An overlooked novel by a Nobel Prize winner little read in the West

I'm looking for ways to praise Mo Yan's 1988 novel, Red Sorghum, without going over the top - I've read only the first 1/3 of the novel and am sadly aware of how many books start off well and lose steam and direction as they chug along - but at least from what I've read so far this novel, about the narrator's family and their village life in Manchuria beginning ca 1939 with the resistance to the Japanese occupation of NE China - this novel deserves comparison w/ the much more famous (to English-language readers) 100 Years of Solitude. Interestingly, YM also won a Nobel Prize for literature, but his work has never earned the readership in the West that it probably deserves (I picked up this novel almost randomly and know nothing about any of his other works). Perhaps the comparison w/ 100 Years isn't entirely apt, as RS has much more violence and brutality than that work; much of it is set during the war, and YM depicts horrible atrocities by the occupying Japanese forces. But there's also much violence outside of the wartime setting; much of the novel, at least in the first third, involve the narrator's grandmother's marriage: She was betrothed, with no say in the matter, as a teenage girl to the son of a wealthy family in a nearby village; the fiance seems to be dying of leprosy and of course the bride is horrified and repulsed. En route to her wedding, to which she's carried by 4 strong men in one of those "sedan chairs" on long poles, the group is attacked by a bandit, whom one of the bearers brutally kills. The man - Yu - returns to to the bridal village where he murders the new husband and his father and carries away and has sex (consensual!) with the young bride. Their resultant child is the father of the narrator - though his parentage is kept secret. Anyway, this novel consists of many adventures, often ending in brutal deaths, but all of which show us some of the hardships, the values, the resistance of the people in this era and this culture. It's in some ways a book about warfare, but also it's a book about family legends - reminding me in some ways of American Westerns (Lonesome Dove comes to mind for some reason). Over the next few days of reading, I'll of YM can maintain this intensity and his focus.