Big Breasts and Wide Hips by Mo Yan

Big Breasts and Wide Hips by Mo Yan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Around the World: 58 of 52 books for 2012

I was surprised when Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature, because I had never heard of him. I did a little research and discovered that he once said, "If you like, you can skip my other novels, but you must read Big Breasts and Wide Hips. In it I wrote about history, war, politics, hunger, religion, love, and sex." (Li-Chun Lin, "My Three American Books.") The name was intriguing too, so I tracked down a copy.

I haven't read Steinbeck for years (I'll be getting back to him next year when I finally tackle East of Eden for my California read), but the style of Mo Yan's writing reminds me a lot of Steinbeck. Gritty details, blood, guts, sex, and people barely scraping by an existence. The setting is different, the particular historical events are unique to China (spanning from early 1900s into the 1960s with the famine and beyond), but my mind kept making the comparison.

There are a lot of breasts in this book. It grew tiresome, actually, and the sometimes-narrator of Jintong is even more so. He never really gets accustomed to eating food, and subsists on breast milk even in his 40s. The narration actually goes back and forth between first and third person, and I preferred being told about the story rather than being inside Jintong's head.

Here is the bit from where the title is taken:
"My sister's figure had developed rapidly after eating the eel; her breasts were the size of pears, beautifully shaped, and she was surely destined to carry on the glorious tradition of Shangguan women, with big breasts and wide hips."

Oh yes, Jintong spends a lot of energy coveting his sister's breasts. But not in a sexual way as much as a disturbing food-source way. Uncomfortable? Yeah. Try 500+ pages of it!

As usual, I feel like I know far too little about China's history, although I have read that the author takes what works for his story and tweaks the rest. In that sense it isn't historical fiction at all, and sometimes even jumps over into magical realism (one of the sisters turns into a bird, etc.). Most of the book is description and narration, with very little dialogue, meaning that it does pass rather slowly.