I don’t like book reviews. I prefer to go in blind. But this book deserved a word, not of praise but of caution. It will not negotiate, it invades. It does not forgive, it demands vengeance.
DR SREEVIDYA SURENDRAN
I usually do not do book reviews, neither do
I enjoy them. I am of the general opinion that one should go at a book like one goes at the world in general: blind. We must be allowed to figure out if we like a book or not, with no external help. After all, life doesn’t come with instructions, or a warning. So why expect that when we enter the world of a book? The blurb and common experience are vague suggestions at best.
But every once in a while, a book comes along to remind you of your supreme naivete. To remind you that sometimes you need a warning. Like I said, I don’t like book reviews. I prefer to go in blind. But this book deserved a word, not of praise but of caution. It will not negotiate,
it invades. It does not forgive, it demands vengeance. It cannot give, it drowns. And most importantly, it stays.
Reading Red Sorghum (1986) is an exercise of agonised fascination. Employing a terse spare style, Mo Yan is as ruthless as his characters and seems to take the untold-- or rather the excruciatingly described-- violence of the tale in the same matter of fact mien
as they do. He does not give the reader any respite, from the unremitting visceral reality
of surviving. Watching a movie allows you the ephemeral comfort of closing your eyes to avoid the horrifying. The book will not brook such cowardice. And so, regardless of the fact that your insides are cringing, you continue reading, you continue living. Just like the characters in the book.
Red Sorghum details the saga of three generations of a family that brewed liquor from the hardy, unglamourous Red Sorghum that grows in the province. And “red” is the shade that colours the skin of the writing. Set in the North-East Gaomi province of rural China, the book spans the perilous years of the Second Sino-Japanese war and the Cultural Revolution, and records the evolution of the local liquor baron and bandits into resistance fighters. But don’t let this general arc fool you into thinking you are going to meet the rural Chinese version of the Guardians of the Galaxy. The characters that people the pages of Red Sorghum are far from good but create a larger-than-life tarnished heroism through their sketchy actions. The origin story of the family itself is a far from glorious. The grandmother,
the chief protagonist of the story, was brought to the rural province to be wedded to the leper son of the local distillery owner. She and her lover, the celebrated “commander” Yu, successfully murder her fiancé and in-laws to take over the distillery and run a flourishing business. Until the Japanese arrive and threaten everything they know and have built from the ground up.
The narrator is the third generation of a family with dubious morality, but with legendary courage and valour based on a code of honour forged in the fires of war and cutthroat competition. The Japanese invasion sets up a bloody background for the gritty, grey heroism that is equal parts admirable and horrifying. The story opens with a teenage narrator joining his foster father in an ambush against the Japanese and watching his family members getting shot and wounded. A few paragraphs later, his grandmother washes her bleeding blood-stained face in a vat of Red Sorghum wine which she later drinks from and gives her grandson. A few more pages into the text, a wounded uncle smashes the head of a mule with a hoe. meanwhile the Red Sorghum turns red in the blood-red sunrise... This is the warning. Turn back now, or brave the fire.
The book weaves together myth, history and folklore to create a tapestry of visceral violence coupled with startling beauty. The story flits between past and present—flashbacks and foreshadowing side by side—twisting notions of time and reality in the weft and warp of the narrative fabric. Mo Yan’s story-telling brilliance shines through as he effortlessly melds magic realism with the bone-searing reality
of over-the-top violence. He creates a world
of such overwhelming excess, that the image
of an exhumed corpse shining golden with shimmering motes of dust, seems more plausible that the reality of decay. At no point of time does the author glorify the past or the characters. However, he presents an array of people so wilfully alive, it makes the reader ashamed of living a half-life.
Whether it is Commander
Yu, or the Grandmother, the characters are unapologetic and ruthlessly self-serving: they will do whatever it takes to not just survive, but also to live as fully, as authentically as they can, regardless of how morally flawed that might be. The Red Sorghum, growing wild and free across the magical vista, serves as a fitting metaphor for the people of the story, who only stop when they are dead, just as we can only stop reading at the end of the book.
After the first reading of the book, you are left breathless and gasping—like you took an unwise gulp of raw liquor. The effects of the book though, deny the numbing effects of alcohol. On the contrary, one is left overly sensitised— like our skin is not enough to contain all that we feel, all that we are and can be. The book drains you, stretches you taut and thin, and then fills you to breaking point with too much. It brings home the fact that you know nothing, can never know and that you should pray that it remains that way; because to know is to never be able to ignore. To never be content with the common. And to know that the “common” is privilege. In our sanguine smugness and misplaced faith in reason we tend to analyse, assimilate and
file away experiences only to be fished out as convenient anecdotes. The reality of the episode fades with time, repetition and with this basic act of classification, and we begin to use these instances only as precedents to support a case. We are argumentative and competitive and rarely, if ever, dwell on a moment long enough to allow it to seep into the bedrock of our psyches. And then, suddenly, you are reminded that realities are real, not manageable instances. No matter how much you ‘manage’ them, its graphic nature can never be veiled. Mo Yan does not shy away from the realities of war and the darkness of human nature. But his characters are indomitable in the face of extreme horror and determined to live, and love life with a rapacious hunger. Kafka said, “A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.” Get ready to have your sea smashed to pieces.
Red Sorghum is a story of survival, the earthy unapologetic survival of a weed that bursts through concrete. The closing pages of the
book describes the changed landscape of the province-- Mo Yan’s only lapse into blatant allegorical eloquence. Filled with a deep and abiding guilt at the inadequacy of the tame present to live up to the past, the author finally helps you name that terrible ache in your chest, so smothered by horror and shock. It is shame: the shame of not being that original, the true seed of the earth that ought to stand tall and proud instead doomed to the boxed existence of pet rabbits. And yet, underneath that crushing realisation, is the cold comfort that we too came from this cruel, loving, avenging earth and will return to it no matter how many times we are exhumed from our rest or fight its reclaiming tug: the fiercest flame and the smallest spark both return to the same hearth; this too is true.
Ah literature, the love of my life.
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