Two Things from the "Chinese Murakami"

I finished the beat-down book, The Garlic Ballads, by Mo Yan. I wrote a post about it over on the OG site after having finished only half of it. Those impressions pretty much hold up; that almost every section contains an act of brutal violence upon another person is a valid observation. There are some scenes that don't revolve around violence of a physical kind, but they usually revolve around verbal abuse, or a kind of bureaucratic malfeasance that borders of abuse. This is a very angry book.

Calling Mo Yan the "Chinese Murakami" is not what I would do if, Norm, you and I were talking books over a cup of coffee. But I noticed in a conversation with a lady working at the grocers that I used Murakami in the same sentence, trying to shed light on the kind of hyper-kinetic feel the book elicits. Calling him a such probably does a disservice to both.

But, there were Two Things I wanted to mention after finishing the book:

The First is the Parakeet Battle.

The two main characters in the book are cousins, Gao Yang and Gao Ma. In Chinese, the family names (Western last names) come first, and, because the translations of "yang" is "sheep" and "ma" is "horse", our main characters would be called "Sheep Gao" and "Horse Gao".

Gao Yang and Gao Ma just sound better to me. In any case, Gao Yang is the pussy pushover who is forced to drink his own urine and gets a thorned branch shoved up his ass; and Gao Ma is a former soldier who's cynical and forward thinking--basically the hero. He represents human dignity and human rights progress, and he's beaten to within an inch of his life in almost every one of his sections. I shouldn't be so hard of Gao Yang, though. He represents the good people who are obedient and respectful, those who have faith in the System, and how that System fucks those people, while Gao Ma is the more Western-heroic archetype, the rabble-rousing rebel, and we all know how the System treats them.

At one point late in the book, Gao Ma sharpens his family's heirloom saber to air-slicing sharpness.

His next door neighbor's thousands of parakeets are always causing a chirpy ruckus, and on this day Gao Ma's past his point of chillness. And the parakeets are buzzing around inside his house and yard, fully out of their pens.

Gao Ma proceeds to battle the swarm of parakeets with his super-sharp saber, causing plumes of tiny colorful feathers like smoke to fill the air. He goes after them, and then they gang up on him, and he's fighting for his life. By the end, there are maybe six or seven sad and wailing parakeets left, and an angry, sword-wielding, parakeet-blood covered Gao Ma, standing over a pile of halved and twitching parakeet bodies.

It's the kind of thing the likes of which I've never read before.

The Second is part "1." of Chapter 17.

Those twelve pages could easily exist out of context. They star Gao Ma, but you don't need to know anything about the character...knowing what he's gone through by that time enhances the enjoyment, though. These are the kinds of pages that show how talented Mo Yan truly is.

He oscillates between an interrogation, a flashback, an anecdote/story during the flashback, while showing how the lesson learned from the story within the flashback has plenty of importance to his situation with the interrogators.

It's really fun to read and see how Mo Yan works it out with the words. I should make some photocopies; it could be a great teaching tool for young writers.