MCLC: review of Mo Yan's Pow!

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: CHEN JIANHUA <hmjjchen at ust.hk>
Subject: review of Mo Yan's Pow!
*************************************************************

Yunte Huang's review of Mo Yan's 四十一炮, which just appeared in the
Chicago 
Tribune.

Jianhua

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Source: Chicago Tribune (1/4/13):
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/books/sc-ent-0109-books-pow-mo-yan-2
0130104,0,1721125.story


Mo Yan Fires Verbal Cannons in 'POW!'
By Yunte Huang

==============================
POW!"
By Mo Yan, translated by Howard Goldblatt
Seagull, 386 pages, $27.50
=============================

While the jury is still out as to whether the Chinese writer Mo Yan, who
is said to have been toeing the party line, truly deserves the Nobel Prize
for Literature, there is little doubt that his novel “POW!” — with its
Rabelaisian carnivalesque language and surrealist narration — rightly
belongs among the best of world literature. First published in 2003 as
“Forty-one Bombards” (“Sishiyi Pao”), Mo's novel in the English version,
rendered beautifully and ingeniously by Howard Goldblatt, has acquired a
poetic, or rather, onomatopoetic title: “POW!” True to the spirit of the
word, readers of “POW!” are bombarded page after page by the blaring force
of a story of carnivorous excess that bares China's soiled bottom.

The novel is set at an ancient temple in contemporary, post-Mao China. Luo
Xiaotong, a 20ish novice wishing to join the monastery, spews out his life
story for the attentive ear of an old monk who appears to relish
exceedingly these earthy tales of lust, greed, chicanery and carnivorism.

Luo is from a village that goes by the improbable name of Slaughterhouse.
Most villagers are professional butchers and avid carnivores who devour
meats of all sorts: beef, pork, chicken, donkey, camel, dog, ostrich, goat
and so on. Lured by the spirit of enterprising capitalism sweeping through
the country, the villagers build a meatpacking plant and try to make a
quick buck by creatively injecting water and other chemical fluids into
the meat.

Luo, the hungry artist who has invented the best way to "beef up" the
beef, is also a champion carnivore. At the tender age of 12, he soundly
beats three adult challengers at a meat-eating contest by gobbling down
five pounds of flank steak within an hour. A boy who "lives to eat meat,"
he sticks to the mantra: "Father is close, Mother is dear, but neither
matches the appeal of meat!" He is willing to call anyone dad if that
person feeds him meat.

Apples don't fall far from the tree. The boy's father, Luo Tong, is also a
consummate carnivore who lives a life of sin. "If there's food in your
belly," Luo Tong likes to say, "even a pigsty is Heaven. If there's no
meat in Heaven, I'm not going there." And he carries on a steamy affair
with a woman named Wild Mule, who knows a secret recipe for cooking the
tastiest pig head. Like most of Mo Yan's novels, "POW!" depicts a world of
phantasmagoria hovering over the hard clay of reality in rural China,
where hardscrabble peasants and other lowly characters, while barely
making a living, battle with each other in the game of life and death.
They curse brilliantly, plumbing the richness of the Chinese language as
never before; they belch loudly, whether or not after a hearty meal; and
men take out their "tools" to urinate in front of their opponents as a
show of masculine bravado, like a dog peeing to make a claim on a spot
however minuscule. The word "pow," in vulgar Chinese slang, also means to
screw, to shag, as with a cannon-like phallus.

The powerful Japanese 82 mm mortar, a relic from the Sino-Japanese War
found by Luo Xiaotong in his scavenging days, will eventually blow the
Slaughterhouse Village into pieces. "POW! the place would go up in smoke."
The 41 mortar shells are also symbolically the 41 chapters that constitute
the novel, the same number of verbal bombshells that Luo Xiaotong, a boy
trapped inside a grown-up man's body, drops on the old monk and the
readers alike. In the carnal life he is about to forsake, Luo Xiaotong is
also called a "powboy," which in his native dialect means someone who
brags and shoots his mouth off. In the afterword, the author characterizes
this novel as "the story of a boy prattling on and on about a story." Luo
Xiaotong, according to Mo, is "a boy who endlessly spouts lies, a boy
whose utterances tend to be irresponsible, a boy who gains satisfaction
through the act of narration. Narration is his ultimate goal in life."

In this bawdy comedy of tall lies, oscillating between a fantastic past
and a hallucinatory present, the author is the ultimate powboy, who fires
a verbal cannon at a world gone awry, a nation, while full of life and
drive, charging forward fiercely like a headless fly.

Yunte Huang is the best-selling author of "Charlie Chan: The Untold Story
of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History."

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