Red Sorghum

A grandson narrates his own family's history in rural Shandong, reconstructing what his grandparents did and endured between 1923 and 1976 from stories, rumor and his own imagination filling the gaps between them. Mo Yan wrote the novel as five linked novellas, published across 1986 and 1987 and later gathered into one book, and he refuses anything like a straight chronology: the narrative jumps forward and back across the decades, and at points shifts into the perspective of the Japanese soldiers invading the region, an unusual choice for a Chinese war novel that keeps the book from working as straightforward nationalist memory.

At the center of that family history sits a distillery making sorghum wine, a business built and defended by force as much as by trade, and the sorghum fields themselves that surround the family's land through every section of the book, a physical presence Mo Yan returns to again and again as war moves through them. Resistance against the Japanese occupation runs through the later chapters, told with the same unsentimental, sometimes brutal directness Mo Yan brings to the family's earlier, peacetime violence, refusing to soften either one for the sake of the other. The shape of the whole is a family's endurance told through appetite, violence and the land itself, rather than a tidy resolution to either the family's fortunes or the war around them.

Mo Yan's prose here is terse and immediate even inside a nonlinear structure, and reading it means accepting a family chronicle assembled the way memory itself works, in fragments recovered out of order rather than delivered in sequence. It suits a reader drawn to twentieth century Chinese history told through one rural family's specific, often violent experience of it, and to a style that refuses to flinch from either the family's cruelty or the war's.