The Garlic Ballads: A Novel

Rats so big they tree cats, and swarms of giant insects breeding in fetid water are just incidental to the suffering of peasant farmers ordered to grow garlic by the Communist government in northeast China in 1988. The setting is Paradise County, inaptly named to say the very least. Growing garlic is tricky, as are many crops, but in particular it spoils quickly once harvested. After the farmers spend days traveling in makeshift carts with their newly harvested garlic to the county offices, they find the gates locked, and while their garlic rots, they learn that the officials have bought garlic elsewhere. Led by one of the main characters, an ex-soldier who fought in the Cultural Revolution, now a disappointed garlic farmer himself, the peasants break down the locked gates and burn the palatial county offices. Once the government identifies the farmers who were there, they are taken from their family huts and imprisoned under such inhumane conditions that it is painful to read about. The cruelty is so extreme one wonders if ordinary humans could survive such conditions, which of course many don't.The two main characters have very different backgrounds and personalities: one the leader of the protest and the other a peaceful soul who doesn't want to cause trouble. But degrees of involvement in the farmers' revolt make no difference to the corrupt officials. A parallel but integral story line is the ex-soldier's valiant attempt to marry the woman he loves despite her arranged marriage. Their story is also heartbreaking.This book is painful to read but important to know about. The author, a Nobel Prize winner, was born and grew up lived in Gaorni Township, China, and dedicates the book to the people there. Although it is fiction, there is an authenticity that clearly resonates.

It's a good story,and well told, it's just SO BLOODY SAD. Like most of the writing out of China today- it all feels like an existential novel gone wrong. The plot is probably based on yet another real life Chinese government fiasco- a group of farmers in one entire district are all told to grow and harvest garlic, to reap promised great profits, only to have a surfeit of garlic in the district. This is turn results in unrest, a sort of semi-riot, police state responses, and general misery. The story is well told and absolutely rings true, which makes it all the sadder. It is especially hard to read about the farmers and local peasants trying to figure out what they did wrong, and why they are suffering, when it is so clearly simply a repressive central government that blames the people for its mistakes. You just end up thinking "God help the Chinese living under the present government". It isn't the communism that feels so heartless- its just autocratic, repressive and all controlling government making criminals of people trying to live a decent life. It really is a Very good story- it's just too sad for me, mostly because it is still so very true.

I believe Mo Yan is trying to channel Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" and show a society of Chinese people cannibalizing itself. To be fair, the book's criticisms of some government practices (making quotas of what should be farmed, then not being able to pay for the surplus that results) and some social practices (arranged marriages) faces strong criticism much of which is imaginatively expressed.But the relentlessness of the suffering of the people, the casual brutality of the officials, the animalistic brutality of a family towards their rebellious daughter and her lover--well, it gets to be too much, real fast.[For those who don't want SPOILERS (but will wish they had read this, because it may have saved them the purchase and the time, I say here--spoiler alert.]One of the main characters, for instance, is forced by various people to drink his own urine. Not once, not twice. . . Copious amounts of it, too. Another man is forced to eat a rich meal--after it has been vomited up by our protagonist (forced vomiting by punching in the stomach). Our one sympathetic female character, pregnant in a love relationship, after a conversation with her fetus dentata, hangs herself on the delivery day. Characters are beaten with wooden stools, strung up from their hands which have been tied behind their back, anally violated with thorny sticks. They have lice eating binges. In one, particularly well-rendered scene, a prisoner with an open sore on his ankle is attacked by a rooster who pecks and pecks at the painfully infected sore until it extracts a tendon, which it gobbles down like a worm. Oh, the balladeer of the title--tasered in the mouth!There are some redeeming qualities to this book, but sometimes it feels like searching for the diamond hidden in a pile of decaying, amputated limbs.

Mo Yan's novel makes Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying" and Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" look like celebrations of joy. This novel of a small farming community somewhere in China lays bare a problematic that is reflected on a daily basis in the world media covering China. Local officials are inept, corrupt and powerful. They spend their time abusing impoverished peasants who are still hopeful that Beijing is getting it right, and will come to save them from the local incompetents. It is also about tradition and progress. In one scene, the novel's hero seeks to rescue his true love from an unfair, yet profitable, arranged marriage. He holds a Communist law book in his hand, and explains to the father of his true love that arranged marriages are illegal, and that "each person has the right to marry the person of his or her choice." The father ponders the words thoughtfully, looks up, and yells to his two sons: "beat him to a pulp!" When the hero minutes later staggers to his feet badly bloodied, he tells the father, "do what you like to me, but do not harm your daughter, the angel whom I love," at which the father takes a meditative puff on his long, brass pipe, and then swings it forcefully with a grunt, cutting a gash in his daughter's forehead. Happy times in the Chinese countryside -- with no hope of change in sight!

The Garlic Ballads describes the desperate plight of a group of poor Chinese villagers, encouraged by the State to plant garlic and then producing a glut of the crop which the state refuses to buy. the peasants almost drown in spoiling garlic while corrupt officials, living in luxury, arrest some villagers for demonstrating against the state refusal to buy their garlic.The story follows two desperate villagers as they are arrested, abused and punished for their part in the garlic riot. the author dwells on their mistreatment, their fear and their suffering in such graphic detail that the whole book reeks with the foul odors of decayed garlic, body odors, excrement and disease. There is very little to bring joy or even satisfaction to the reader in this unremittingly stench-ridden tale of suffering.It may be great literature, but it is depressing to read. And smelly.

Excellent service met expectations fully

I am not quite finished this amazing novel and it is one that I have not been able to put down. The detailed descriptions of peasants' lives is heart wrenching and difficult to read at times. Mo Yan is soooo adept at describing the lives of his characters. As I read I am transported in time to a place where life is unbelievably challenging - physically, emotionally, spiritually. The range of humanness described in the novel is so real, so real - a reminder of how we as humans have the capacity to be so loving with each other and so cruel, heartless and unfeeling.

A book chosen by our son for a Christmas present. He hasn't had time to read it yet but I'm sure he'll enjoy it.

The Garlic Ballads is life just as it is, described with great strength by an aware and loving man.Thanks a lot.