Fellow laureate excoriates Nobel literature winner
STOCKHOLM: A past winner of the Nobel Prize in literature has called this year’s choice for the award, China’s Mo Yan, a “catastrophe” and accused him of “celebrating censorship,” a Swedish newspaper said on Saturday.
Herta Mueller, who won the prize in 2009, told the daily
that she wanted to cry when she heard Mo Yan had been given the prestigious award.
“The Chinese themselves say that Mo Yan is an official of the same rung as a [ government] minister,” the Romanian- born writer said.
“He celebrates censorship. It’s extremely upsetting.”
She noted that the laureate had copied by hand a speech by late Communist ruler Mao Zedong for a commemorative book this year. In the speech Mao said that art and culture should support the Communist Party.
Mueller, 59, added that handing the prize to the vice-chairman of the government-backed China Writers’ Association, while 2010 peace laureate Liu Xiaobo remains in jail, was “a slap in the face for all those working for democracy and human rights.”
Liu is serving an 11-year prison term for subversion after he called for democratic reforms to China’s one-party system.
The day after his prize was announced, Mo Yan told reporters that he hoped Liu could be released from prison “as soon as possible.”
“He should have said that four years ago, or at least two weeks before receiving the prize,” Mueller said.
Mueller was persecuted by Romania’s Communist- era secret police for refusing to become an informant and her work was censored at home. She immigrated to Germany in 1987. Her novels, notably
and describe the terror and humiliation she said that she suffered under Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime. few years later with the novella
(1986, pub- lished in French as
1993). In his writing Mo Yan draws on his youthful experiences and on settings in the province of his birth. This is apparent in his novel (1987, in English 1993). The book consists of five stories that unfold and interweave in Gaomi in several turbulent decades in the 20th century, with depictions of bandit culture, the Japanese occupation and the harsh conditions endured by poor farm workers. was successfully filmed in 1987, directed by Zhang Yimou. The novel (1988, in English
1995) and his satirical (1992, in English
2000) have been judged subversive because of their sharp criticism of contemporary Chinese society.
Fengru feitun (1996, in English Big Breasts and Wide Hips 2004) is a broad historical fresco portraying the 20th-century China through the microcosm of a single family. The novel Shengsi pilao (2006, in English Life and Death are Wearing Me Out 2008) uses black humor to describe everyday life and the violent transmogrifications in the young People’s Republic, while Tanxiangxing ( 2004, to be published in English as Sandalwood Death 2013) is a story of human cruelty in the crumbling Empire.
Mo Yan’s latest novel Wa (2009, in French 2011) illuminates the consequences of China’s imposition of a single-child policy.
Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.
In addition to his novels, Mo Yan has published many short stories and essays on various topics, and despite his social criticism is seen in his homeland as one of the foremost contemporary authors.