Red Sorghum is the most well-known work that plays a crucial role in Mo Yan’s winning the Nobel Prize in literature. The book, which is about the Japanese invasion of China, scares the reader with the fact that Mo Yan was born and raised in one of the invaded places. I recommend you to get some information on the subject and read it before; otherwise, the author’s elaborately writing might feel light.
Mo Yan will impress you with his unique style and various characters. One thing you can be sure of is that he will not get tired of disturbing you. You will endure the Japanese persecution, and you will rebel. You will also hear the screams overflowing from the book.
Mo Yan is a tremendously talented author. And Red Sorghum may be called his masterpiece. The story is difficult; the author doesn’t make things easier for sensitive readers. The torture scenes described in detail are so beautifully written that you continue to read even if you can’t stand it. If you consider yourself a good and diverse reader, you have to read this book, as soon as possible. Enjoy!
Red Sorghum
Spanning three generations, this novel of family and myth is told through a series of flashbacks. That depict events of so staggering horror set against a landscape of gemlike beauty as the Chinese battle. Both the Japanese invaders and each other in the turbulent 1930s.
As the novel opens, a group of villagers, led by Commander Yu. The narrator’s grandfather, so prepare to attack the advancing Japanese. Yu sends his 14-year-old son back home to get food for his men; but as Yu’s wife returns through the sorghum fields with the food, the Japanese start firing and she is killed.
Her death becomes the thread that links the past to the present. And so the narrator moves back and forth recording the war’s progress. The fighting between the Chinese warlords and his family’s history.
Mo Yan
Guan Moye, better known by the pen name Mo Yan, is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. Donald Morrison of U.S. news magazine TIME referred to him as “one of the most famous, oft-banned and so widely pirated of all Chinese writers”. And so Jim Leach called him the Chinese answer to Franz Kafka or Joseph Heller.
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
