Rate this book

POW! (2003)

by Mo Yan(Favorite Author)

3.35 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0857420763 (ISBN13: 9780857420763)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Seagull Books

review 1: Pow! is not an easy book to which to assign stars. It's not an easy book to summarise either, as it's a hallucinatory narrative full of utterly repugnant people and events and yet is yet strangely funny and mesmerising. It's also hard not to read Pow! in light of the controversies that have raged around Mo Yan and his complicity with the Communist Party in China ever since he was awarded the Nobel Prize. I've written in more detail in a review for the Melbourne Age, which should come out within the next week or so.After handing in my review, by chance, I came upon this quotation from Lin Yutang, a great twentieth century essayist: 'China is being ruined by our farcical view of life, by our ruthless realism and humour, by our tendency to turn everything and anything into a ... morejoke, by our inability to take anything seriously, not even when it concerns the salvation of our country.' He wrote that in 1930 but like much of what Lin wrote then, it remains apt today.
review 2: Pow! takes place in a small town in modern China. Each chapter has a similar structure: they open (and often close) with italicized text in which the narrator, a young man named Luo Xiatong, sits in a crumbling Wutong temple and tells his life story to Wise Monk, who almost never says a word. As he tells his tale, various actions happen in and about the temple: a fox gives birth, a mysterious woman undresses, a meat festival springs up, ostriches are decapitated, mobsters battle, etc. Xiatong is quite the talker, however, and he always manages to ignore these events enough to tell his story to unbelievably patient Wise Monk. His story is the second part of each chapter, and it is the meat of the book (pun intended, as you shall see). It begins after his father has left his mother for another woman, Aunty Wild Mule, and as a consequence his mother, a tough lady, has to bring Xiatong up by herself. She not only does this; by scrimping she actually prospers. Unfortunately for her son, she is so thrifty that he never gets the chance to eat meat, and young Xiatong lives to eat meat. He literally has a digestive system and stomach that can easily process at least five pounds of steak at one sitting, as he proves later in the novel. His desire for meat overrides everything else in his brain, and he resents his mother. Later though, his father returns (with a new daughter, Jiaojiao, in hand) and after that the fortune of the family improves, mainly due to the help of the town’s corrupt yet enterprising and generous mayor Lao Lan. What follows is mostly an account of Lao Lan setting up a meat factory that illegally (and brutally) injects animals with water to increase the weight of their meat. On the side though, it seems like he might also be sleeping with Xiatong’s mother. The sentences of the novel are lovely (especially for a translation), and Mo Yan’s ability to describe meat in over and over again is truly remarkable. Still, the story proved difficult to get into. The book’s blurbs and other reviews point to its humor, but in my own read I had a hard time pinning down any, other than the rare, easy dirty joke. Because of the tone, it felt as though I was reading a satire of a society that I was unfamiliar with, and therefore I couldn’t understand any of the jokes; hardly the author’s fault—I was not the intended audience. For example, the novel ends with several references to the number 41, and I had no idea what significance this might have in Chinese society. Nevertheless, I was able to savor the book for its prose and for the way its odd characters gave some insight into rural Chinese life. The two narratives were woven together expertly. Best of all, I thought the ending, which dips into magical realism after a story that has (for the most part) stuck to reality with the exception of some exaggerations by the narrator, was stunning: it involves the narrator sitting on a rooftop with a mortar and lobbing shell after shell (pow!) into various places around the town as time and action are compressed into a few moments. Overall, a memorable book, though one I might not recommend to someone unfamiliar with modern China. less

Download links for: POW!

Advertising