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“... it was unceasingly violent and nasty, and it came near to puncturing Party myths. In the preface, Howard Goldblatt, Mo Yan’s longtime translator and advocate, reported that it had provoked anger on the mainland among ideologues for humanising the Japanese soldiers who invaded Manchuria, though there can’t have been very much anger because the novel ...”

“... Mo Yan’s novel opens with a kind of prospectus for itself: ‘I didn’t realise until I’d grown up that Northeast Gaomi Township is easily the most beautiful and most repulsive, most unusual and most common, most sacred and most corrupt, most heroic and most bastardly, hardest-drinking and hardest-loving place in the world.’ And forthwith the narrator’s father, aged 15 in the year 1939, is seen hanging onto the coat-tails of Commander Yu Zhan’ao as the latter’s troops (forty of them, poorly armed) advance through the sorghum fields to ambush a Japanese convoy and, as it happens, kill a Japanese general ...”

“... Chinese fiction ‘appears to be the lonely province of one man’. He was referring to Howard Goldblatt, who recently gave a talk in Shanghai on why Chinese fiction isn’t popular in the West. He argued that contemporary Chinese fiction fails to explore the inner life of characters: it is driven by plot, and often by a plodding narrative ...”