How would we react in such a time? Would we be heroes? Would we be bastards? Would we even survive? Who would we be afterwards? But these Chinese protagonists represent real people who were subjected to much worse for decades. And they last longer than many readers will want to endure. These details are not easy for a reader to experience. Mo Yan sees to it that we are complicit with them and experience with them this horror.Īnd his very powerful prose that so beautifully describes each flower and star and fish and drop of dew-also describes in awful detail every part of the horror these souls find themselves a part of. We are trapped because it is this region and these people who are doomed to participate in this particularly tragic and grotesque portion of 20th century history. Mo Yan’s prose is so well crafted that it is this beauty that enmesh us into this world. We become bonded to these folks and their homeland. The many characters are flawed but humanly seductive such that one becomes attached to them as though they are family-despicable but endearing. The manner in which Mo Yan organizes these bits and pieces are masterfully presented so that the reader is at first transported by a poetic lyricism that emotionally tears the heart so, that the reader is now as deeply in love with the land and the region as would be a native. But as the book progresses these bits assemble in the readers mind into a more complete picture.

An individual of a later 20th century Chinese lifespan, this man’s experience of that earlier time is found through flashbacks of family memory that play out in bits of seemingly disjointed montages.

Told as a first person narrative, this tale betrays the nationalism, racism, and sexism of that fictional narrator, permanently marked by his times and traumatic heritage. Red Sorghum is at least a work of historical fiction.

For someone who might not be at least superficially familiar with the appalling conditions of these two wars of attrition fought upon a countryside already devastated by poverty and organized crime, it might appear that this book contains far too much gratuitous horror.īut for someone like Mo Yan, who was born and raised in Shandong Province (completely taken over by Japan), it might constitute family memory and cultural history. This brutal invasion occurred coincidentally within the 23 years of the Chinese Civil War (1927~1950). For about eight years (1937~1945), northeastern China was occupied by Japan.

Red sorghum book review