Get to know Mo Yan. Every year, the Nobel Prize committee issues a short explanation of their selection in literature. This year's award lauds Chinese author Mo Yan, "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary." But this doesn't tell us much, and with the Nobel committee's preference for championing authors who haven't been buzzed about endlessly in American media, you'd be forgiven for reading the announcement and thinking, "Mo Yan who?" Here's your cheat sheet for holding an intelligent cocktail party conversation about the newly minted Nobel laureate
Mo Yan is a pen name (the author was born Guan Moye in 1955). His pseudonym translates as "Don't Speak," which is not a No Doubt reference but has been interpreted as a reflection of his reluctance to address politics. The Nobel is as much a political as a literary award, and many are saying Yan is too cozy with Chinese authorities. The author has said on record that he believes "censorship is great for literature creation." The situation is made even more complicated by the question of the "first" Chinese literary Nobel laureate. Official party line says it's Yan. But to the rest of the world, that honor goes to Gao Xingjian, who won the Nobel in 2000 but lives in exile as a French citizen.
Politics aside, critics praise Yan for his experimental, magically tinted examination of China's fraught 20th century history. Yan's breakthrough novel Red Sorghum (1987) is set, like most of his work, in a lightly fictionalized version of his hometown, Northeast Gaomi Township. Yan shares Faulkner and Marquez's instinct for settings that feel specific and universal all at once, and he tells Granta, "those two writers have great influence on my creations. I found that my life experience is quite similar to theirs."
His 2006 novel Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out tells the story of landlord Ximen Nao from 1949 through 2000. The mystical twist is that Nao dies right at the beginning, killed as a result of China's Land Reform program. Nao's point of view shuffles through his various reincarnations, jumping from donkey to ox, pig to monkey, concluding from the perspective of a young boy with a freakishly large head. In thisexcerpt, Nao has just been executed and shuttled through a nightmarish netherworld. Here's how he reemerges in the world:
Everything was murky; I felt like a drowning man. Suddenly my ears filled with the happy shouts of a man somewhere:
"It's out!"
I opened my eyes to find that I was covered with a sticky liquid, lying near the birth canal of a female donkey. My god! Who'd have thought that Ximen Nao, a literate, well-educated member of the gentry class, would be reborn as a white-hoofed donkey with floppy, tender lips!
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