Uneven work. But when Mo Yan’s imagination cuts loose, and the gloves come off, he can be a provocative and powerfully...
A mixed-bag collection of frequently abrasive, imaginative stories written in the 1980s and ’90s by the highly visible Chinese author (Red Sorghum, 1993; The Republic of Wine, 2000).
“Mo Yan” is a nom de plume that translates literally as “Don’t Speak”—a curious fact revealed in its bearer’s somewhat smug Preface (“Hunger and Loneliness: My Muses”), which summarizes the facts of his career and identifies the impulse behind his work as “a yearning for the good life by a lonely child afraid of going hungry.” Those concerns are dramatized directly in “Abandoned Child,” whose writer-narrator describes his rescue of a baby girl found in a sunflower field as an act of humanity reviled by a society that values only sons, seeing female children as no more than worthless mouths to feed. The story begins intriguingly, but lapses into excessive commentary—a mistake avoided in such stark parabolic tales as “Iron Child,” about the dietary extremities to which neglected children of exhausted railroad workers are driven; and “The Cure,” a ghastly revelation of how impoverished villagers forced to witness executions of “traitors to the Party” recycle the corpses thus provided. Mo Yan is in fact least effective when most conventional, as in tales depicting an adolescent “Love Story” occurring in a commune and an old man’s bitter memory of his failure to grasp the love offered him years earlier (“Shen Garden”). The standouts here, conversely, are a wickedly imaginative look at the horror of arranged marriage (“Soaring”); a fable of national pride and ethnic hatred embedded in the tale of a Chinese soldier’s ordeal of survival (“Man and Beast”); and the marvelous title piece, in which an elderly factory worker, laid off just prior to his retirement, achieves both prosperity and unexpected complications by converting an abandoned bus into a “love cottage” he then rents to couples seeking privacy.
Uneven work. But when Mo Yan’s imagination cuts loose, and the gloves come off, he can be a provocative and powerfully original writer.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-565-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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