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A review by elenajohansen
Big Breasts and Wide Hips by Mo Yan
1.0
I didn’t hate the writing style, or the characters. I didn’t hate the premise. So why did I DNF this just past 150 pages?
Because I literally cannot count the number of times a single female character (Shangguan Lu, or “Mother”) was raped in those 150 pages. Incidents occurred on three separate occasions, the first by a lone man (who fathered one of her many children on her), but the later two were both gang rapes, one by four men and the other by…who knows? It’s not said.
The blurb led me to believe this was era-spanning Chinese historical fiction centered on “strong female characters” despite it being narrated by Mother’s last child and only son. (Which is weirdness I’ll get to in a minute.)
But this is a textbook case of “strong” equaling “suffers constantly and horrifically.”
Why is a woman’s strength measured by how much pain she can endure? Where’s the literary fiction built upon a male character being raped countless times?
So that’s enough to make me stop, because despite some aspects of the work being genuinely engaging, I’m done with narratives glorifying women for their stoic, unflinching acceptance of shit men shovel onto them.
Now, about the weirdness. The narrator, Jintong, is a baby. He’s fixated on Mother’s breasts (which the blurb says are symbols, that the female body is a symbol of strength) and sure, okay, they feed him, so I get that, even if reading about it constantly is vaguely uncomfortable because of the hyperbolic language and metaphors he uses for da boobs.
But this baby narrator thinks and “speaks” like an adult, because who would want to read 400-some pages of baby babble? So it’s already a flawed conceit. And then I noticed that Jintong also narrates scenes he’s not physically present for. I’d be fine with an omniscient non-character narrator, but….Jintong’s an actual baby? Is he supposed to be a psychic baby? Clairvoyant? If you’re going to have a gimmick, at least commit to it–if you pick a baby for a narrator, then the story should only be what he’s around for.
Because I literally cannot count the number of times a single female character (Shangguan Lu, or “Mother”) was raped in those 150 pages. Incidents occurred on three separate occasions, the first by a lone man (who fathered one of her many children on her), but the later two were both gang rapes, one by four men and the other by…who knows? It’s not said.
The blurb led me to believe this was era-spanning Chinese historical fiction centered on “strong female characters” despite it being narrated by Mother’s last child and only son. (Which is weirdness I’ll get to in a minute.)
But this is a textbook case of “strong” equaling “suffers constantly and horrifically.”
Why is a woman’s strength measured by how much pain she can endure? Where’s the literary fiction built upon a male character being raped countless times?
So that’s enough to make me stop, because despite some aspects of the work being genuinely engaging, I’m done with narratives glorifying women for their stoic, unflinching acceptance of shit men shovel onto them.
Now, about the weirdness. The narrator, Jintong, is a baby. He’s fixated on Mother’s breasts (which the blurb says are symbols, that the female body is a symbol of strength) and sure, okay, they feed him, so I get that, even if reading about it constantly is vaguely uncomfortable because of the hyperbolic language and metaphors he uses for da boobs.
But this baby narrator thinks and “speaks” like an adult, because who would want to read 400-some pages of baby babble? So it’s already a flawed conceit. And then I noticed that Jintong also narrates scenes he’s not physically present for. I’d be fine with an omniscient non-character narrator, but….Jintong’s an actual baby? Is he supposed to be a psychic baby? Clairvoyant? If you’re going to have a gimmick, at least commit to it–if you pick a baby for a narrator, then the story should only be what he’s around for.