The Garlic Ballads – A Perturbing Tale of Dissent and Oppression

“They say officials love to serve the people, so why do they treat the common folk as enemies? Heavy taxes and under-the-table levies, like ravenous beasts, force the farmers to head for the hills. The common folk have a bellyful of grievances, but they dare not let them out. For the moment they open their mouths, electric prods close them fast.”

The brilliant and controversial Chinese novelist Mo Yan’s 1988 novel The Garlic Ballads (translated to English by Howard Goldblatt in 1995) details inhumanity and injustices that offers a disconcerting reading experience. Having previously read a novel and short stories of Mo Yan (Red Sorghum & Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh) and forewarned of the brutal violence in The Garlic Ballads, I was somewhat prepared for it. Yet the novel deeply agitated me with its relentlessly grim portrait of patriarchy and bureaucracy. Set in 1987 rural China, the novel chronicles the ruined lives of ‘Paradise County’ peasants, who are ordered by the government to plant only garlic in their fields.  When garlic glut renders the commodity worthless the officials who gave the order now refuse to even buy their produce, while the angry peasants revolt and ransack the local government office. The establishment reacts in the only way it knows when the masses question its power: through state-sanctioned violence.     

               

The Garlic Ballads may sound like a diatribe against the corrupt and vicious communists of Deng Xiaoping era (1978-1989). In fact, the book was banned in the wake of Tienanmen Square protests. But Mo Yan, the masterful raconteur and storyteller delivers more than a polemic as he effortlessly conveys the concerns and ubiquitous struggles in farmers’ lives. The powerlessness and frustration of the peasants is narrated through three characters: Gao Ma, a garlic farmer and war veteran whose love affair with his neighbor girl Jinju leads to bitter conflict with the girl’s family; Gao Yang, also a poor garlic farmer who has faced humiliation throughout his life for having landlord parents; and Fourth Aunt, Jinju’s ill-treated mother. All three are arrested by uncaring officials for their alleged participation on the revolt and trashing of the government co-op.

While Mo Yan symbolizes the atmosphere of fury and depravity by evoking the imagery of garlic rotting in the fields, he also meticulously details the trickle of bodily fluids. There are vivid descriptions of these people bleeding, urinating, sweating, etc (“something warm and wet [which] slithered into his nasal cavities then continues down his face. He tried, but couldn't hold it back; whatever it was spurted out of his nostrils and entered his mouth.”) Such intimate (and discomfiting) observations of the bodily functions somehow illustrate the people’s distressed psychological state. Moreover, when the three alleged rioters are picked up by the police (several days after the revolt), Mo Yan cleverly uses disjointed flashbacks to gain our empathy for the characters. And most often, the author counterbalances his visceral depictions of pain and torture with lyrical evocation of natural landscapes (“Stars shone brightly in the deep, dark, downy-soft canopy of heaven, beneath which cornstalks, straining to grow tall, stretched and rustled.”)

The Garlic Ballads not only lays bare the inhumanity rampant in the ruling quarters, it also closely focuses on the brutality, carried out in the name of preserving tradition & culture. The marriage arranged for Jinju is pretty much a business negotiation, and when Gao Ma decides to thwart Jinju’s family’s plans the violence he is subjected to us is as dreadful as the state-sanctioned violence. On one hand, the corrupt officials use the shell of socialism to propagate fascist policies; on other hand, Mo Yan indicts deplorable cultural practices and rigid moral codes, pushing the agrarian community to be in conflict with one another. The writer depicts how this debasement enveloping the Chinese society (within family and state) sternly restricts individual freedom. The title refers to ballads sung by a blind minstrel named Zhang Kou, whose songs is considered to be driving force behind the farmers' rebellion. Each chapter of the novel opens with Zhang’s ballads who eventually gets arrested by a policeman, cursing “You blind bastard, you’re the prime suspect in the Paradise County garlic case!” The minstrel's mouth is gagged although it takes much more than to wholly silence him.

P.S.: when Mo Yan received Nobel Prize in 2012, Peter Englund, the Nobel permanent secretary selected The Garlic Ballads as ‘Mo Yan’s gateway book’ (first of the author’s novel to be translated into English). 

 

The Housekeeper and the Professor – A Gentle and Poignant Tale of a Make-Shift Family

“Eternal truths are ultimately invisible, and you won’t find them in material things or natural phenomena, or even in human emotions. Mathematics, however, can illuminate them, can give them expression — in fact, nothing can prevent it from doing so...”

While reading Yoko Ogawa’s 2003 novel The Housekeeper and the Professor (translated to English by Stephen Snyder in 2009), I kept wondering if it was the same Ogawa who wrote the eerie novellas and unsettling short stories, published under the titles ‘The Diving Pool’ (Ogawa’s first work to be translated to English) and ‘Revenge’. If those works I first read of Ogawa had a spooky fun-house quality, The Housekeeper and the Professor could be described as charming and heartwarming. I wouldn’t say the novel was as riveting as the author's previous works I read. Yet this slender novel has an extraordinary premise and evokes honest, powerful emotions without becoming melodramatic or sentimental.

Set in the year 1992, the eponymous unnamed housekeeper and our narrator is a young single mother, who receives a job from the Akebono Housekeeping Agency to take care of an old professor. The professor’s sister-in-law informs the housekeeper about the unusually challenging nature of her job. The professor is a brilliant mathematician who after a car accident in 1975 suffers from short-term memory loss. His memory lasts only 80 minutes (which means he can’t remember anything past the year 1975) and he is intimated of his own condition and other vital things through post-it notes affixed to his jacket with safety pins. While the professor’s memory fails him, he takes comfort in the numbers. In fact, he gets acquainted with his housekeeper everyday (whose image is roughly drawn in a paper decorating his suit to remind him who she is) through questions related to numbers: “What’s your shoe size?”, “What’s your date of birth?”, “How much did you weigh when you were born?” -- these are the number-related questions he poses to his housekeeper.

