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Rating: 
Summary: "Dying's easy. It's living that's hard."
Review: Setting this monumental family saga in rural Gaomi, in northeast China, where he grew up, Mo Yan vividly portrays political and historical events--most of them bloody--over the course of the twentieth century, from the Boxer Rebellion through the Communist Revolution, the Japanese invasion, the Cultural Revolution, and the death of Mao. Jintong, the only son of Shangguan Lu, tells the story of his remarkable mother, his eight sisters, and their families as they live through these seminal events.
Shangguan Lu's early marriage and domestic life unfolds through flashbacks. With an infertile husband, whose family beats and abuses her for failing to produce a son, she resorts to extreme measures, giving birth to eight daughters by eight different fathers before finally producing a male heir. The stories of the daughters and their marriages to men with varied political agendas reflect the history of twentieth century rural China, and its unconscionable atrocities, starvation, death from exposure, forced marches, and land seizures.
Author Mo Yan, who lived through the major events depicted here, gives a thorough portrait of rural life during these historical crises. The author's style, while often exciting, is also brutally realistic. Precise physical descriptions help bring the culture and people to life, including the kind of clothing nursing mothers wear so they can feed their children in very cold weather, descriptions of the silent "snow market," and facts and figures about the minimum amount of grain needed per person to keep farm workers alive for the harvest season. But the author also uses satire, wry comments, and black humor to criticize totalitarian governments and closed societies.
Providing a helpful cast of characters at the beginning of this episodic novel, Mo Yan shows a society in which individualism has little meaning. The narrator and spoiled only son, Jintong, is neither a hero nor a fully realized character in the western sense, and though much detail is given about what characters do and how they behave, less consideration is given to how they think and why they behave as they do.
Author of nine novels, Mo Yan, whose pen name, ironically, means "Don't speak," has sometimes been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. The vibrancy and accuracy of his portraits of Chinese life, his steadfast insistence on showing life as it is, rather than as it ought to be, his celebration of resourceful women, and his willingness to take risks for his art make him one of the most influential writers in the People's Republic, despite the fact that most of his books (including this one) are banned there. Mary Whipple
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