Customer Reviews

The Garlic Ballads

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I discovered Mo Yan and this title years ago through Amazon, when it was recommended as an "undiscovered" work. Sadly, it is still the case that very few people have read either The Garlic Ballads or Red Sorghum, Mo's other masterpiece, let alone heard of the author. This is tragic, given that he is immensely talented, one of the true literary masters writing today. The Garlic Ballads tells the tale of a group of Chinese peasants whose lives are dependent upon selling their garlic crop; when harvests exceed governmental estimates, officials curb the amount of garlic that can be brought to market, setting off a violent chain of events. Against this backdrop, Mo weaves presents three stories: that of two lovers, which dominates the novel, as well as a familial conflict and the relationship between two friends. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the Chinese equivalent of The Sound and the Fury or 100 Years of Solitude; Mo's voice is inventive, poetic and urgent, yet he never loses sight of the plot, making this book difficult to put down. Goldblatt also deserves a great deal of credit for his translation. I do not read Chinese, but I often have the sense in reading English translations, even of great works, that a great deal has been lost, that there is something missing from the original work. Goldblatt's translation is so good as to make the reader mistake this for an English novel; the prose is nearly flawless. Any reader interested in literature would be wise to pick up this novel, if just for the ending, which is unsettling yet poetically rendered, and will stick with the reader for years. Years from now, probably when Mo wins a Nobel, I am sure he will have a wide following, but for now, The Garlic Ballads is a novel that cries to be read.

It's difficult to let go of the book. If you consider Arundhati Roy's A God of small Things graphic and captivating, this book is ten times more. You can smell Gao Ma's sweat, feel Fourth aunt's anguish, almost to the point of having a lump in your throat.... you want to warn Jinju...... I must say it is one of the best books I have read.... it depicts simple people living in hard times, in very helpless circumstances. Basically there was no way out, and people could only console themselves that their lives were `fated'. To have a better understanding, it would really help if you read Wild Swan: three daughters of China by Jung Chang. It literally gives you heartache.

This is one of those book that makes you both depressed and inspired at the same time. Set in rural China, the Garlic Ballads explores the misfortune of ordinary Chinese farmers during the post revolutionary period. Having read this book for a Political Science class on China, it was interesting to see how the policies implemented in Beijing could harm the common people so severly. Because the government told these people to grow Garlic, a non-staple food, instead of rice for instance, when they couldn't sell it they were left with nothing. you cannot survive on Garlic. This poor regional planning by the PRC leads to the ruin of many lives. The book, while not overtly political, must have rubbed someone in Beijing the wrong way because it was banned in China. Great Book, Great Author!

The scent of garlic permeates this book, to such an extent that it becomes quite visceral and at times -- amazing for such a bulbhead as myself -- even nauseating. Both time and space are fragmented by the writer as he weaves back and forth among his stories of garlic farmers pitted against local corruption and their own at times cruel family traditions.

The central event in the book is an invasion and trashing by an angry mob of the local governmental offices. We do not see this event occur until the end of the book, yet it colors every moment in the lives of the Fang and Gao families of Paradise County. It is understandable that the Beijing government would suppress a novel that shows most of its local officials to be bloated satraps and its policement to be little better than thugs, applying cattle prods to their prisoners and beating them mercilessly.

Equally villainous, however, are the Fang family, who force their daughter to marry an old man in a three-in-one arranged marriage that guarantees that their crippled eldest son also gets a bride. In a grisly scene, the marriage deal finally goes through after both the daughter and her fiance commit suicide: Their bodies are dug up, their remains are mixed together, and they are re-interred in a single coffin.

This is not a pleasant book to read: It takes a strong stomach, especially in the prison episodes. At the same time, it is, I feel, an important book that is beautifully written.

When it comes to the plight of the farmer and the destitute, Mo Yan has experience in spades. Having come from Revolutionary China, he relates a tale in his introduction to Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh where his village was so poor and hungry that when a shipment of coal arrived, the people started eating the coal.

