Tan (The Joy Luck Club). She states that she thinks that Mo Yan deserves a
place in world literature, besides Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Milan Kundera.
After having read ‘Red Sorghum’, I can but agree with her statement. This is
literature on a grand scale. For anyone expecting a Chinese ‘Hundred Years of
Solitude’, however, go elsewhere.
The intriguing narrating ‘I’ person (possibly Mo Yan himself?) tells us everything
about love and war, with a focus on the various people of his extended family.
There is no general narrative as such, there are different time-periods
involved, in different geographical locales, but it is all coherent nevertheless.
The story starts in the 1930s, when Japan invaded China, and creates
impressions of very personal experiences and of experiences of a people alike.
The description of one, gory single murder against the description of a
massacre of hundreds create a filmic atmosphere that seems to zoom in and
zoom out and focus on the foreground and then on background that leaves you
with the impression to have been there on the battlefield yourself.
Mo Yan has written an incredibly violent book. This is the high literary
equivalent of a Tarantino shoot-out. This is bloody. The ‘red’ of the title should
warn you. This is not communist-red, this is blood-red.
Despite the enormous amount of descriptive warfare, this novel, at the end, is
positive and uplifting in that it seems to want to underline that war and enemies
are part of life, but that on the other end of the scale, family and love are there
to balance life’s atrocities and cruelties. The line ‘enemies and lovers are
destined to meet’ may sound like a tag-line for a Hollywood movie, but this
phrase surfaces several times in the novel and sums it all up: We live, we love,
we fight, we die. Mo Yan has written a novel that reminds us that China’s past
(and indeed the world’s past) should not be idealised, because it is part of a
people and thus part of the present.