The professor spends most of his time solving complex math problems for prize money or wrestles with proof for new theorems. The numbers give him the continuity his memory couldn’t. At the same time, the professor’s compassionate behavior and unbridled love for mathematics affects the housekeeper too and later shapes the future of her 10-year-old son, nicknamed ‘Root’ by the professor. A tender friendship forms between the three people of different age group and sensibilities. Their mutual love for numbers and baseball helps them create a make-shift family. The housekeeper and her son learn to accommodate themselves according to the professor’s abridged memory. The friendship between them reveals hidden beauty of math as well as the hidden beauty of human connection.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is a simple, cozy novel that explores the themes of memory, family, healing, and loss. Ogawa does a good job in often relating the warm relationship between the three to a math theory or special numbers: like the housekeeper learning about ‘amicable numbers’ or the professor’s kindness towards Root is compared with his love for ‘Primes’, and the professor cutting short a bitter argument by writing Euler’s formula. The friendship is slightly romanticized, but Ogawa includes tangible bittersweet notes to the keep the premise’ sentimentality in check. The author’s prose is clear and precise so that she never goes overboard with emotions. Eventually, the underlying commentary in the professor’s love for mathematics and his memory condition is beautifully fleshed out; the challenges related to math isn’t solved by preservation and acquisition of memories, but by scrutinizing the problems with fresh set of eyes every time. That also has something to say about quotidian life and human connections.

P.S.: The book was adapted into a movie (‘The Professor’s Beloved Equation’) in 2006 by Takashi Koizumi, which largely stayed faithful to the source novel.

The Shape of the Ruins – A Complex and Layered Novel on the Elusive Nature of Political History

“”Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric,” wrote Yeats. “Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” And what happens when both quarrels arise at the same time, when fighting with the world is a reflection or a transfiguration of the subterranean but constant confrontation you have with yourself? Then you write a book like the one I’m writing now, and blindly trust that the book will mean something to somebody else.”

Robert Bolano and Juan Gabriel Vasquez are couple of my favorite Latin-American authors, whose works serve as antithesis to the canonized magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Both Mr. Vasquez and Mr. Bolano ostensibly like to insert themselves into their narratives (Bolano shows up as Arturo Belano) and they both possesses the gift to turn a anecdote of some obscure history (pertaining to their nations) into a compelling fiction. May be the Chilean author Bolano differs from Colombian Vasquez in the way he employs his deliberately impassive prose to convey the horror and violence of Latin America’s historical reality. Vasquez’s prose also presents the human toll claimed by the country’s years of violence, but it resonates more with lyricism and poignancy.  

Juan Gabriel Vasquez’ latest novel The Shape of the Ruins (originally published in 2015 and translated to English by Anne McLean in 2018), which got shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, focuses on pair of political assassinations in 20^th century Colombia that was enveloped in the shadows of conspiracy theories. One was the killing of reformist liberal politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitan whose death plunged Colombia’s capital Bogota into chaos, and the resulting massive riots caused death of 3,000 Colombians (referred to as ‘El Bogotazo’). The riots were followed by ‘La Violencia’, a ten year civil war. Juan Roa Sierra is the man who guns down Gaitan and in the ensuing pandemonium he is lynched by the mob, his body paraded around the streets. But soon there are talks of mysterious elegant men in grey suit, disappearing witnesses, cover-ups, and fall-guys. The other political murder was that of Rafael Uribe Uribe in 1914, a liberal statesman axed to death in broad day-light (Uribe was the inspiration behind the fictional character Aureliano Buendia in Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”) The perpetrators are captured, but a young lawyer named Tulio Anzola makes public accusations of a conspiracy involving prominent figures (Jesuits, Police chief, Prosecutor, etc).

The Shape of the Ruins, however, isn’t an Oliver Stone’s JFK-style counter-propaganda on the murder of Colombia’s two prominent political figures of 20^th century. It isn’t a conventional political thriller, where the author strongly propagates his version of truth. Vasquez rather deftly explores how the conspiratorial visions smooth over the jagged rifts left by conflict-ridden national history and the perils of obsession over such hearsay and speculations. Vasquez achieves this by injecting his fictionalized self as the narrator-protagonist. As the narrator’s premature twin daughters are fighting for their lives, he attends a party thrown by his friend, Dr Benavides. In the party, Vasquez meets Carlos Carballo, an eccentric middle-aged man obsessed with figuring out the alternative version of 1948 murder of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. Their initial encounter leads to physical altercation, pushing Vasquez to categorize Carlos as a conspiracy theorist and fantasist. But later when encountering Carballo at a funeral of a writer-friend, Vasquez questions his initial assessment of Carballo. And Carballo approaches Vasquez (with plethora of materials), requesting him to open his mind and write a book that may unravel the secrets behind Gaitan’s death.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

I like reading novels like The Shape of the Ruins because it takes some elements of historical truth to build an intricate tale around it. In the due process, I have also learned a lot about Colombian history (not just the conspiracy theories behind the political assassinations). Vasquez’ literary world has one foot set in the fact and the other is set among personal memories and private lives. The novel attains immense depth when these two facets of Vasquez’ world meet each other. In fact, the historical, political landscape and private conflicts are beautifully and captivatingly voiced so that it doesn’t get lost among the elliptical narrative. Overall, The Shape of the Ruins is a magisterial novel that deals with pliancy of historical narratives and human obsession for scrutinizing the shadows of the past.