But Mo Yan doesn't take that kind of personal experience to make his work seem like communist propaganda, making the government seem ornately inhuman and the working man saintly and oppressed. In this novel, there is clearly an imbalance of power, and the exploitation of the poor and the powerless by the connected and wealthy, but the oppressed are hardly saints. They are, instead, people with their own shortcomings and prejudices, and by understanding that, Mo Yan shows the true power of an artist--rather than stoop for the easy message, he dives into the actuality of his characters to make them empathic and flawed, and allow us to root for them and cringe when we realize that they simply don't have the wisdom to always act correctly.

This novel focuses on the aftermath of an uprising. The people of Paradise County have been encouraged, if not ordered, to grow garlic, and so garlic has infused itself into every aspect of the people's lives--their breath reeks of it, their celebrations tainted with it. But the governing officials of Paradise County are out to grab up every copper they can, and so out come the taxes for traveling the roads to the co-op warehouses, the penalties, the closures, and one day the garlic farmers have had enough and act out against the officials making their lives so full of hardship.

But of course the government retaliates, and we focus on some of their victims. First off is Gao Yang, who suffers enough with a blind daughter and a new son soon to be born, but he is beaten and brought to jail. One who escapes at first is Gao Ma, a former soldier who longs to marry Jinjun, whose family have agreed to marry her to someone else, but Gao Ma and Jinjun do not take the alternate marriage lightly, and trouble ensues from there. Jinjun's mother, Fourth Aunt of the Fang family, is also sought after in the police hunt since she won't stay quiet about her husband being run over by a government official, and the lives of these peasants intertwine through the courses of love and justice. The Fang family is cruel to both Jinjun and Gao Ma as they try to reject the lovers' vow to be married, and Gao Yang suffers humiliation and torment from his cellmates. Fourth Aunt holds a tyrranical post at home, but in jail she becomes a different creature altogether. At times bawdy and scatological, at other times heart-breaking and lyrical, Mo Yan gives us the entirety of the human spectrum with his novel, presenting to us both the base nature of life as well as its romantic pleasure. Powerful, haunting stuff.

This book relates the dramatic impact of a minor upsurge against the corrupt state institutions on the lives of a number of Chinese peasant families. The main story details the tragic love story of Gao Ma and Fang Jinju. This story is told in parallel with the life of Gao Yang and some other stories. All are inter-related. The background is a Chinese village in the mid 1980s. The details make it frightfully real. A book everybody with an interest in China should read

We take our freedom of speech for granted in the USA. In China, one word out of line and you could be in the slammer. You could try to defend yourself and your family and still face a jail cell. This book had my heart in clutches. Warning: Don't read this book while you're eating since there's a few gross scenes. The "wedding" in the end far surpassed any late night horror shows; and the rooster pecking scene had my stomach churning. And the curses people yelled at each other are pretty funny and original. I read this book was banned in China after the famous uprising in the "Square". Mo Yan is such a great writer. Where is he anyway? I wish there were more books coming out of China; there is such an untapped source of orginality and perspective. I Mo Yan's wonderful "Red Sorghum" and many aspects of that still linger in my mind. I hope he contines writing more and more because I will snatch his books up quickly.

Despite a rather clunky translation by Goldblatt (a profusion of 10th-grade similes and things happening "all of a sudden") and arguable melodrama by the author (there are 119 instances of characters bursting into tears, by my count), this book delivers. The small dramas of the Gao and Yang families, set against a slightly larger but nonetheless miniscule backdrop of rural corruption (the tale wouldn't even merit a paragraph in the NY Times' regional roundup), gets steadily deeper as it progresses, illuminating the paradoxes of modern China and the unchanging demands of love, family, and duty. It's a tragic story which depicts both a very specific time and place and sheds light onto basic human truths.
Background details are handled effortlessly (for example, the great numbers of handicapped children born, presumably, to parents exposed to noxious agricultural chemicals sold by the uncaring rural cooperatives), but the real miracle is Mo Yan's pacing. He cuts rapidly between locations and times, but never too rapidly, striking a perfect balance between forwarding the plot and drawing back to offer perspective on the goings on. The full picture of alternating hopelessness and rebellion emerges slowly and tragically, and the disparate elements (an arranged marriage, a botched directive from central agricultural planners, a drunk driver with government connections) weave together into an elegant and moving whole.