| The Republic of Wine: A Novel | |
| Translator: | Howard Goldblatt |
| Author: | Mo Yan |
| Country: | China |
| Language: | Chinese |
| Publisher: | Hong Fan (China) Hamish Hamilton (UK) |
| Genre: | Satire, Detective novel, Comedy, social commentary |
| Pub Date: | 1992 |
| English Pub Date: | 2000 |
| Media Type: | |
| Pages: | 356 (English) |
| Isbn: | 0-14-025677-6 |
| Oclc: | 59544313 |
The Republic of Wine: A Novel is a satirical novel by Mo Yan, which was first published in 1992. The novel explores the relationship between Chinese people and food and drink, and comments on government corruption and excesses. It was translated to English by Howard Goldblatt.
The novel has two distinct narrative threads, one of a standard fiction form following a detective, and the other a series of letters between "Mo Yan" and an aspiring author who is a fan of his work. The book contains ten chapters; each chapter contains several parts. The "detective" thread follows a special investigator, Ding Gou'er, sent to rural China to investigate claims of cannibalism. The "letters" thread contains letters exchanged between Li Yidou, an aspiring author, and "Mo Yan", as well as short stories that Li Yidou sends to "Mo Yan". As the novel progresses, the focus shifts from the Ding Gou'er standard narrative thread to the Li Yidou/Mo Yan thread. Some characters appear in both threads.
The Republic of Wine received near unanimous praise from Western literary critics. Phillip Gabone of The New York Times wrote, “The Republic of Wine is a fantastical postmodernist hodgepodge that borrows elements from kung fu novels, detective thrillers, traditional Chinese tales of the supernatural, American westerns and magic realist fiction. Some readers may find, as Mo says of one of the student's stories, that this novel suffers from "overly loose organization and relative lack of authorial restraint," but there's no denying that in his juxtapositions of the horrific and the comic, the lyric and the scatological, Mo is poking fun at China's post-Mao reformist era while letting out a wrenching cri de coeur for the lost soul of his country.”[1] [2]
Literary magazine Publishers Weekly praised the novel writing that Mo Yan, "fashions a complex, self-conscious narrative structure full of echoes and reflections. The novel grows progressively more febrile in tone, with pervasive, striking imagery and wildly imaginative digressions that cumulatively reveal the tremendous scope of his vision.”[3] [4]
Yun-Chu Tsai has interpreted the novel as criticizing the increasing disparities in wealth and status in Chinese society and the increasing commodification of life. The book depicts a society where the "pleasure and desire for delicacies" of the wealthy matter more than the lives of the poor, until "the inferior in social rank becomes food".[5] Likewise, the satirical exaggeration of the novel shows where commodification might lead. In one of the embedded stories, the inventor of the "braised baby" argues that "the babies we are about to slaughter and cook are small animals in human form that are, based upon strict, mutual agreement, produced to meet the special needs of Liquorland's developing economy and prosperity", not essentially different from other animals raised for consumption or other goods produced for sale. If anything can become a commodity based on the mutual consent of buyer and seller, then Liquorland's cannibalism is just the logical consequence.