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Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh: A Novel, by Mo Yan Howard Goldblatt
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About the Author
Mo Yan, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in 1955 in North Gaomi Township in Shandong Province, an impoverished rural area that is the setting for much of his fiction. Despite the audacity of his writing, he has won virtually every national literary prize, including China’s Annual Writer’s Prize, its most prestigious award. He is the author of The Garlic Ballads, The Republic of Wine; Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh; Big Breasts and Wide Hips, and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, all published by Arcade, as well as Red Sorghum and Pow!. Mo Yan and his family live in Beijing.
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Product details
Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Arcade (November 6, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1628729449
ISBN-13: 978-1628729443
Product Dimensions:
5.5 x 5.5 x 8.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 15 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.0 out of 5 stars
45 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#1,106,649 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
When the Nobel Committee announced the 2012 award to Chinese writer, Mo Yan, it was a name unknown to me. So I chose this collection of short stories as a sampler. It was a fortunate decision, for the eight stories here, chosen by the excellent translator Howard Goldblatt, range over two decades of his writing and reflect a life lived through a turbulent half-century of China's history. As a group, they are strange yet engaging, fabulous yet engaged, and surprisingly easy to read. Of course, I may yet find that Mo Yan the novelist is a very different writer, but I doubt it. The author himself in his playfully candid introduction breaks with Chinese tradition in viewing his short works as every bit as important as his longer ones, and there is a consistency of concern in all these stories that I cannot imagine altering when exercised on a larger scale. Oddly enough, the story that I would single out as distilling Mo Yan's vision is an homage to an older writer, Lu Xun. Entitled "The Cure," it depicts a father and son waiting under a high bridge to await the falling bodies of class enemies executed by the Armed Work Detachment, to gather the materials necessary for a folk remedy to cure a sick relative. The combination of stark historical realism with folklike elements that even verge on the surreal is a characteristic of all these stories, though the proportion differs in each case. "Soaring," in which a young bride develops the power to fly like a bird to escape a forced marriage, is a comic fable with an ugly twist. "Abandoned Child," the last story in the book, reads almost autobiographically in its denunciation of the official "one family one child" policy. Both attack the traditional Chinese attitude to women.The somewhat unfortunately-named title story ("Shifu" is an honorific for a master workman) is both the longest and the most recent. Its leading character, a victim of industrial downsizing, hits on an unusual way of making money, until he encounters some even more unusual clients. Social realism with a twist. Even more twisted is "Iron Child," a surreal tale set against the very real deprivations of the Great Leap Forward, about two children who learn to eat iron in the absence of real food; Mo Yan tells a similar story of himself eating coal as a hungry child. Two of the tales, "Love Story" and "Shen Garden," are more or less straightforward romances -- a banned genre when Mo Yan began writing -- though again with a twist. Be sure to check the Translator's Introduction before reading the second of these; this is the most human of the stories, whose warmth comes from the knowledge that Shen Garden is a metaphor for a later meeting of divorced couples.Perhaps my favorite in the collection is "Man and Beast," an almost phantasmagorical story about a soldier living out the duration of WW2 in a cave in the forest, becoming one with the animals around him, but living in fear of the foxes whose den he stole. This is an appendage to the author's RED SORGHUM, a saga set against the background of China's war with Japan. Although the story itself is relatively short, it gives a sense of what Mo Yan can do on a larger conceptual scale, and makes me eager to read his novels.
While I've read numerous Chinese writers in the past, I have never read a collection of short stories. Mo Yan's "Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh" collects a handful of his stories from the '80s and '90s. They are interesting enough but they are very quick, very abrupt, and have very little context.The longest story is "Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh." It is an enjoyable parable about a exemplary machinist who starts a bordello of sorts after his factory is closed. Other stories include "Iron Child," about an abandoned child who meets a spirit. The two of them roam the countryside eating iron during the Great Leap Forward. In "Soaring," a bride grows wings and flies away the day of her wedding. The comparisons to Kafka are valid because several of these stories include such fantastical situations. However, to understand the stories the reader should understand the historical contexts in which they were written.Unfortunately, the stories all end very quickly, often dispensing with the descriptions and resolutions that other contemporary Chinese writers use. Nevertheless, these stories are all quick reads and enjoyable in their own right.
This strange and unsettling collection of short stories by Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan is guaranteed to stick in the minds of its readers, not just because it is wonderfully written by a man whose country is not as open to foreigners as this book is, but because its reality is so far removed from what any of us have experienced or even imagined. Seven short stories and one novella create a sometimes mystical or mysterious mood, though that mood is oftentimes more akin to horror than to fantasy. Whether one should interpret some of the events described in this collection as dark humor, shocking dramatic irony, or simply as the shocking reality of the various Chinese speakers is a question which readers will have to explore on their own.Using Northeast Gaomi Township as his setting (the fictionalized name for Dalan Township where the author lives), Mo Yan creates fast-paced narratives in which nature often plays a strong part, not a benevolent nature, but the cruel nature of "tooth and claw." In almost every story, the main character, no matter how honorable, is foiled by outside forces, and sometimes by nature - always a victim with little or no control over his life and destiny.The seemingly light-hearted novella, "Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh," tells the story of a man who has worked hard for his entire life, suddenly terminated a month before his retirement. When he comes up with a unique way to earn a great deal of money, he feels so guilty that he eventually goes to the authorities to "confess," with surprising and darkly comic results. "Abandoned Child," by contrast, is a shocking story told by a writer (of what appears to be purple prose, judging from his introduction to this story) who finds an abandoned baby only a few hours old. The baby, of course, is a girl, her fate revealing the full horror of the One Child Rule and the life of an abandoned baby, nearly always a girl, along with the long-term effects on the country.In between these two stories are six others which suggest much about Chinese life - their long enmity with Japan, many legends and folk beliefs associated with nature, the position of women in marriage, and the belief that no matter how honorable one's intentions, the fates will conspire against personal success. The forced abandonment of children by parents conscripted to work for the state, the near starvation of country dwellers, the feeling that the individual is totally unimportant, and the fact that sex is real and love is not, are only a few of the themes which show a bleak picture of Chinese life. Happiness is not even to be a goal among the characters here. The writing is clear and unequivocal, and western readers cannot help but take notice of the contrasts between our cultures, and of these characters' power of sheer endurance in the face of hardship. Highly recommended as an introduction to Mo Yan's work.
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