Mo Yan's fiction compared w/ Garcia Marquez and Faulkner

Mo Yan's 1988 novel, Red Sorgham, keeps circling around the central point in the narrative: the attack that the Chinese resistance forces, led by the narrator's grandfather, Yu, and initiating his father into the ways of guerilla war. The attack was a disaster for the Chinese (and the narrator's family), largely because reinforcing troops from another division never arrived on the scene. Outnumbered at first, but not for long, the Japanese tore through the village and left few survivors. Section 3 (of 5) in this novel begins w/ the aftermath of the massacre, with the narrator's father mourning the death on the field of his mother (the narrator's grandmother), and Grandfather Yu is set on vengeance, both against the Japanese and against the Chinese leader who never arrived at the attack site. Throughout this section we see more of the brutality and the gruesome side of combat - lots of blood and oozing, lots of broken bones and worse - the battle site feels closer to medieval warfare than to modern combat. The narrative at times flashes ahead to china ca 1980, so we know that some of the characters, aside from the narrator, endure and live to fight w/ the revolutionary army and perhaps beyond. This novel continues to be that rare combination - I mentioned Garcia Marquez in a previous post, and the comparison still seems apt - of life in a small and remote community, essentially seen through the viewpoint of one family, that gives us a sense of all of humanity, though I would say that MY's novel is more overtly a piece of historical fiction than most other novels of this type (compare, say, w/ Faulkner, in which there is little depiction of the major historical events w/in its scope).