Wendy Larson, University of Oregon

Ever since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012, Mo Yan 莫言 (Guan Moye管谟业1955-) has been thrust into the global eye. Mo Yan’s fiction, which has been both fiercely attacked and passionately defended, demands the recognition of devastating social change and the destruction it has inflicted on individuals, groups, and culture. Always alert to space and place, the author immerses the reader in an intense local lifeworld, an approach that sets his entry into world literature apart from fellow Nobel Prize winners such as Gao Xingjian高行健 (1940-).

The 2001 novel Sandalwood Death (Tanxiang xing 檀香刑), one of the author’s most brutal novels, centers on a German-sponsored railway against which residents fight using Cat Tunes, a form of local opera. Although the novel is fiction, the setting of turn-of-the-century Gaomi—Mo Yan’s hometown and the real/imaginary site of much of his work—is historically accurate, as the town was an important site of opposition to the construction of the railway during the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901). The novel’s ferocious power struggles culminate not only in horrific trauma, torture, and death, but also in the defeat of local culture. From a literary perspective, however, this defeat is itself encapsulated within the author’s experimental form, which uses sounds and traditional story-telling forms to create a uniquely Chinese style. Through its innovative narrative aesthetics, violent story, surreal language, and the direct words of the author in an Afterword, Sandalwood Death addresses the complex entry of Chinese literature into world literature.