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Frog andRed Sorghum, which was made into a feature film, dozens of novellas, and hundreds of short stories. Mo Yan is the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature and the 2009 Newman Prize for Chinese Literature. He has won virtually every Chinese literary prize, including the Mao Dun Literature Prize in 2011 (China's most prestigious literary award) and is the most critically acclaimed Chinese writer of his generation, in both China and around the world. He lives in Beijing.
The Garlic Ballads
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ISBN-13:
9781628722062
- Publisher: Arcade Publishing
- Publication date: 10/22/2012
- Sold by: Barnes & Noble
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 304
- File size: 532 KB
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The farmers of Paradise County have been leading a hardscrabble life unchanged for generations. The Communist government has encouraged them to plant garlic, but selling the crop is not as simple as they believed. Warehouses fill up, taxes skyrocket, and government officials maltreat even those who have traveled for days to sell their harvest. A surplus on the garlic market ensues, and the farmers must watch in horror as their crops wither and rot in the fields. Families are destroyed by the random imprisonment of young and old for supposed crimes against the state.
The prisoners languish in horrifying conditions in their cells, with only their strength of character and thoughts of their loved ones to save them from madness. Meanwhile, a blind minstrel incites the masses to take the law into their own hands, and a riot of apocalyptic proportions follows with savage and unforgettable consequences. The Garlic Ballads is a powerful vision of life under the heel of an inflexible and uncaring government. It is also a delicate story of love between man and woman, father and child, friend and friend—and the struggle to maintain that love despite overwhelming obstacles.
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Publishers Weekly - Cahners\\Publishers_Weekly
Through this powerful, fiercely lyrical story of a Chinese garlic farmer's 1988 revolt, Mo Yan (Red Sorghum) uncompromisingly portrays the harsh realities of an existence difficult to comprehend. Garlic farmer Gao Ma aches with love for Fang Jinju, whose parents are using her as a pawn in an arranged marriage. Defying her two thuggish brothers and her father, who in the past has savagely beaten her, Jinju, pregnant with Gao Ma's child, runs away with him but meets a tragic end. The grief-stricken farmer is thrown in jail for his alleged role as ringleader of a farmer's riot-an angry mob has destroyed a government building to protest a county official's refusal to buy the garlic crop amid a surfeit. Gao Ma's fate is entwined with that of another imprisoned protestor, Gao Yang, who preserves his sanity through the love of his wife and blind 10-year-old daughter. Mo Yan fuses gritty realism, stunning imagery, acid satire, bawdiness, dream sequences, interior monologues, and flashbacks to the Cultural Revolution. His luminous prose lays bare the corrupt bureaucracy, grinding poverty and pervasive oppression borne by millions of inhabitants in the People's Republic.
FYI: This fifth novel by the acclaimed Mo Yan has been twice banned in China, and the 39-year-old author is prohibited from leaving the country.Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Through this powerful, fiercely lyrical story of a Chinese garlic farmer's 1988 revolt, Mo Yan (Red Sorghum) uncompromisingly portrays the harsh realities of an existence difficult to comprehend. Garlic farmer Gao Ma aches with love for Fang Jinju, whose parents are using her as a pawn in an arranged marriage. Defying her two thuggish brothers and her father, who in the past has savagely beaten her, Jinju, pregnant with Gao Ma's child, runs away with him but meets a tragic end. The grief-stricken farmer is thrown in jail for his alleged role as ringleader of a farmer's riot-an angry mob has destroyed a government building to protest a county official's refusal to buy the garlic crop amid a surfeit. Gao Ma's fate is entwined with that of another imprisoned protestor, Gao Yang, who preserves his sanity through the love of his wife and blind 10-year-old daughter. Mo Yan fuses gritty realism, stunning imagery, acid satire, bawdiness, dream sequences, interior monologues, and flashbacks to the Cultural Revolution. His luminous prose lays bare the corrupt bureaucracy, grinding poverty and pervasive oppression borne by millions of inhabitants in the People's Republic. (May)
Library Journal
Mo Yan, author of the critically acclaimed Red Sorghum (LJ 3/15/93), which was made into a film directed by Zhang Yimou, presents a tale of brutality and corruption set in China in 1988. The novel focuses on the lives of three individuals imprisoned for their roles in the garlic revolt, a peasant uprising against corrupt government. Gao Ma has additional problems: his beloved has been promised to another in direct violation of the Marriage Laws, but the officials are siding with her family. The peasants are seen as adhering to the idealism of socialism and wondering how the new social formation came to be embodied in such corrupt officials. The action of the novel goes backward and forward in time, alternating between fact and fantasy. Overall, a very violent book, occasionally interrupted by scenes of domestic harmony; for a specialized readership.-Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati Technical Coll.
Mary Ellen Sullivan
China's most popular novelist again takes us to the setting he so vividly brought to life in the very successfully filmed "Red Sorghum" the peasant villages of China that he depicts as situated in a myth-ridden, brutal, and hyperreal landscape. This time his novel unfolds in the late 1980s, when a bumper crop of a village's lifeblood, garlic, turns the community upside down, for this year garlic is a glut on the market--blame official corruption. Against this backdrop, three cleverly intertwined stories, as fanciful as a French farce, as fantastic as a Latin American tale, play out. In them we see both the lyricism and the absurdity of contemporary Chinese life conjured by the deft hand of a talented writer. Mo Yan's is a powerful and original voice, using sophisticated techniques to get at some very raw truths.San Francisco Chronicle
A work of considerable political power and lyrical beauty.Newsday
Mo Yan gives you a sharp and sentimental view of peasant life, while demonstrating at full throttle the nastiness, brutality, and brevity of it all.New York Times
“Mo Yan is one of China’s best writers.”