A meaty tale, carnivorous and twisted
Mo Yan, the controversial Chinese winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a demented poet of the appetites. His novels have a lurid, greasy sheen.
He’s a complicated writer, but at base he’s a satirist of animal urges and animal longings (lust for food, lust for sex, lust for dominion). His overstuffed books make you feel you are engaged in a competitive eating contest. It all goes down a bit roughly. You will be some time in digesting.
The titles of Mo’s novels hint at his obsessions: The Garlic Ballads (1995); The Republic of Wine (2000); Big Breasts & Wide Hips (2004). Even the title of his best-known and somewhat more button-down book is a food reference: Red Sorghum (1993). He is not so much chewing his cud as spreading out a series of riotous feasts.
His latest novel to be issued in English, Pow!, is a red-toothed fantasia about meat production and meat consumption. It may put the western reader, at times, in mind of the nursery rhyme Jack Sprat (who could eat no fat), of Hansel and Gretel, of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Cannon Song (“quick as winking chop him into beefsteak tartar”) and finally of Upton’s Sinclair’s exposé The Jungle.
But that’s our cultural baggage, not Mo’s. He is a writer who, defiantly in the face of those who wish his work were less cartoonish and more straightforward in its political meanings, continues to sing his own peculiar and alluring song.
The narrator of Pow! is a young Chinese man, Luo Xiaotong, who as a boy loved meat so much that it called out to him, begging to be eaten. He is referred to as a “carnivorous genius” and “the world’s most gluttonous boy.” Just watching him stuff his face, one man says, “is better than embracing my wife in bed.”
This novel can be skimmed for its ecstatic, wellspiced food writing. It is filled with descriptions of things like a shrimp paste “so salty it nearly made you jump in the air.” The author lingers on meals in which the attendees gorge on “delicacies such as donkey lips, cow anuses, camel tongues and horse testicles.” It is the sort of book in which little girls have the ability to belch like sumo wrestlers.
The plot of Pow! glides, like fat on a griddle, in two directions. We listen to the story of the boy’s troubled childhood. After his father abandoned his mother for a sexy wine merchant named Wild Mule, the boy’s miserly mother began withholding meat from him, nearly driving him insane with longing.
At the same time, the novel chronicles the corruption and greed in a town where the farmers have left the fields to raise meat animals or become butchers. Capitalism has gained a toehold, and the new bosses (some of them former peasants) are mostly as bad as the old ones. It is an era, one man declares, of “primitive accumulation.”
Butchered meat is injected with water to increase its weight; formaldehyde is applied to keep it fresh. Still, most of the citizens seem to agree with our narrator, who maintains, “I’d rather eat unhealthy meat than healthy turnips.”
The title of this novel, which has been deftly translated by the indefatigable Howard Goldblatt, has multiple meanings. A “powboy,” in China, is one who boasts and stretches the truth. There is also a daft and surreal scene near the end in which the narrator aims 41 consecutive Second World War-era mortar shells at his father’s enemy.
Like many Mo Yan novels, Pow! is difficult to warm to. There are few characters to admire; the novel’s heart is antic but also icy. Mo has also begun to go back to the well for some of the same imagery.
In Big Breasts & Wide Hips he wrote about “slightly upturned nipples as nimble as the mouth of a hedgehog.” In Pow! we confront “nipples rising gracefully, like the captivating mouths of hedgehogs.” I’m not sure this bit clicked the first time.
Since winning the Nobel Prize, Mo has taken a beating from some commentators for failing to condemn state censorship in China, and for not displaying enough solidarity with that country’s persecuted dissidents. Salman Rushdie has called him a “patsy of the regime.”
Mo has been defended by Pankaj Mishra, who asked: “Do we ever expose the political preferences of Mo Yan’s counterparts in the West to such harsh scrutiny?” Others have argued for the instinctively subversive nature of his satire.
Pow! is staunchly adult in its concerns. It’s a reminder that so much of life and literature is about, as the narrator puts it, “putting a knife in white and taking it out red.”