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The post Substitute for himself appeared first on Minuto30.

All fans of Mo Yan (Nobel 2012) have a very serious problem: the man writes too slowly. Although who can judge, only in this way can greatness be achieved. But the fact is that, excluding “Late Flowers” ​​from 2022 because it is a collection of stories, we have run out of great novels to translate, since in the absence of his new manuscript from 2023 titled in Chinese “Crocodile” (鱷魚) crossing the Silk Road to the West, all his 11 books published in English are already available in our language and we only have a few compilations of minor stories in the pipeline before the more than imminent shortage of literature. moyanesca to which we are headed.

Meanwhile, we have “The Reunion of the Comrades in Arms”, a short novel that was originally published three decades ago and where we find as main themes several of the recurring themes that Mo Yan hides behind the scenes like supporting actors: the followinglife and military conflicts. The first had a prominent supporting role in the wonderful “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out” while the second accompanies as a garrison in the totemic “Red Sorghum”. Here, instead, we enter fully into both with the officer Zhao Jin who, following some strange events, as usual, ends up remembering his old past glories with the ghosts of his friends in the People’s Liberation Army of the Chinese Communist Party.

Although the novel works in an acceptable way, it does so more because of Mo Yan’s great narrative (unfortunately somewhat marred by multiple typing errors that crept into the final style review before printing) than because of the story it proposes to us, since there is no such story, but rather we simply go to witness various anecdotes of a group of rifle colleagues who have become somewhat nostalgic for the followinglife. However, there are several passages of pure gold with the best of Mo Yan unleashed, such as the arc regarding the work “Eating Soy Beans” in Chapter 8 or the heartbreaking story of the father who wants to recover his son’s bones in Chapter 17.

There is no doubt that Mo Yan’s forte is in the long novel, to which he himself expressed his devotion in the Spanish prologue of “Boom!” entitled “Defending the Honor of the Novel,” since “The Reunion of the Comrades in Arms” feels like a substitute for itself, a promise of something that looked very good, but that is a bit bland, halfway between short and discreet titles from his catalog such as “The Map of the Hidden Treasure” or “The Oxen” and the big hits that made us fall in love with his lyrics. With 300 more pages that would allow him to slowly develop, as he likes, the stories of the other soldiers who accompany Zhao Jin (and that of Zhao Jin himself), we would most likely have had a spectacularly solid text with a direct entry into the author’s canonical material.

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The post Substitute for himself appeared first on Minuto30.

2024-07-22 02:07:03
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