Molti hanno parlato di Mo Yan comparandolo a Marquez, ma non mi pare di condividere questa idea.
Marquez, nel suo mondo (Macondo), oltre a racchiudere la vita di un popolo ci trasmette quell’aspetto fantastico che non troviamo in Mo Yan. Per aspetto fantastico intendo il lato magico che travalica l’ordinario.

In Mo Yan ho trovato piuttosto un legame con l’idea del rapporto tra la terra e l’uomo presente nella letteratura russa (pocva).
La terra come luogo dove si nasce e si muore: terra di rinascita, terra dove si ritorna, terra dove si cammina, terra da cui cresce cio’ che ci sostiene…
La terra di Mo Yan non e’ quella che inginocchiandoci raccogliamo con le mani per poi sbriciolarla e lasciarla cadere, ma quella terra che inginocchiandoci baciamo (come navigatori che sbarcano in terre sconosciute).

Alcuni brani:
Quando fu tirato su, la testa gli ricadde a sinistra e poi a destra; la crosta di sangue somigliava alla strato di fango lucente sedimentatosi sulla riva del fiume, poi seccato al sole, crepato e spaccato. (46)

Arrivato all’argine si sedette. Guardo’ a oriente, poi a occidente, guardo’ l’acqua che scorreva e le anatre selvatiche. La vista del fiume era splendida, ogni filo d’erba acquatica era vivo, e in ogni spruzzo d’acqua si celava un segreto. (79)

A sud del monte Baima, a nord del fiume Moshui cresce ancora un fusto di sorgo rosso puro, devi cercarlo a ogni costo. Tienilo alto quando correrai verso il tuo mondo invaso dai rovi e percorso da tigri e lupi, perche’ sara’ il tuo talismano e anche il totem glorioso del nostro clan, il simbolo della tradizione di Gaomi! (471)
( )

I persevered to the end but honestly, I should have abandoned this book. I found the graphic descriptions of war, famine and atrocities ranged from unpleasant to nauseating and the back and forth timeline didn't seem to add anything to the plot. Perhaps there's a message in this to today's Chinese readers that I didn't get - I hope so because otherwise this book is just wallowing in misery and disgusting images. ( )

Ambientada en una zona rural de la provincia de Shangdong, Sorgo rojo arranca con la invasión japonesa de los años treinta, y cuenta, a lo largo de cuatro décadas de la historia de China, la conmovedora historia de tres generaciones de una familia.
Mo Yan seduce al lector con las desventuras del comandante Yu Zhan'ao y de su joven amante, una chica obligada a casarse con el hombre que su padre ha dispuesto, un viejo leproso muy rico, que posee una destilería.
El sorgo, utilizado como ingrediente de un potente vino, era en tiempos de paz centro y símbolo de la vida campesina. En tiempos de guerra, se convierte en el centro de la lucha por la supervivencia.

A family in rural China in the 1920s and 30s confronts banditry, civil war and the Japanese occupation. Mo Yan plays with the timeline to force us to read this as a novel about individual people, not abstract historical events, and there's a lot of local colour — most of it red and cereal-based — grim wit, and human resilience in the face of overwhelming odds.

Inevitably, given that it's dealing with times in which civil order had broken down in the face of barbarism and competing factions, there's a lot of violence. Mo Yan places at least one act of extreme violence at the centre of each chapter, and each one is described in loving and often grotesque detail. I'm guessing that the idea is that we are supposed to realise how the incessant piling up of shocking detail is desensitising us to what is going on, in something like the way it might if we were confronted with it in real life, but after a while it just started to feel vaguely pornographic.

I can see the importance of this book, and it probably goes a long way to explain how China works and why the current Chinese government is so authoritarian and so extremely allergic to any sign of disorder. But, from the perspective of my particular squeamish, western, liberal ivory tower, it's not really a book that I would ever want to read again or to recommend to anyone else. ( )

Originally published as 5 separate novellas, the novel can feel a bit disjointed in places - the main timeline in each of them is slightly different and that changes how the story inside of each segment works. But the novel has a unified overall structure - each of the stories weaves in and out of different timelines (sometimes multiple times on the same page) and ends up fitting like a puzzle - every part of the stories fit in its own place and by the time you finish the novel, you have the story of a family from the early 20th century to the 80s. It is heavier on the earlier part of the stories - the story of Grandma in the 20s and the Father's story in the 30s and early 40s dominate the story; the story of the narrator which spans the 60s-80s are there mostly for comparison and in short notes. The more you know of Chinese history, the more you will get from some of these glimpses into these periods -- without at least a basic idea, some of their importance can be lost.

But it is not just a historical novel - it weaves in a lot of mythology into the narrative. Sometimes it is hard to draw the line between the real and the unreal and between the mythological and the historical. Add the constant shift between the timelines (and in one of the chapters in the viewpoint - the story about the dogs is so full of allusions and metaphors that I was never sure if it is part of the novel really or if it was added just as a commentary. On the other hand, it actually connects with the main story and allows some additional comparisons and insights which add to the tapestry of the novel).

In a way, it is as much the story of a family as it is a story of a country. From Grandma, still proud with her golden lotuses (bound feet), through the rebels fighting against Japan (although it seemed to fight more internally than with the imperial army) and into the modern times, the family changes as China changes. That's where the story really shines - the family sounds unconventional but is connected to the traditions of the times in so many ways that you can almost see where the traditional turns into a new thing. It is this constant change that ends up the main thread that connects the disjointed parts of the story - and a lot of that change was almost hidden into the colors through the story - keeping track of what colors are mentioned and where helps with the understanding of the story. These two threads, the constant change and the colors, are there to the very end - from the ghost of the Second Grandma who makes a point to come back from the grave to condemn the narrator for spending so much time in the city to that very last stalk of red sorghum which somehow survived the change to higher yielding varietals - it all came back down to tradition and change, to the new and the old. And depending on how you want to read certain parts, you may get a different idea of which side the narrator (or the author) is on.

It is not an easy novel to read through - between the time jumps (some predictable, some feeling as if the author wrote the stories and then cut them into pieces and just inserted one into the other in random places), the constant stories starting with their ends (we were told what happened before we were told the story of that event) and the gory details in some parts of the story, it required a certain state of mind. Keeping track of the various stories became easier as the novel progressed and as the reader gets more familiar with the people (some of which had different names in different periods - and the author made the distinction clear so one had to follow these and connect the dots when the timelines intersected), the story started to feel less of a jumble. But sometimes it still seemed more like a literary exercise than a novel - while the story is in there, the modernistic style felt a bit too overwhelming. It adds to the uneasiness that the novel projects and was probably designed with that in mind but I wonder if a bit less jumbled story, even if it was still not completely linear, would not have served the underlying story better. But considering that it was published in the form of separate stories in various magazines and that it is the first novel of the author play somewhat into this - the different chapters/novellas have their own internal cohesiveness.

I am still not entirely sure if I liked the novel. There is enough in it that I enjoyed so I am not sorry that I read it but I found it heavy going in places where I least expected. It could have used some notes and a glossary - while some elements were supposed to be explained in the novel (and they were), the initial audience of the novel would have recognized some of the references in the Chinese text. ( )