A few essays on Mo Yan

I recently read this brief interview with Brendan O’Kane (“Why I’m leaving China: parting words from Brendan O’Kane”, The Anthill, 26 July 2013), wherein he mentions how Mo Yan’s prose is “neither fully vernacular, in the way that Wang Shuo is, nor literary in the way that Eileen Chang is”, which prompted me to read the surprisingly active English-language critical discourse around Mo Yan’s work when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature:

• Anna Sun, “The diseased language of Mo Yan”, Kenyon Review, fall 2012
• Brendan O’Kane, “Is Mo Yan a stooge for the Chinese government?”, Rectified.name, 15 October 2012
• Perry Link, “Does this writer deserve the prize?”, The New York Review, 6 December 2012 (paywalled)
• Charles Laughlin, “What Mo Yan’s detractors get wrong”, ChinaFile, 11 December 2012, which is partially a response to Sun’s and Link’s pieces
• Perry Link, “Why we should criticize Mo Yan”, The New York Review, 24 December 2012 (paywalled; reprinted here)

I myself have barely read any Mo Yan; I started his first and most famous novel, Red sorghum clan (紅高粱家族) but was unable to get more than a few dozen pages in before I lost interest—largely because of this exact issue with his language.

Also worth reading is this interview, again with O’Kane, on the Los Angeles Review of Books China blog:

• Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “Of literature and laureates, translations and trends: a Q & A with blogger, tweeter, translator, and ‘model worker’ Brendan O’Kane”, 21 August 2013