MOLESKINE ® LITERARIO

Carátula de la novela de Mo Yan. Fuente: arcade publishing

In the summer of 1976, as Chairman Mao lay on his deathbed in Beijing, the pigs at the Ximen Village Production Brigade Apricot Garden Pig Farm in Gaomi County, Shandong Province, also began to die. The first batch of five were found with “their skin dotted with purple splotches the size of bronze coins, their eyes open, as if they’d died with unresolved grievances.” The commune vet declared they had succumbed to “what we call the Red Death” and ordered them to be cremated and buried immediately. But it had been raining for weeks and the ground was too waterlogged. Dousing the carcasses with kerosene and trying to set them alight simply filled the farm with vile-smelling smoke. Soon 800 more pigs were infected. A fresh team of vets arrived by motorboat with more sophisticated medicines, but their ministrations were of little help. Dead pigs were piled up throughout the farm, their bloated forms expanding and exploding in the heat. Unable to bury the corpses, the farmers “had no choice but to wait until the veterinarians left and, in the fading light of dusk, load the carcasses onto a flatbed wagon and haul them down to the river, where they were tossed into the water to float downstream — out of sight and out of mind.” The farm was in ruins, proof that its “glorious days” were “now a thing of the past.” The foundations of the hog houses collapsed, and raging flood waters toppled the utility poles, cutting the commune off from the wider world. Thus it was only through the village’s single transistor radio that these farmers learned Mao had died. “How could Chairman Mao be dead? Doesn’t everyone say that he could live at least 158 years?” Mo Yan’s powerful new novel, “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out,” contains many such vivid set pieces. His canvas covers almost the entire span of his country’s revolutionary experience — from 1950 until 2000, in the so-called “reform era” of post-Deng Xiaoping China. At one level, therefore, “Life and Death” is a kind of documentary, carrying the reader across time from the land reform at the end of the Chinese Civil War, through the establishment of mutual-aid teams and lower-level cooperatives in the early and mid-1950s, into the extreme years of the Great Leap Forward and the famine of the late ’50s and early ’60s, and on to the steady erosion of the collective economy in the new era of largely unregulated “capitalism with socialist characteristics.” At the novel’s close, some of the characters are driving BMWs, while others are dyeing their hair blond and wearing gold rings in their noses.

The kind of critique that we find in this book has many echoes within China today. In his new novel, “Wolf Totem,” Jiang Rong includes a ferocious account of the battle between a starving wolf pack and a herd of wild horses that seems tightly geared to showing the value of older ways of living in the steppe, in contrast with the ultimately disastrous values insisted on by the Party. Mo Yan has his own version of such a battle in his account of the donkeys’ struggle against the wolves near the collective farm. Yan Lianke’s “Serve the People!” gives a common soldier and his mistress, the wife of the division commander, a summer of passionate lovemaking, culminating in a wild and randy spree in which they smash all the once-treasured artifacts and memorabilia of Mao Zedong and his outmoded, pointless policies. Such antipolitical passion also surfaces in many of the sexual entanglements Mo Yan describes in “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out.” It seems that novels in China are coming into their own, that new freedoms of expression are being claimed by their authors. Mao has become a handy villain. One wonders how much longer his successors will be immune from similar treatment.

Etiquetas: blogs, china, jiang rong, mo yin, NOTICIA

Jian Rong. Fuente: man asian literary prize

Dice la nota: "Chinese author Jiang Rong won the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize for ``Wolf Totem,'' beating four other short-listed authors. The $10,000 award, sponsored by hedge-fund company Man Group Plc, is the first regional prize for a work that hasn't been published in English. The result was announced last night at a dinner in Hong Kong. Man funds Britain's most prestigious literary award, the Man Booker Prize. Jiang was chosen over Jose Dalisay Jr. (``Soledad's Sister''), Reeti Gadekar (``Families at Home''), Nu Nu Yi Inwa (``Smile As They Bow'') and Xu Xi (``Habit of a Foreign Sky''). Jiang was born in Jiangsu province in 1946, and spent 11 years living with nomadic communities on the Chinese border of Inner and Outer Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution. ``Wolf Totem'' is a fictional account of life in the 1970s in China's border region that draws on his personal experience. The work is ``a panoramic novel of life on the Mongolian grasslands during the Cultural Revolution,'' said Adrienne Clarkson, who led the panel of three judges, in a statement. ``This masterly work is also a passionate argument about the complex interrelationship between nomads and settlers, animals and human beings, nature and culture.'' ``Wolf Totem'' was published in Chinese by Changjiang Art and Culture Publishing House. The English-language version is scheduled for release by Penguin in March 2008. The prize is jointly administered by representatives of the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival, the University of Hong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. More than 240 works were submitted before the March 31 closing date, from across Asia, including Nepal, Cambodia and Macau. "

Etiquetas: china, jiang rong, NOTICIA, PREMIO, wolf totem