skygiants | (no subject)

The difference between me and the New York Times, I think, is that the New York Times is just generally more interested in testicles than I am - not only because they are much more likely to review books by men than by women (no surprise to anyone) but also I suspect they probably raise their eyebrows less than I do when a novel contains no less than six individual accounts of testicles being stolen and/or eaten. For the New York Times, this is probably clever and bawdy! For me, this is gratuitous. The New York Times is also I think less annoyed than I am by an excessive pagecount devoted to graphic donkey, ox and pig sex.

. . . there are many other differences between me and the New York Times, obviously, but these are probably some of the reasons that the Times and other literary-type book reviews liked Mo Yan's Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (translated by Howard Goldblatt) more than I did.

(Or maybe I'm just bitter that Mo Yan, according to Wikipedia, wrote the whole five hundred page monster in fifty days. WHAT. WHO DOES THAT.)

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out has a great premise - Ximen Nao, a landlord executed in 1950 after the Communist takeover, puts up such a fuss in the afterlife about the injustice of his fate that he's eventually reincarnated as (in turn) a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, and a monkey in his own village, giving him a chance to see what happens to everyone after his death. And I actually pretty much enjoyed the first half of the book, gratuitous donkey and ox sex and testicle theft aside; Ximen Nao's exploits as SUPER DONKEY and SUPER OX are kind of ridiculous, but his relationship with Lan Lian, who was his foster son and is now the last stubbornly independent farmer in the village, is really compelling. After that, though, the book becomes all about the next generation, who are pretty much uniformly terrible people, and there's still more testicle chomping and boring animal sex and boring people sex and I started to lose interest fast. (I actually kind of suspect the New York Times started to lose interest around then too, given that they write about the book like it's all about Lan Lian and Ximen Nao's connection all the way through, and also misreport Lan Lian as narrating sections when it is in fact his much less likeable son who does that.)

I also think I was probably missing a lot all the way through, though - I can recognize that there is social satire going on, but I don't know enough about China over the past fifty years to pick out when it's especially funny or on-the-nose, and someone who knew more would probably get a lot more out of the story than I did. I will stand by my statement, however, that there are too many testicles in this book.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

kindness_says

...Any particular reason you're reading so much about China?

-curious-

From:

skygiants

No particular reason except the fact that I'm generally trying to read more books by nonwhite and non-USian authors - it's mostly just coincidence that these reviews happened to go up next to each other. I'm on a constant project to read EVERYTHING BY LAURENCE YEP EVER, and then I picked up this book because it was featured at the library. :D

From:

kindness_says

You're so good. I'd feel pretty good if I could just manage to read something new more than once in a blue moon when I'm not on vacation.

From:

skygiants

Haha, it helps that I spend about an hour on the subway every day - that's where most of my reading gets done! I love being a non-driving commuter.

From:

obopolsk.livejournal.com

(Or maybe I'm just bitter that Mo Yan, according to Wikipedia, wrote the whole five hundred page monster in fifty days. WHAT. WHO DOES THAT.)

Seriously.

From:

skygiants

No one should be allowed to be that speedy! I find it DEEPLY UNFAIR.

From:

kindness_says

How do you steal testicles??? Are they...pre-detached?

From:

aberrantangels

I was assuming they did it the hard way and trying not to think about the particulars any more than was absolutely inevitable.

From:

kindness_says

...This comment made me laugh out loud.

And then laugh more, because my friend, who is on videochat, said in response to my sudden laughter, "Did someone else die?" (because I was just telling her about a friend's relative's death - she was old, don't worry! - and how said friend was describing the current situation of flailing about trying to get things in order, which is apparently like a bad comedy from everyone's perspective...which makes me sound like an awful person for laughing, but I swear, it's very funny, and I do also feel sympathy!!!!) Oh, dear.

From:

kindness_says

Me: Oh, it's about testicle-stealing.
Her: What?!
Me: I know, right?
Her: No, I didn't hear you.
Me: It's about testicle-stealing.
Her: What?! (and realizing, no, she did hear me the first time)

From:

skygiants

With a knife, and stealth, if you are stealing them from a donkey or an ox without the permission of the animal's owner for the purposes of drinking them down with your wine. With your teeth, if you are an angry pig hoping to get revenge for the stolen testicles of the ox and/or the man who is currently making time with the woman who was your wife three reincarnations ago. And now you know more than you ever wanted to.

