Big Breasts and Wide Hips: A Novel (Arcade Classics)

Out there in media discussion writers about Mo Yan get their feet entangled about why he can't get himself struck off by Chinese authorities, there must therefore be something wrong with him. Writers of three star reviews say honestly that the book is difficult and grim.I have to say I am very sorry I did not find this book and read it sooner. Thank you Nobel committee for bringing me to it. I am lesser for having not read it sooner.I was taken aback when I first read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Hundred Years of Solitude. The comparison between the two books is valid, there is much in the style of the book to link it to the way Latin American writers (read also Isabel Allende, watch Like Water for Chocolate) tell history, or the life of people in history, by weaving between the mystical and the earthy, the literal and the imagined, the actual and the exaggerated. We are confronted by the mind of the writer, the mind-processes of the protagonists, and most especially by our own mind processes. And Mo Yan leaves GGM wallowing in his wake.If you really want 'difficult and grim', please read more literal offerings such as Ningkun Wu's personal story, 'A Single Tear': http://www.amazon.com/Single-Tear-Persecution-Endurance-Communist/dp/0316956392/For a vivid account of an earlier period, read Han Suyin: http://www.amazon.com/The-Crippled-Tree-China-Autobiography/dp/0586038361/Mo Yan succeeds in welding a story together by having so many strands of China's revolutionary history melded into one family; indeed into the oral fixations of one child growing into the breast obsessions of one adult. A tale of generally flawed protagonists who nevertheless become family around us too. There is in that notion perhaps a definition of family for most of us, if we can think that kindly of our families. We are also entangled with the absolute importance of family in traditional life. The book is at the one time deeply compassionate, passionate, merciless, merciful, humorous and satirical... and real, not as plodding history, but in creating a sense of the atmosphere of times and circumstances. I arrived, for example, after weathering the battles and conflicts (and breasts and hips) at a point way down in the book where there is a meeting over land reform in this small village and, armed as Mo Yan had made me with an intimate sense of who these people in the story are, the meeting became perhaps the most extraordinary account of a meeting I have read, at which I have ever been present as I felt I was in the story. If you have ever attended a contentious community meeting you will (I hope) be impressed by Mo Yan's force upon you of empathy for those participating as the upwelling of bitterness and old sores has its savage effects.I have in the past said to people that to begin to come to terms with China, we need to note of ourselves that only perhaps 10% of our brains are conscious and in those conscious brain bits in turn maybe we overlap 10% with the conscious brains of urbane internationalist Chinese. This is changing in some ways in the modern free-shifting world, but it's still a good start point. Think about it: I think people in my Australia have a fantastic notion that their brains work the same way as Unitedstatesensian brains - but they do not. If you wonder at that, consider disparities between brains of Teapartistas and readers of the New York Review of Books. This is not meant as frivolous yak. I suggest the book be read as a wondrous opportunity to explore elements of Chinese history-through-psyche. You are not asked to believe, you are invited to be swept along. To understand, to empathise... and to be entertained miraculously. The truly confronting quality of the book is that you cannot, as does the tourist, see oneself in some mirror, and one cannot, as even with the best history, see it as disconnected from one's own self. It is the drawing-in that gets you. Don't run away from its occupation.A long time ago, I travelled the short distance by road from Jinan, capital of Shandong province to the Yellow River, somewhat into the country where the story is located. It is astonishing when the car rises up a small hill and you arrive on the levee of the river, perched as it is high above the plain and growing higher with silt load every day. Read the story with that sense of the precariousness of life alongside this river, as powerful to life as the Nile to Egypt but also a huge threat to life. Mo Yan stays away from dangerous literal history, but to understand literal fear of the river (and 'difficult and grim') research how in 1938 Chiang Kai-shek deliberately breeched the Yellow River levee hoping to slow Japanese forces, inundating three provinces, drowning perhaps a million people.===Finally, I do have to comment on the wonderfully clearly printed cover. If you read it on the train, you do attract attention and some who see you in your overcoat may not know the high grade of the literature into which your nose is wedged :-)

