Red Sorghum 红高粱 莫言诺贝尔文学奖常销书英文版 原汁原味英文角度洞悉诺奖大家之情感与思考 当当5星级英文学习产品

　　Spanning three generations, this novel of family and myth istold through a series of flashbacks that depict events ofstaggering horror set against a landscape of gemlike beauty as theChinese battle both the Japanese invaders and each other in theturbulent 1930s. As the novel opens, a group of villagers, led byCommander Yu, the narrator's grandfather, prepare to attack theadvancing Japanese. Yu sends his 14-year-old son back home to getfood for his men; but as Yu's wife returns through the sorghumfields with the food, the Japanese start firing and she is killed.Her death becomes the thread that links the past to the present andthe narrator moves back and forth recording the war's progress, thefighting between the Chinese warlords and his family's history.

From Library Journal
Though this is the first of Mo Yan's novels to be translated intoEnglish, many Americans know his work from the film Red Sorghum ,winner of the Silver Bear at the 1988 Berlin Film Festival. Thefour-chapter novel spans 40 years in rural China through flashbacksand foreshadowing, beginning with the Japanese invasion in the1930s. Sorghum, used as food and as an ingredient of a potent wine,had been the focus and metaphor of peasant life during peacetime.In wartime, it becomes intertwined with the struggle for life.Death pervades this novel--death brutally dealt by Japanese troops,by factions within China, by crazed dog packs; death from suicide,starvation, and freezing. The strength and love of the narrator'sgrandmother and her lover insure the continuation of their lineagainst all odds. But they cannot prevent the later introduction ofa hybrid sorghum into their village that lacks the "soul andbearing" of prerevolution sorghum. For literary collections.
- D.E. Perushek, Univ. of Tennesee Libs., Knoxville
From Kirkus Reviews
powerful new voice on the brutal unrest of rural China in the late20's and 30's. Mo Yan's debut novel (and first US publication) wasthe basis of a 1988 Oscar-nominated film. A member of the young``root-seeking'' writers whose focus is the Chinese countryside, MoYan tells the story of three generations--simultaneously ``mostheroic and most bastardly''- -caught up in these turbulent years.Set in a region where the sorghum is grown, the tale's as much afamily history as the story of a particular time and place--a placewhere the red sorghum, which ``forms a glittering sea of blood andis the traditional spirit of the region,'' is also a metaphor forchange and loss. The novel opens as a group of villagers led byCommander Yu, the narrator's grandfather, prepare to attack theadvancing Japanese. Yu sends his 14-year-old son back home to getfood for his men; but as Yu's wife returns through the sorghumfields with the food, the Japanese start firing and she's killed.Her death becomes the thread that links the past to the present asthe narrator moves back and forth recording the war's progress, thefighting between rival Chinese warlords, and the history of hisfamily. Commander Yu, a former bandit, had fallen in love with hiswife when she was the young bride of the rich son of a distilleryowner. Yu had murdered the husband, and this murder is one of manyin a cycle in which brutality and betrayal alternate with love andsacrifice. In the 1970's, the narrator returns to pay his respectsto the family graves--only to find that the red sorghum, ``ourfamily's glorious talisman,'' replaced by a green hybrid, ``hasbeen drowned in a raging flood of revolution and no longerexists.'' Graphic scenes of violence become numbingly repetitive,but Mo Yan tempers his brutal tale with a powerfully evocativelyricism. A notable new arrival.