Pow! by Mo Yan – review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jan/19/pow-mo-yan-review-fiction

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Mo Yan's Nobel prize win last year thrilled the Chinese government, but outraged advocates of free speech. As the Nobel committee was praising Yan's by turns "hallucinatory" and "realist" fiction, one prominent Chinese critic branded its decision an insult not just to literature, but to humanity. Best known internationally for his 1987 novel Red Sorghum – which boldly tackled China's humiliation under Japanese occupation – Yan has since gone on to defend, as he did in his Nobel acceptance speech, "necessary" censorship. Meanwhile, his later novels have privileged bawdy fairytales over sober realism – as with his 1996 novel Big Breasts and Wide Hips – prompting critics to accuse him of airbrushing the tragedies of Chinese 20th-century history.

These accusations could all be leveled at Pow!, first published in China 10 years ago, which is an erotic, absurdist romp through the life story of Xiaotong, a boy obsessed with meat. But while it's true that Pow! doesn't land any blows on the Chinese regime – keeping its fire firmly trained on oafish village leaders and corrupt town officials – what remains is still a rich, original and highly rewarding novel.

The story – confessed by Xiaotong to a silent, benign and extraordinarily well-endowed old monk who communicates by twitching the hairs in his ears – recounts not just his own rise to fame as a legendary meat-eater and womaniser, but that of his village as home to the first industrial-scale meat factory in China. Yan creates extremely powerful characters, especially Xiaotong's mother, whose struggle to raise him after his father quits town with another woman is the most moving strand of the story.

And, pleasingly for a novel about meat, Howard Goldblatt's translation is frequently poetic – making countless passages about shining entrails, greasy pig heads and steaming pots of dog flesh all but waft off the page.

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