Review: "Big Breasts & Wide Hips" by Mo Yan

This book was a pleasant surprise for me. I’m always worried going into a novel by a writer who has one the Nobel Prize in Literature. Although my perception of it has changed with writers like Alice Munro and Mario Vargas Llosa winning the award in recent years, authors who are also bestsellers, I’ve always viewed the award as being too political for someone of my tastes. For every J. M. Coetzee there is a Herta Muller who comes along and reinforces my notions of the Nobel Prize. But I’m glad to say, that even without a Nobel to his name, Mo Yan is one of my new favorite novelists, and his epic novel Big Breasts & Wide Hips is one of the best novels I have read this year. Beyond some of the politics and history that it utilizes (I will happily admit that I know very little of the history it presents), which only acts as a back drop to what is going on in the lives of the characters, this is good, old-fashioned storytelling at its finest; the rich, thick creamy kind that takes a little more time and effort than usual, but is worth every important second of your time. Reading this bulky, 532 page novel, the one author I couldn’t stop thinking of was none other than American John Irving, an author who is somewhat low on the totem pole of authors you would think of when discussing a Nobel laureate. But it really is a fitting comparison when you read the novel. All the markings of a classic Irving novel are here: a keen sense of a well-developed and wrought out place, oddball characters whose weirdness is only overshadowed by how weirdly real they seem to be, and brutal twists of fate that almost seem comical if you didn’t care so much about the characters. And this is a really brutal novel at times, and it rarely pulls any punches. To give a thorough summary would give away too much. But the too central characters, Mother, with her tenacity and all eight of her daughters, and her son, the worthless and impotent Jintong, who is also the narrator of most of the story, go through some pretty horrific events as the course of Chinese history changes over the course of the 20^th century. Loved ones die, dignity is snatched away, and hope seems not only futile, but stupid most of the time, since the fates really have it out for Mother and her family. And unlike the works of Irving, there is very little levity to the chain of events, and there seems to be no means to an end as well. In that case, if it is ever gets adapted into a movie, Terry Gilliam would be a good choice to direct this greatly pessimistic, and hilariously angry story of Chinese history. This book is definitely not for the faint of heart, since it is not a very happy story, but it sure is an entertaining one.

Rating: 5/5