![]() ![]() The most important character, the narrator’s aunt (who in the novel is known as Gugu – father’s sister), is apparently also based on Mo’s own aunt he has said he asked her not to read the book on the grounds that it would make her angry. ![]() Born in 1955, he lived through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and he has come at these subjects either obliquely or directly in his work. Frog covers well-trodden territory with a surreal veneer that reduces our engagement with the characters, and adds a misbegotten final flourish.Īs he has done previously, Mo sets the novel in his own childhood home of Gaomi County in Shandong Province. ![]() We haven’t read the earlier books, so can’t pronounce on Mo’s body of work as a whole, but this is a disappointment. This is the most recent novel by the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature after all, and the prolific Howard Goldblatt is the most lauded of the Chinese-to-English translators. What to make of Mo Yan? Originally written in 2009, this English-language version has been much awaited by Anglophones eager to see what the fuss is all about. ![]()
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