How do you take your meat—if you do? Well-done or still bloody? Are you queasy at the thought of slaughter or do you ignore the source of your Leo’s, Tombs, or 5 Guys burger?
Liao Xiaotong, protagonist of Mo Yan’s newest novel Pow!, adores his meat from pasture to plate. He wouldn’t turn his nose up at even the bleakest casserole left at late night.
In fact, carrion might just be the star character in this comical, magic and folklore-infused narration of a childhood, loosely based off the author’s own.
It may surprise you to hear that this is the work of last year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature. Is this comic 386-page ode to meat and immaturity the serious, level-headed work of the 2012 Nobel laureate? Or must it be some pretentious, post-modern, allegorical meditation on the absurdity of life, especially under the repressive Chinese government?
Thankfully, it isn’t the latter. Mo’s novel is a pleasure for its creativity, clever narration, and transportation to a different place—not just to a Chinese village, but to a world of meat gods and fleshy magical realism.
The author grew up in Shandong province on the center of the Chinese coast in a farming village, and was forced to drop out of school at a young age to work. Mo has focused all of his writings on that region and lifestyle—“I hope to make tiny Northeast Gaomi Township a microcosm of China, even of the whole world,” he said. Of becoming an author after such humble beginnings, Mo said, “I must admit that were it not for the 30-odd years of tremendous development and progress in Chinese society, and the subsequent national reform and opening of her doors to the outside, I would not be a writer today.“
This is about as political and subversive as Mo gets, which has been hugely frustrating to many literary figures. Salman Rushdie, of The Satanic Verses fame, called him a “patsy” for the Chinese government. Mo didn’t sign the petition for Liu Xiaobo’s freedom, a fellow intellectual who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 while in detention for “inciting subversion of state power.” Mo says he’s proud of being able to stay impartial.
In the acceptance speech for his Nobel, Mo responded to these, virtually his only, critics: “As a member of society, a novelist is entitled to his own stance … but when he is writing he must take a humanistic stance, and write accordingly. Only then can literature not just originate in events, but transcend them, not just show concern for politics but be greater than politics.”
Pow! is greater than politics. At Georgetown, if you aren’t reading Hillary Clinton’s biography, you’re reading a history of the Cold War, or a classic novel you can reference in conversation. I’m guilty of partaking in this kind of esoteric activity myself. When was the last time you read a 400-page book that made you smirk, squirm, and smile on every page? Try it over Spring Break and feel what a relief it is.
The real treasure in Mo’s refreshing novel is the narrator, a meat-obsessed 20-something relinquishing his childhood to become a not-so-saintly monk. Above all else, he adores meat—“My dilemma suddenly became clear—my stomach could only hold so much, but the amount of meat in this world stretched out into infinity. And all that meat longed for me to eat it, which was in perfect accord with my desires.”
This know-it-all, immaturely self-assured tone marks the entire text, whether the character is speaking as a child or as narrator recounting his past. His graphic descriptions of the butchering process are plentiful too—no way to read around them.
I’m not the biggest carnivore out there by any means—I’ll take my meat well-done, if at all, thank you very much. I’d like to think I have a high tolerance for gore—I’ve seen an animal beheaded, smelled its metallic blood, seen it skinned and hung to dry, and am certainly not a vegetarian. Still, some passages really made me cringe—Liao Xiatong’s town butchers inject dirty water to bulk a still living animal’s size and weight, dye it, and coat it in formaldehyde to preserve the aforementioned changes. It’s a bit much to bear.
But it’s worth reading, if you can get beyond the graphic details. Pow! does not force you to rebel or “think” in a grand, intellectual sense, but it takes you away and makes you laugh. Even the Nobel committee doesn’t require revolution or subversion of its awardees—the medal for literature quotes Virgil, saying that winners “enhance life which is beautified through art.”
Pow! is charming and fun, and thus beautifies life. It is an unpredictable journey of youthful flaws, candor, digressions and lots of soliloquies on the virtues of meat. Maybe Mo’s other stories are more serious, more revolutionary. But Pow! is hot, local, and finely cooked—no formaldehyde preservatives in sight.