Bottom Line First:Mo Yan attempts much in this sprawling novel. There are some threads about survival, the impact of modern history on peasants and Chinese peasants and Communism and War and...trust me a huge bucha stuff. There are flashes of brilliants and tiny ants of problems. One gets a real sense of the arbitrary and violent nature of life in last half of the 20th Century in remote North East China. The use of magic realism can be lyrical and unsettling. Jumps in time and space are confusing, as can be the jumps from first to third person. It has been suggested that this may not be the best translation, but this one has not left me with much interest in re-reading a better translation of Big Breast Wide Hips.%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%The novel begins with Mother (Shangguan Lu') giving birth to her only son and her eighth daughter. All conceived outside of her marriage to an impotent and generally weak husband. Meantime the family donkey is struggling to give birth to a mule-(technically a hinney). The matriarch of the family is mother in law to the woman in labor is far more concerned about the threat to the family livestock than to her daughter in law who has so often failed to produce a male. We will get flash backs explaining something of Shangguan Lu' treatment in her husbands We will get some idea of poor farming life in the edges of North East China, village politics, the status or lack of same for women, ties of family, hints about who and why Shangguan Lu has so often mated with different men and also the invading Japanese army is about ot arrive. And some people are about to die. Our central character Shangguan Jintong is born and we are not yet to page 50.With more than 90% of the book to go it suddenly become 1900, or about 35 years earlier and we get detailed flash backs with the details of Mother's life before the opening chapters. We learn she had undergone foot binding (in some detail) in an effort to assure her a rich marriage. This ancient style was about to be over taken by the changes that are only beginning to be the norm in China. And we learn about how her mother-in-law will push her into seeking fathers to get her with male child. Then we are back at the scene of the birthing and history resumes.Between sisters, their husbands, and various cousins, the cast become both large and unwieldy. Death will arrive in many froms, sometimes suddenly and often graphically. Survivors become scattered and many characters will disappear only to return often more than once and you can never be sure which ones ae to be favored by fate.At some point an American, named Babbitt arrives. Likely he is an OSS /Army operative tasked with channeling support to the Nationalists effort to fight the Janpaese. He will marry into the family, and disappear and this is only one of many sub-plots that fizzle into nothing.And there are still over 300 plus to go.I wanted to like Big Breasts Wide Hips. I took it up on the recommendation of someone who knew I was looking for some non-western literature. The arbitrary nature of village life feels real and the slow increase in the status of women, the possibilities of modern and sophisticated life are left for you to track and evaluate. Long passages have the power to draw you in and give you the sense of living this life on the edge. Then comes the jarring changes in time, space and person. And then the scenes with no connection to the rest of the storyJintong, the center of the story is not a likely character as a Chinese Everyman. His lifelong fixation on nursing at the breast does more to de-sexualize the breast since the anatomical drawing in Gray's Anatomy. His encounters with sex, especially his first do very nearly the same to the eroticism of sex. We have reason to believe that Jintong has talents, and that he never gets to use them because of his uneven luck. He is a good observer, and a good choice to be the center of the narrative, but he can also be aggravating and inconsistent.And so it goes. Sometimes powerful writing, sometime the narrative is as simple as the people described. China lurches into modernity but not so much the peasants. Ancient superstitions and village prejudice defy sophistication. And at irregular intervals the narrative jumps and continuity is lost.By the end I was grateful to be done with Big Breasts Wide Hips. Glad to have read it and leery of trying to ever read it again, I do want to read more Mo Yan.

Read this book as few years back and feel in love with it, ever since I've been reading Mo Yan fondly! Loved how it starts with so many details, they all get tied up and explained so well, it feels like I was there and lived it myself. Never read anyone that can describe something gruesome so beautifully!

The previous review gives a good summary of the novel, which follows the life of Shangguan Lu and her son Jintong and the impact of historical events such as the Japanese invasion and the Cultural Revolution on their lives and those of other family members and fellow villagers. It is the breadth of this novel that is its weakness - there are so many events and characters that is becomes difficult to remain engaged throughout the whole book. This would not be so difficult is there was a strong unifying theme, but I struggled to find it. Although many individual segments are well-realised , there are times when the novel becomes slighly chaotic. Other novels, such as 'Red Sorghum' as well as Mo Yan's shorter fiction (see "Shifu, you'll do anything for a laugh") are more memorable and are more stylistically interesting.

not his best work

Absolutely loving this book. The way it's written, it's easy to digest but the stories run deep. Gives a real insight into Chinese culture.

Read this some years back, and needed a copy for myself. It is a great read to revisit, very imaginative with outlandish situations, fantastic imagery but oh so telling of the the times it was set in. A good near satirical account of life in China, before and during the cultural revolution.