Undecided

Still perplexed by Red Sorghum which I finished the other day. It's Mo Yan's depiction of violence that bothers me. In the early stages of the novel I just took this as an appropriate rendering of a sadly brutal world, but the increasingly cartoon-like quality of the violence became alienating. It sounded like the writer was enjoying himself at times.

This, in turn, provoked doubts about aspects of the writing which seemed unusually naïve: the sometimes random quality of the non-linearity of the text; the lack of depth of characterisation in relation to the central characters; the extreme clumsiness of shifts of point of view. Yes, I can see a way of justifying all of these in relation to the folkloric quality of the story-telling, but I'm not sure I find this convincing. I suppose I should try and read beyond this novel into the writer's oeuvre to try and figure out just how deliberate all this is.

Funnily enough, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Red Sorghum despite my doubts.