how low my mother had fallen

"Worse was to come, something I could never have imagined. I opened the drawer of her bedside table to make sure she still had some biscuits. I saw what I believed to be a cookie and took it. It was a human turd. I slammed the drawer shut in utter confusion. Then it occurred to me that if I left it there, someone would find it, and that subconsciously, I probably wanted this to happen so that they could see how low my mother had fallen. I found a piece of paper and went to flush it down the toilet. I recalled a scene from my childhood: I had hidden some excrements in my bedroom cupboard because I felt too lazy to go downstairs and use the outdoor toilet."

~~ from I Remain in Darkness by Annie Ernaux

currently reading

I'm almost finished Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and am thirty pages into Mo Yan's Change. On the horizon are To Live by Yu Hua and Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal.

Mo Yan and the writer's wealth of dumplings

"One old-timer talked about all the famous dishes he had seen as a waiter in a Qingdao restaurant: braised beef tournedos, pan-fried chicken, things like that. Wide-eyed we stared at his mouth until we could smell the aroma of all that delicious food and see it materialize, as if it had dropped from the sky. The 'rightest' student said he knew someone who had written a book that brought him thousands, maybe tens of thousands, in royalties. Each and every day the fellow ate jiaozi, those tasty little pork dumplings, at all three meals, the oil oozing from inside with each bite. When we said we didn't believe anyone could be so rich as to eat jiaozi three times a day, the waiter said scornfully, 'He's a writer, for goodness sake! Do you understand? A writer!' That's all I needed to know: become a writer and you can eat meaty jiaozi three times a day. Life doesn't get any better than that. Why, not even the gods could do better. That's when I made up my mind to become a writer someday."

~~from Mo Yan's introduction to his stories collected in Shifu, You'll Do Anything For A Laugh

Mo Yan

I was browsing Mo Yan novels in the Greenville Public Library, and I came across his interesting choice for a prefatory quotation to The Garlic Ballads:

Novelists are forever trying to distance themselves from politics, but the novel itself closes in on politics. Novelists are so concerned with "man's fate" that they tend to lose sight of their own fate. Therein lies their tragedy. 

~Josef Stalin

I don't think that it invariably requires a Nobel Prize in Literature to sell translated books in the states, but I do know Mo Yan won one in 2012. The books I was looking at in the library appeared worn, to an extent, so I'm guessing that they were on the shelf before that.

As you may know, Mo Yan is a pen name that means "don't speak," and if you follow the link to Wikipedia.org from his name above, you'll see that there was some controversy over his win in light of both his ties to Chinese authorities as well as his Swedish translator's connection to the Nobel committee. I haven't read his writing.

you said that's a Prize for Peace?

I wasn't thinking of all the different points Tariq Ali makes in this interview, but in light of the current austerity in Greece and Spain and European Union's extremely high unemployment rate, I was surprised and confused when I heard the news that the E.U. has won the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize.

Mo Yan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is getting much stronger praise, at least from this expert in Chinese literature. Smith College's Sabina Knight says, "If you want to know why I love Mo Yan, just read anything by Mo Yan. His works seethe with a life force, and his grappling with human aggression transcends national borders. His works shed light on the dark depths of our psyches, a darkness on which China has no monopoly."

I like to think she wasn't speaking of my recent ice-cream intake when she notes that we all have darker depths than we care to recognize.