely riveting tale that reveals the author’s love of a homeland beset by ills inevitable, political, and traditional.
Jonathan Spence
…a wildly visionary and creative novel, constantly mocking and rearranging itself and jolting the reader with its own internal commentary. This is politics as pathology. From the start, the reader must be willing to share with Mo Yan the novel's central conceit: that the five main narrators are not humans but animals, albeit ones who speak with sharply modulated human voices…harsh and gritty, raunchy and funny. The revolutionaries' village politics are deadly; sex in the village (whether human or animal) is flamboyant and consuming. Death is unexpected and usually violent. Coincidences of plotting abound. The zaniest events are depicted with deadpan care, and their pathos is caught at countless moments by the fluent and elegant renderings of the veteran translator Howard Goldblatt. One might have thought it impossible, but each animal does comment with its own distinctive voice
—The New York Times
Library Journal
Mo Yan's (Big Breasts & Wide Hips) latest epic novel spans the years 1950-2000 and opens with landowner Ximen Nao, executed in Mao's Land Reform Movement of 1948, being fried to a crisp in hell. After negotiating with the king of the underworld, Nao returns to his village reincarnated in turn as a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, a monkey, and, finally, a big-headed boy. Though the concept is intriguing, the existence of multiple narrators often makes the story difficult to follow (the list of some dozen characters in the opening does, at least, help readers keep track of who's who). Also, the author liberally references a character sharing his own name who is very similar to himself throughout the story. These references seem unnecessary, narcissistic, and annoyingly disruptive to the narrative flow. Yan does manage to convey the difficulties of village life, complex character relationships, and occasional humor. But his work is not for the average reader and requires immense patience to follow through to the end. Academic and large public libraries with collections of translated works by Chinese authors will probably want to consider.
—Shirley N. Quan
Kirkus Reviews
Epic black comedy from the inventive Chinese author (Big Breasts and Wide Hips, 2004, etc.) frequently mentioned as a leading Nobel Prize contender. This novel is every bit as rambunctious and bizarre as the summary will suggest. The story begins in Hell, whose placid sadistic calm is disturbed by the bitter complaints of Ximen Nao, a prosperous landowner arrested and executed when Chairman Mao's policy of "land reform" required the seizure of Nao's property. Unable to extract the stubborn Nao's confession of wrongdoing, Lord Yama (aka Satan) agrees to "send him back" to earth. But Nao finds he isn't himself, as he lives through successive reincarnations as a donkey, ox, pig, dog and monkey during a half-century of the Cultural Revolution, up to the beginning of the new millennium. All these Naos relive the past as well as interact with his nearest and dearest (wife, concubines, children), his former handyman Lan Lian and such disturbing avatars of Mao's new society as militia commander and bean counter Huang Tong and Nao's upwardly mobile, amoral son Ximen Jinlong. This long story never slackens; the author deploys parallel and recollected narratives expertly, and makes broadly comic use of himself as a meddlesome, career-oriented hack whose versions of important events are, we are assured, not to be trusted. Mo Yan is a mordant Rabelaisian satirist, and there are echoes of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy in this novel's rollicking plenitude (e.g., a typical chapter title announces "Wild Geese Fall, People Die, an Ox Goes Berserk/Ravings and Wild Talk Turn into an Essay"). The recent Nobel awarded to Gao Xingjian may have ousted Mo Yan from the top level of contenders. If so, theselection committee may have to be "re-educated." He's one hell of a writer. First printing of 12,500
The New York Times Book Review
“A wildly visceral and creative novel . . . A vast, cruel, and complex story.”
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