Instead, Mo Yan recreates a world defined by brutality and extends its horizons past wars and cultural revolutions the ultimate cruelty emerges as oblivion. Nowadays, not many Chinese literary works have been introduced into western market. Eventually, however, his emphasis on the ignoble becomes a protest against the universal tendency to idealize the past. Mo Yans winning the Nobel Prize can be partially attributed to the translatorHoward Goldblatt, who has translated Mo Yans representative novel Red Sorghum into English. At first Yan's insistence on graphic and gruesome descriptions and his interest in bodily functions make the novel rough going.
Mo Yan turns these events over and over, introducing each a fragment at a time and exploring their significance as they pass from one character's experience into another's memory. A few key episodes serve as recurrent motifs: murders counterpoint battlefield massacres women are raped by their saviors and by enemy soldiers the community leader punishes gamblers and thieves with floggings, while the Japanese flog a saboteur as a preamble to skinning him alive. The narrator, a young man from the provinces, relates the intertwined histories of the Sino-Japanese war of the 1930s and of his parents and grandparents.
In the way that Chinese landscape painting reshapes the viewer's perspective by offering not one but many focal points, this singularly forceful contemporary Chinese novel reinvents the notion of chronology.
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