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Mo Yan’s new novel: A Peter Pan tale | The Economist
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Review our <a href="/web/20121222172802/http://www.economist.com/cookies-info" target="_blank">cookies information</a> for more details</div><div class="ec-messages messages-warning message-region-ME" id="ec-message-2"><a href="/web/20121222172802/http://www.economist.com/ec-messaging/2" class="dismiss-messages"></a>This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Review our <a href="/web/20121222172802/http://www.economist.com/cookies-info" target="_blank">cookies information</a> for more details</div><div class="ec-messages messages-warning message-region-NA" id="ec-message-2"><a href="/web/20121222172802/http://www.economist.com/ec-messaging/2" class="dismiss-messages"></a>This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. Review our <a href="/web/20121222172802/http://www.economist.com/cookies-info" target="_blank">cookies information</a> for more details</div> <div id="columns" class="clearfix"> <div id="column-content" class="grid-10 grid-first clearfix"> <!-- Create left column on search pages --> <div class="node-blog-tpl" class="clearfix"> <div class="blog-title prospero"> <img class="imagefield imagefield-field_blog_logo" width="236" height="95" alt="" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20121222172802im_/http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/blog_sites/_0000s_0007_propero.png?1328719155"/> <div class="blog-post-header"> <span><a href="/web/20121222172802/http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero">Prospero</a></span> <h2>Books, arts and culture</h2> </div> </div> <div class="item-list"><ul id="blog_post_sublinks"><li class="first"><a href="/web/20121222172802/http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/12/new-film-west-memphis" data-ec-omniture="blogs_nav_top|prev">Previous</a></li> <li class="even"><span>Next</span></li> <li><a href="/web/20121222172802/http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero" class="sublink_latest" data-ec-omniture="blogs_nav_top|blog_site">Latest Prospero</a></li> <li class="even last"><a href="/web/20121222172802/http://www.economist.com/blogs" data-ec-omniture="blogs_nav_top|all_blogs">Latest from all our blogs</a></li> </ul></div> <h1 class="ec-blog-fly-title">Mo Yan’s new novel</h1> <h3 class="ec-blog-headline"> A Peter Pan tale </h3> <p class="ec-blog-info"> Dec 22nd 2012, 11:01 by L.M. </p> <div id="block-ec_components-share_inline_header" class="block block-ec_components"> <div class="content clearfix"> <div class="share_inline_header"><ul class="clearfix"><li class="share-inline-header-facebook first" data-ec-omniture-frame="top_fb"><fb:like href="http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/12/mo-yan%E2%80%99s-new-novel" ref="scn/fb_ec/a_peter_pan_tale" send="false" layout="button_count" show_faces="false" font=""></fb:like></li> <li class="share-inline-header-twitter even last" data-ec-omniture-frame="top_twitter"><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20121222172802/http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="horizontal" data-related="theeconomist" data-url="https://web.archive.org/web/20121222172802/http://econ.st/VRgGVa" data-counturl="http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/12/mo-yan%E2%80%99s-new-novel">Tweet</a></li> </ul></div> </div> </div> <div class="ec-blog-body"> <div><p> <div class="content-image-float"> <img src="https://web.archive.org/web/20121222172802im_/http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/290-width/images/2012/12/blogs/prospero/20121222_bkp504.jpg" alt="" title="" width="290" height="416"/> </div></p><p><strong>Pow!</strong> By Mo Yan. <em>Seagull Books; 386 pages; £18. To be published in </em><em>America</em><em> in January; $27.50</em></p><p>“WISE MONK, where I come from people call children who boast and lie a lot ‘Powboys’, but every word in what I’m telling you is the unvarnished truth.” The unreliability of the narrator in “Pow!”, Mo Yan’s first new book since <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20121222172802/http://www.economist.com/news/china/21564894-prestigious-award-chinese-writer-sparks-debate-about-literary-freedom" target="_self">winning the Nobel prize in literature</a> in October, is established in its epigraph. So too in the opening pages is the structure of the novel: a roguish boy, Luo Xiaotong, sits in a crumbling temple on a stormy night recounting the story of his life to an unspeaking monk. The ordinariness of the setting only heightens the extraordinary narrative told from within it.</p><p>A decade in the past, Xiaotong’s father ran off with another woman, leaving the boy and his mother to scavenge for scrap. The pair eked out a living. But it was not much of a life, especially for Xiaotong, whose obsession with meat is matched only by his mother’s niggardliness in matters of the stomach. His is not a passion born of greed but of love. Meat talks to Xiaotong. It waves its “little tentacle-like hands” at him, begging to be eaten. It moans and trembles and sheds tears of joy as it makes its way to his mouth. Resisting it is doubly hard in his village, made up almost exclusively of butchers.</p><p>A counter-narrative of scenes unfolding in and around the temple is equally infused with meat. A woman with “breasts like ripe mangoes” suckles Xiaotong as the monk sleeps. His alter ego ravishes 41 women on an opera stage. The temple itself is devoted to the god of virility. Inevitably, the two meats collide, quite literally, as a parade of naked women mount an oncoming herd of cattle and surround the temple.</p><p>Mr Mo has been criticised for refusing to lay out his ideological beliefs, a din that reached its shrillest in the week running up to his Nobel acceptance speech on December 10th. “What about ideology?” he writes in the afterword to “Pow!”. “About that I have nothing to say. I have always taken pride in my lack of ideology.” The sole purpose of “Pow!”, he says, is narration: it is its goal, its theme, its “construct of ideas”. “Pow!” is a Rorschach inkblot of a book, and all the better for not telling the reader what to think. Within the book, meat is everywhere and everything. 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