Mo Yan wins Nobel prize in literature 2012
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk
Chinese author Mo Yan has become the first Chinese author ever to win the Nobel prize in literature.
Chinese author Mo Yan has become the first Chinese author ever to win the Nobel prize in literature.
Novelist, the first ever Chinese literature Nobel laureate, praised for 'hallucinatory realism'
The Swedish Academy ,
announcing his win this lunchtime, said that "with hallucinatory
realism", Mo Yan "merges folktales, history and the
contemporary". His win makes him the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel
in its 111-year history: although Gao Xingjian won in 2000, and was born in China,
he is now a French citizen; and although Pearl Buck took the prize in 1938, for
"her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her
biographical masterpieces", she is an American author.
The Nobel goes to the writer "who shall
have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal
direction", with previous winners including Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing
and, last year, the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer.
Mo Yan's writing, said
head of the Swedish Academy Peter Englund this lunchtime, draws from his
peasant background, and from the folktales he was told as a child. Leaving
school at 12, the author went to work in the fields, eventually gaining an
education in the army. He published his first book in 1981, but he first found
literary success with Red Sorghum, a novel which was also made into an
internationally successful movie by Zhang Yimou.
"He writes about the peasantry, about
life in the countryside, about people struggling to survive, struggling for
their dignity, sometimes winning but most of the time losing," said Englund.
"The basis for his books was laid when as a child he listened to
folktales. The description magical realism has been used about him, but I think
that is belittling him – this isn't something he's picked up from Gabriel
García Márquez, but something which is very much his own. With the supernatural
going in to the ordinary, he's an extremely original narrator."
The eminent professor
of Chinese literature Howard Goldblatt, who has translated many of Mo Yan's
works into English, compared the author's writing to
Dickens in a recent interview with China Daily, saying that both
write "big, bold works with florid, imagistic, powerful writing and a
strong moral core".
"I see parallels with works like William
Vollmann's Europe Central, with its historical sweep (Red Sorghum) and
trenchant criticism of monstrous behavior by those in power (The Garlic
Ballads)," said Goldblatt. "And, of course, there are writers Mo
seems to prefer, the modernist Faulkner, the magic-realist Garcia Marquez, and
the Japanese
Oe Kenzaburo. And don't forget another
"oldie": Rabelais, with his bawdy humour and scatological
exuberances."
Goldblatt said that
the author's satirical novel Jiuguo (The Republic of Wine)
"may be the most technically innovative and sophisticated novel from China
I've read", while his Shengsi pilao (Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out) is
"a brilliant extended fable", and Tanxiangxing (Sandalwood Death)
"is, as the author contends, musical in its beauty".
Red Sorghum is made up of five interwoven stories,
set over several decades during the 20th century, touching on topics including
the Japanese occupation and the difficult lives of poor farm workers. Mo Yan's
1996 novel Fengru feitun, translated into English as Big Breasts and Wide Hips in 2004, portrays 20th century China through
the life of a single family, starting with the story of Xuan'er, six months old
in 1900 when she is abandoned in a vat of flour. "By the time she has
blossomed into the province's number-one golden lotus girl, her bound feet are
no longer in vogue and the best her aunt can do is marry her to a blacksmith in
exchange for his mule. But this is no Wild Swans - from here, Mo Yan, author of
Red Sorghum, steers his provocative story towards a masculine perspective, as
he follows one family through China's war with Japan to the cultural revolution
and beyond," said the Guardian in its review,
which called the book an "astonishing" novel. "Blending bawdy
humour, gory violence and pungent imagery, Mo Yan paints a unique portrait of China 's
20th century, and cleverly dramatises the unsustainable predicament of a
society fixated on bearing boys."
The author's most recent novel, Wa, is the
story of the consequences of the single-child policy implemented in China .
Nicky Harman, a Chinese translator and lecturer
at Imperial College ,
London , hailed
Mo Yan's win as "amazing" news. "He's a great writer and will
now be better known. That's good news for all Chinese writers, because it will
bring English readers a bit closer," she said. "I'm sure they will be
deliriously happy in China .
He's very well thought of there."
Informing Mo Yan – a pen name meaning
"don't speak" – of his win today, Englund said the author, who was at
the home in China
where he lives with his 90-year-old father – was "overjoyed and scared".
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