This recent novel-in-translation by the 2012 Nobel Laureate Mo Yan, originally published in China in 2004, embodies a labyrinthine web of changing alliances and terrifying vengeance. Set during the Boxer Rebellion, the turn-of-the-20th-century Chinese uprising against Western imperialism, it features pivotal figure Sun Meiniang, who reveals in the first sentence that she will kill her father-in-law in seven days.
Meiniang’s husband is the town butcher whose executioner father is ordered to devise the most diabolical death (the titular sandalwood death) for Meiniang’s own father – an opera singer-turned-rebel-leader – who has been coerced into surrender by Meiniang’s magistrate lover. Alternately voiced by Meiniang and her four men, the narrative dovetails with passages from an opera of the same name, quickly gaining momentum toward an epic crescendo.
Verdict: In the wake of Mo’s Nobel win, his upcoming titles will garner greater attention. However, demand for Death might prove higher than actual readership, not because of a lack of quality writing but for its power to conjure the most heinous scenes of torturous death. Mo’s “Author’s Note” warns at book’s end, “This novel of mine will likely not be a favorite of readers of western literature, especially in highbrow circles […] my novel will be appreciated only by readers who have an affinity with the common man.” Diligent readers will also need to detach themselves from the gruesome machinations of Mo’s “common man” to reach the final pages.
Review: “Fiction,” Library Journal, March 1, 2013
Readers: Adult
Published: 2012 (United States)
Part of Canongate’s much-praised Myths Series. Su Tong – best known Stateside for his novella Raise the Red Lantern, which became an Oscar-nominated film by legendary Zhang Yimou – breathes life into one of China’s oldest myths. Binu is a devoted wife who leaves her native village to search for her missing husband, one of thousands of workers kidnapped to build the Great Wall.
Four short stories and a longer novella are linked together to create a mosaic of disparate voices that share a visceral longing for a time – and place – forever past. Chu adroitly leads readers through a contemporary Taiwan displaced by Japanese colonial overtones mixed with inescapable Western cultural influences.
Here’s the updated second edition of what was already considered the definitive overview of modern Chinese literature in English translation, with representative writing from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. With China poised to become a dominant world player in the 21st century, this anthology is a great introduction to some of the very best in Chinese language fiction, poetry, and essays.
From the celebrated author of 
From the author of Red Sorghum comes a monumental novel that follows 20th-century China through the lives of the eponymous woman and her nine children, none of them fathered by her sterile husband. The birth of her last child, the one boy, is a complicated, stupendous feat that brings in the village vet, the midwife, and finally a Japanese army doctor. Mo’s superb writing is so visceral, his descriptions so vivid that the smells, sights, and feelings become larger than life.
Okay, call me a terribly old fuddy-duddy, but I just don’t get the lure of reading about the sex lives of misdirected, apathetic teenagers. I know there’s an audience out there because Doll is an international bestseller with rights sold in 17 countries. Based on her own diaries, Sue wrote Doll at age 17 about her own encounters and adventures beginning at 14 (!). And I suppose it’s quite the commentary on the lost youth of a too-fast-changing China. She’s certainly precocious. And no surprise, she’s already got her next novel out, although it was immediately banned in China. These days, that’s the best guarantee for lucrative sales.
Don’t be put off by the tacky cover with the bare chest of a necklaced young man. The story within, with all its rawness and shock, is hard to put down. Five Dragons, an orphaned young man on the verge of starvation, is given a job in the rice emporium belonging to the Feng family in 1930s China, a time marked by widespread famine. The Feng family treats Five Dragons no better than a dog; Five Dragons reciprocates with beastly behavior. His fate remains intertwined with the proprietor Feng and his two daughters, and through the decades, the results move toward greater brutality and final tragedy.
An uncensored glimpse into the suffering lives within a rural Chinese community reeling from the utter violence that haunts the town as a result of a brutal rape, which results in a suicide by hanging, which leads to the bloody retribution wreaked upon the rapist’s wife and his favorite prostitute.
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