Oct

12

Hallucinatory realism is the writing style ascribed to this year's Nobel Prize winner in literature, Mo Yan. One of Yan's novels, Red Sorghum, was made into a 1987 movie by Zhang Yimou. (Yimou as I recall used old Kodacolor film that made for beautiful colors in many of his films).

It is interesting that Faulkner had an influence on Yan's writing.

Novelist Mo Yan, whose popular, sprawling, bawdy tales bring to life rural China, won the Nobel Prize for literature Thursday, the first time the award has been given to a Chinese who is not a critic of the authoritarian government. Official media and many Chinese cheered his selection.
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From wikipedia:

Mo Yan's works are predominantly social commentary, and he is strongly influenced by the social realism of Lu Xan and the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez. In terms of traditional Chinese literature, he cites Journey to the West and Dream of the Red Chamber as formative influences.[3] A major theme in Mo Yan's works is the constancy of human greed and corruption, despite the influence of ideology.[1] Using dazzling, complex, and often graphically violent images, he sets many of his stories near his hometown, Northeast Gaomi Township in Shandong province. Mo Yan says he realized that he could make "his family, people I'm familiar with, the villagers…" his characters after reading William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.[3] Mo Yan strongly advocates that Chinese authors read foreign authors and world literature.[7]

From the New Yorker:

The People's Republic has sought a Nobel Prize in Literature so avidly and for so long that it became a national psychological fixation—China's "Nobel complex," as commentators and television shows often put it. (Julia Lovell wrote a good book about China's pursuit of the literature prize.)

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