Sunday Read: Excerpts from 2012 Nobel Laureate Mo Yan’s Books
On Thursday, Chinese writer Mo Yan (a pen name meaning “don’t speak”) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. For today’s Sunday Read we invite you to dip into the new Nobel laureate’s works Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh, Red Sorghum, The Republic of Wine, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, Life and Death are Wearing me out, Garlic Ballads, Sandalwood Death and Frogs, courtesy The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Granta.
A selection of excerpts from The New York Times:
Every person has his own reasons for becoming a writer, and I am no exception. But why I became the sort of writer I am and not another Hemingway or Faulkner is, I believe, linked to my childhood experiences. They have been a boon to my writing career and are what will make it possible for me to keep at it down the road. Looking back some forty years, to the early 1960s, I revisit one of modern China’s most bizarre periods, an era of unprecedented fanaticism. On one hand, those years saw the country in the grips of economic stagnation and individual deprivation. The people struggled to keep death from their door, with little to eat and rags for clothes; on the other hand, it was a time of intense political passions, when starving citizens tightened their belts and followed the Party in its Communist experiment. We may have been famished at the time, but we considered ourselves to be the luckiest people in the world. Two-thirds of the world’s people, we believed, were living in dire misery, and it was our sacred duty to rescue them from the sea of suffering in which they were drowning. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when China opened its door to the outside world, that we finally began to face reality, as if waking from a dream.
Excerpt from The Republic of Wine:
As the night deepened, I detected the aroma of liquor off to the northeast, an intimate, seductive smell, even though there was a wall between it and me, and it had to soar across one snow-covered roof after another, pierce the armor of ice-clad trees, and pass down roads, intoxicating chickens, ducks, geese, and dogs along the way. The barking of those dogs was rounded like liquor bottles, exuberantly drunk; the aroma intoxicated constellations, which winked happily and swayed in the sky, like little urchins on swings; intoxicated fish in the river hid among lithe water weeds and spat out sticky, richly mellow air bubbles. To be sure, birds braving the cold night air drank in the aroma of liquor as they flew overhead, including two densely feathered owls, and even some field voles chomping grass in their underground dens. On this spot of land, full of life in spite of the cold, many sentient beings shared in the enjoyment of man’s contribution, and sacred feelings were thus born. ‘The popularity of liquor begins with the sage kings, though some say Yi Di, and others Du Kang.’ Liquor flows among the gods. Why do we offer it as a sacrifice to our ancestors and to release the imprisoned souls of the dead? That night I understood. It was the moment of my initiation. On that night a spirit sleeping within me awakened, and I was in touch with a mystery of the universe, one that transcends the power of words to describe, beautiful and gentle, tender and kind, moving and sorrowful, moist and redolent . . . do you all understand? He stretched his arms out to the audience, as they craned their necks toward him. We sat there bug-eyed, our mouths open, as if we wanted to go up to see, then eat, a miraculous potion lying in the palm of his hands, which were, in fact, empty.
From Sandalwood Death:
That morning, my gongdieh, Zhao Jia, could never, even in his wildest dreams, have imagined that in seven days he would die at my hands, his death more momentous than that of a loyal old dog. And never could I have imagined that I, a mere woman, would take knife in hand and with it kill my own husband’s father. Even harder to believe was that this old man, who had seemingly fallen from the sky half a year earlier, was an executioner, someone who could kill without blinking. In his red-tasseled skullcap and long robe, topped by a short jacket with buttons down the front, he paced the courtyard, counting the beads on his Buddhist rosary like a retired yuanwailang, or, better yet, I think, a laotaiye, with a houseful of sons and grandsons. But he was neither a laotaiye nor a yuanwailang—he was the preeminent executioner in the Board of Punishments, a magician with the knife, a peerless decapitator, a man capable of inflicting the cruelest punishments, including some of his own design, a true creative genius. During his four decades in the Board of Punishments, he had—to hear him say it—lopped off more heads than the yearly output of Gaomi County watermelons.
From Frogs:
I have to admit that, though I did not make it public, I was personally opposed to my Aunty’s marriage plans. My father, my brothers and their wives shared my feelings. It simply wasn’t a good match in our view. Ever since we were small we’d looked forward to seeing Aunty find a husband. Her relationship with Wang Xiaoti had brought immense glory to the family, only to end ingloriously. Yang Lin was next, and while not nearly the ideal match that Wang would have provided, he was, after all, an official, which made him a passable candidate for marriage. Hell, she could have married Qin He, who was obsessed with her, and be better off than with Hao Dashou . . . we were by then assuming she’d wind up an old maid, and had made appropriate plans. We’d even discussed who would be her caregiver when she reached old age. But then, with no prior indication, she’d married Hao Dashou. Little Lion and I were living in Beijing then, and when we heard the news, we could hardly believe our ears. Once the preposterous reality set in, we were overcome by sadness.
Book details
- Red Sorghum: A Novel of China by Mo Yan
EAN: 9780140168549
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- Frogs by Mo Yan
EAN: 9787532136766
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- The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan
EAN: 9781611457070
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- Big Breasts and Wide Hips by Mo Yan
EAN: 9781559706728
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- Shifu, You\’ll Do Anything for a Laugh by Mo Yan
EAN: 9781611452228
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- The Republic of Wine by Mo Yan
EAN: 9781559705769
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- Life and Death are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan
EAN: 9781559708531
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- Sandalwood Death by Mo Yan
EAN: 9780806143392
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Image courtesy The Hindu
Apr
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