Book: Frog, Mo Yan
Publication date: 2014 (2009 in Chinese)
WCRG Meeting: 13 January 2016
Group rating: 5.8
In the first meeting of the New Year, the Reading Group met to discuss Mo Yan's Frog. First published in Chinese in 2009, Mo Yan has gained increased international attention as a novelist since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012. The member who recommended the book was keen to see how the group would find Mo's work and felt that our Reading Group members would read the text closely, rather than simply be swayed by the wildly differing opinions of Mo Yan as either a brave whistle-blower against the establishment, or the mouthpiece of the Chinese government. Reading the book – which deals with the one-child policy in China – at this time was also felt to be particularly apt given the announcement of the official ending of this policy in 2015.
In explaining its decision to award the Nobel Prize to Mo Yan, the selection panel described his style as one of 'hallucinatory realism'; and this blurring of the lines between superstition and reality, truth and subterfuge, was evident to all who read Frog. Mo's frankness in describing the brutal realities of enforcing the one-child policy is counter-balanced by a certain playfulness in dealing with some of the other painful issues of the time, such as the starving children eating coal and the ambiguity surrounding the provenance of Little Lion's and Tadpole's baby.
It was remarked upon by a number of readers that Mo Yan 'fudges' the issue of who is responsible for the suffering of the people and raises potential economic justifications for the policy through the narrator, whom all believed to represent Mo Yan himself. One member commented that, for all the detail provided, she didn't get a sense of history or the passage of time from reading the novel, and felt that interrogation of the issues was avoided.
Gugu is ostensibly the main character, but she does not tell her own story. Instead, her story is told by a man in a society which heavily dictates the role of women. This framing of Gugu's story may have been an attempt to highlight this injustice, but it had the unfortunate side-effect of distancing the reader from Gugu. One never gets a glimpse of her interiority or that of any character in the book. One member memorably described the characters of Frog as 'illustrations of points' rather than representations of flesh and blood people. The epistolary form of the novel, where Tadpole tells the story of his family and his village through a series of one-sided letters to his Japanese mentor, was also felt to be rather awkward.
The possibility was raised that the at-times clunky prose may partly have been the effect of the translation. Howard Goldblatt is the English translator of all Mo Yan's works and is known for self-editing the texts so as to, in his opinion, make them more palatable for Western readers. Not speaking English himself, Mo Yan is supposedly unfazed by the possibility that his works are being, at best edited, but at worst butchered.
It was argued, quite passionately, that Mo Yan does not set out to create heroes in Frog. Instead, he creates ugly characters that expose ugly truths about humanity. However, readers were not disappointed by the negativity of the character portrayals so much as they were by the failure to fully realise any of the characters, or move them beyond mere caricature. Mo Yan's style may have been designed to allow his readers to think independently but it also created a distance between readers and the text, particularly Western readers who have not had first-hand experience of such situations. This begs the question of how an author writes for an audience: should a writer address an audience in terms that he/she would understand, or pitch the work at some approximation of a universal audience?
All present at the meeting found Frog to be an educational and beneficial read, bringing their attention to a society and a culture too often shrouded in mystery or obscured by misrepresentation and misunderstanding. A few members were very appreciative of the novel, giving it scores of six and seven. Ultimately, however, there was very little strong enthusiasm for the novel – giving the impression that, for many, it was a spoonful of medicine, required but not enjoyed. This somewhat lukewarm response to the text is reflected in its score of 5.8 out of 10.
