New Yorker discovers Nobel Prize winner!

Now that Mo Yan has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the New Yorker has discovered him. Pretty cool, guys. Not that I knew of Yan and not that other magazines were rushing forward to translate and publish him, but it's kind of funny how the New Yorker is always late to the table - as the wealthiest and most prestigious magazine in the U.S. with some literary pretensions, couldn't we expect the NYer to be a little bit more adventuresome in its selections and a little more bold in its discoveries. Well, better late than never - the Mo Yan story, Bull, in the current NYer is very good, a rare insiders look, from the POV of a young boy, on the turmoil in China as the country transitioned to a market economy. This story highly unusual because it is set in a remote country village: the narrator's father, a ne'er do well who is scrupulously honest (about money) but who treats his family poorly, keeps them in poverty, and, as we learn over the course of the story, two-times his wife, makes his meager living as a kind of market seer: he can judge the weight and value of any piece of livestock, cows and bulls in particular, and the village butchers will pay him to adjudicate price disputes. He's in rivalry with an unscrupulous bully who makes a fortune by ingesting cattle with water, and later with formaldehyde, pumping up the weight of the carcass. You can see that this is extremely far from the usual New Yorker territory! It's also not quite what we expect of a story about a young boy's perceptions of his father at the cattle market: none of the idolatry of the powerful and just father. The boy gets enraged at his father for putting up with humiliations; and the story itself is quite brutal and viscous in its portrayal of Chinese village life - no doubt extremely distasteful to the authorities, except insofar as they can claim to have "rescued" Chinese villagers from this poverty and backwardness. Mo Yan gives a great description of the cattle market int he remote village - with the cattle traders traveling to the village in the night and arriving at dawn with their tiny herds (two or three head at most), the butchers arriving after dawn, reeking of blood, the cattle at first docile and oblivious but then increasingly agitated as they literally smell their fate. Story builds to a climax as the father's rival taunts the father, then taunts a bull - driving it into a frenzy. Story ends rather abruptly - but not with the soft and nostalgic kind of epiphany that usually ends childhood reveries, but with a shouted curse of abomination - dark and mysterious.