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rosellareads's review
challenging
dark
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.75
This is anything but a light read. The author clearly takes delight in describing one bloody, cruel scene in graphic detail after another. His writing style is quite dense, a lot of description and metaphors and only few pages don't contain the word 'sorghum'. He jumps to flash backs without any warning and characters are described as 'father' 'grandmother', even though the grandson is never part of the story, which it all makes for an individual literary style. I found the book too heavy handed and sadistic.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Domestic abuse, War, Violence, Misogyny, Emotional abuse, and Gun violence
kitness's review
challenging
dark
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
If you liked this, I recommend…
- 🏜️ Blood Meridian (more artistic)
- 🕸️ One Hundred Years of Solitude (more surrealistic)
- 🌘 Season of Migration to the North (little violent & more contemplative)
- 🌴 Harp of Burma (gentler & less artistic)
- 🗡️ Waiting for the Barbarians (more intimate & bleak)
- 💀 The Thirteenth House by Zameenzad (even bleaker)
This book has moments that are truly horrifying and sickening, but the force of its fiery and courageous main characters and the poetry of the prose make them a little easier to endure. The narrative’s frequent time-jumping was rather jarring at first, but eventually I grew accustomed to it. And that, I think, is the novel’s greatest quality: it creates its own world entirely.
The phrase “red sorghum” probably occurs hundreds of times, and the analogies are often deeply Chinese or even specific to the setting and narrative. By interweaving the past and future with frequent reference to events of each within the other, it creates a kind of fairytale- or folklore-esque rhythm. This impression is enhanced by the wild and often dark superstitions of the villagers, and the surrealistic army of dogs. The writing style and plot could be vaguely compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude or Blood Meridian, but Yan has his own distinctive voice that is clearer and more personal. (At least once, he even speaks to the reader directly, charging them to make a psychological and moral guess.) Two of the book’s main characters, the narrator’s Grandma and Grandpa, are called heroic at first; over time, they become as such for the reader despite their gross flaws, thanks not only to their actions but also to the narrative’s presentation of them like Greek gods who continually return to the stage (Greek for me; surely like Chinese heroes for those versed in that literature).
There is not one clear message to the book, which is very complex. People’s behavior is strange. Despite the loathsome threat of the Japanese invasion, the various Chinese regiments and bands are constantly at each other’s throats. Maybe that’s how it really was. The horrible acts of the Japanese soldiers would seem to thoroughly stamp the book as an anti-war novel, but it doesn’t seem to condemn violence as such, and most of the male characters are brutal. Nor does it praise it.
In a sense, it feels like not only the Japanese, who appear as inhuman beasts and psychopathic sadists, but almost everyone in the book is blamed—the Chinese characters, mostly not for their violence, but for their follies. At the end, the narrator bemoans the loss of the culture and life of the past, surely likening the red of the sorghum to China before the Second Sino-Japanese War, before the civil war between the Nationalists and Communists, and maybe just…before. The loss of a more natural way of life and the imposition of modernized hybrid sorghum seems key at the end. However, the majority of the book does not describe the loss of a culture the way that Things Fall Apart does—mostly, it describes the waves of battles and love affairs that defined the narrator’s grandparents’ lives, contrasted with their traditional village life whose occasional violence looks like tea and roses compared to the Japanese forces’ violence. This older violence has a quality of “when men were men” and the grandfather’s acts of murder on behalf of the grandmother certainly have a heroic light about them.
Perhaps these complexities are a result of the complexities of the real situation. It’s not simply that China’s civil war and following government changed its character, but also that the Japanese invasion demolished and violated so much. Things Fall Apart may be a good comparison after all: there is much to judge and criticize about the culture prior to the impositions of outsiders and government changes, especially on behalf of women and children; but it was something genuine and personal, something embedding people in nature and steeped in colorful tradition. It was not for outsiders to destroy.
For my part, the main result of reading this novel was to become even more anti-war than I was, though I am not confident this is an anti-war novel (maybe an anti-invasion novel). For the narrator, the Japanese seem to be the prime evil, and truly some of their real-life WWII acts I’ve read about are sickening. But I also have worked as a Japanese translator and lived in Japan, and know that a people cannot be condensed to their wartime behavior, especially not their soldiers’ wartime behavior. How then to reconcile the morally unacceptable behavior of the Japanese soldiers in Red Sorghum with the character of the Japanese people as a whole today? For me, the answer is that war always turns some people into animals. No matter their nation, no matter their race, this is the inevitable result of setting out with the intent to kill as many human beings of a certain color (be it uniform or skin) as possible. To always assign the root cause to the aggressor being “bad” misses the point that as long as war is a viable concept for humanity there will always be aggressors, and often the victims of the past become the perpetrators of the future. I don’t know if there is a single root to all war, despite its many differing motivations, or how war can be ended on Earth; but certainly Red Sorghum made me feel more strongly than ever that it is madness.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gun violence, Violence, and Sexual violence
witheredflower's review against another edition
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Infidelity, Injury/Injury detail, Murder, Animal cruelty, Child death, Death, Gun violence, Physical abuse, Rape, Violence, War, Blood, Domestic abuse, Genocide, Animal death, Excrement, Suicide, Torture, Sexual assault, and Vomit
plainplantains's review
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
3.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content, Vomit, War, Body horror, Cursing, Rape, Suicide, Blood, Gore, Injury/Injury detail, Death, Medical content, Sexual assault, Torture, Violence, Medical trauma, Physical abuse, Suicide attempt, and Murder
Moderate: Infidelity, Colonisation, and Gun violence
emamoretti03's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
4.5
Questo libro parla della storia della famiglia del narratore. Seguiamo le vicende tragiche, drammatiche e sanguinose che si svolgono intorno a questa famiglia per vari motivi, tra cui la guerra contro i giapponesi e conflitti interni tra fazioni politiche. Lo stile è crudo, descrittivo e può risultare impegnativo per un pubblico sensibile. A me questo libro è piaciuto molto, ci sono alcuni punti più calmi, però nel complesso è un classico da recuperare anche per capire le tradizioni della Cina, così in alcuni casi distanti dalle nostre.
Content Warnings
Graphic: War, Violence, Abortion, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Blood, Child abuse, Child death, Colonisation, Death, Death of parent, Domestic abuse, Excrement, Infidelity, Injury/Injury detail, Kidnapping, Mental illness, Misogyny, Murder, Sexual assault, Sexual content, Sexual harassment, Torture, Fire/Fire injury, Forced institutionalization, Gore, Grief, Gun violence, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexual violence, and Suicide attempt
seanml's review
challenging
dark
informative
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.75
Red Sorghum was very casually the most graphic thing I’ve ever read. Its backdrop is 20th century China, jumping around between the early 1920s and through the intense Japanese occupation of 1939 and 1940. If you want a story where things get bad and then they get worse and then become entrenched in misfortune, this may be for you. 7.5/10.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Domestic abuse, Grief, Gun violence, Medical content, Miscarriage, Gore, Sexual assault, Animal death, Blood, Body horror, Colonisation, Injury/Injury detail, Toxic relationship, Violence, Rape, Sexism, Sexual harassment, Child abuse, Child death, Confinement, Abortion, Animal cruelty, Murder, Racial slurs, Racism, Torture, Physical abuse, Vomit, Death, Death of parent, Sexual violence, Xenophobia, Genocide, and War
Moderate: Schizophrenia/Psychosis , Suicidal thoughts, Excrement, Pregnancy, Infidelity, Misogyny, and Abandonment
Minor: Alcohol, Body shaming, Classism, Kidnapping, Cannibalism, Drug use, Addiction, Incest, and Suicide
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