From:

skylilies.livejournal.com

....ow.

From:

aberrantangels

I will stand by my statement, however, that there are too many testicles in this book.

It sounds to me like, at the very least, Mo Yan gives testicles a level of narrative attention in excess of their importance to the plot.

From:

skygiants

Perhaps I should say, too many detached testicles in this book?

I can't exactly say testicles have no importance to the plot, but I could easily do without the bits of the plot that center around testicles. For my own personal preference.

From:

aberrantangels

I could easily do without the bits of the plot that center around testicles. For my own personal preference.

Sounds like a plan to me. Also, if I read these comments (and indeed this page) for long enough, I get that thing where (in this case) "testicles" stops looking like a real word. Fortunately, it resets if I go to another tab.

From:

skylilies.livejournal.com

i'm not sure i would read this book, given your review ):'

plus the whole unlikeable-villagers thing makes me think of The Good Earth, and that book wasn't really to my taste

From:

skygiants

To be fair, I think there are people who would get a lot out of and probably quite enjoy this book, but alas, I was not one of them. :(

From:

skylilies.livejournal.com

have you ever read any of Haruki Murakami's work? o: /creeped on your comments and noticed you're trying to read non-English authors.

or Banana Yoshimoto, I adore her writing style;;

From:

skygiants

I've read some Murakami - The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - and mean to read more! I have not read any Yoshimoto, though, and would welcome recommendations. :D

From:

genarti

I have read Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto! I picked it up on a whim at the library once. It was very quick, and quite fun. Kitchen is a novella I liked a lot, about a young woman who's semi-adopted by a friend and his MtF mother after her grandparents die and who discovers a love of food and cooking, although of course things are more complicated than that. It will make you very hungry for traveling around Japan eating regional specialties. There's also a shorter story after that -- I don't know what you call something that's long for a short story but too short to be a novella -- which is also about dealing with grief, and which I didn't find as substantial but liked well enough. YMMV, of course.

I haven't read any of her other work, but I keep meaning to! I liked her style, at least as translated there. (I don't remember who the translator is, and am not sure if her other work has the same one or not.)

From:

skygiants

. . . . this is part of your cunning plan to recruit for a Japan trip, isn't it. >.>

But I am always in favor of books that will make me hungry, so!

From:

genarti

All things are part of this plan! :D I think long-term.

But this is more a cunning plan to make you read more books by people named Banana. *sage*

From:

skygiants

In that case I can only conclude that your priorities are, in fact, in order.

From:

elle-white.livejournal.com

Just out of curiosity, have you ever read Wild Swans? It documents the lives of three women over different periods of China's history? It was deeply moving and amazing to read these womens stories, but it is very long.

I also read and raged about the New York Times article that makes it abundantly clear that they put great value on testicles. Everytime I read something about TNY times I'm just kind of horrified. They seem to take every opportunity to talk about how they feel testicles are superior in every way to what women may have!

Edited Date: 2011-02-10 12:40 am (UTC)

From:

skygiants

The Wild Swans I keep seeing in bookstores, and being intrigued by, but have not yet picked up! Perhaps this is a thing I should remedy.

Haha, yeah, the most frustrating thing is that while I was hunting for that article (because I knew I'd read the statistic, and couldn't remember where) the first thing I found was a thoroughly infuriating rebuttal of the article written by - shocker! - a dude, talking about how the statistics were worthless and women should just stop complaining about the NYT being biased. MAYBE WOMEN JUST WRITE FEWER BOOKS, okay.

Yeah, I don't think so.

On the other hand, I do feel that Franzenfreude is a word that I needed to have in my life.

From:

elspeth-vimes.livejournal.com

...my first reaction to this was, "oh, Goldblatt is a respected translator!"

From:

skygiants

Hahahaha, I believe that he is! The translation in general was pretty good, although I give the publishers the side-eye a little about some of the copyediting - there were places where they clearly forgot to put in paragraph breaks and missed spelling errorsand so on.