Book Review: Frog

Frogby Mo Yantranslated from the Chinese by Howard GoldblattViking, 2015Despite the fact that Chinese novelist Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2012 (beating the customary wide field of better writers), his latest novel to be translated into English, Frog, is actually good - exceptionally good in some of its parts. It's an issue novel, centering on the Chinese government's one-child policy - which makes it a fairly audacious work quite independent of its literary merits, since the author writing under the pen name of Mo Yan still lives and works in China and is therefore vulnerable to any kind of reprisal his government might see fit to inflict.Frog is therefore a daring novel, or at least a calculatedly daring one. It doesn't rabble-rouse explicitly; it's underlying stances on the one-child policy are for the most part buried under layers of subtlety and tortured psychology, and it's all so intelligently marshalled that the emotional effect is much more heightened than anything Mo Yan could have achieved through simple polemic.The narrative is told in the form of long, rambling, impressionistic letters written by a Chinese army officer and aspiring playwright named Tadpole to his mentor about his aunt Gugu, who had been a beloved midwife in their home rural province until her party loyalty was questioned when her lover defected. She reacted by becoming the dark opposite-reflection of her former self, a monomaniacal enforcer of the one-child policy, with all of the sordid expedients that entails (the book's dramatizations of forced sterilizations, forced birth control, and widespread infanticide are predictably chilling). In one tense scene, a man assaults her with a club ("I'll fight anyone who tries to end the Zhang family line!") before he's restrained, at which point a witness demands that he apologize to Tadpole's aunt - to which Gugu responds with the scorn of a true believer:

"I don't need his apology, Gugu said. Family planning is national policy. If we don't control our population, there won't be enough to feed and clothe our people, and a failure in education will lower the quality of our population, keeping the country weak. Sacrificing my life for national family planning is a small price to pay!"

It's a masterfully-done portrait of a personality utterly crushed and re-shaped by a repressive government policy, and it's linked throughout the book to a thread of deeper doubt about the full extent of Gugu's involvement, as Tadpole reflects in one of his letters:

Gugu, Mother once asked her, this family-planning business, was it your idea or were you following orders?What do you mean, my idea? Gugu replied testily. It's the call of the Party, a directive by Chairman Mao, national policy. Chairman Mao has said: Mankind must control itself, people must learn to embrace viable population growth.

Amazingly, given the incredibly grim backdrop and import of Frog, Mo Yan manages to sprinkle moments of humor and even whimsy into a very dark storyline; in the strange, mysterious tradition of Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris and Kafka's "Die Verwandlung," Frog is a thoroughly bleak novel that's nevertheless hypnotically readable. Right alongside the cramped, unremitting obsession of a character like Gugu, there are moments of sunny, almost playful rhetoric between characters, dutifully reported by Tadpole in full knowledge of the tragedies that await them:

I fell under your spell the first day I saw you at Xiaopao's house. From that moment till this very day, till the end of time, this heart of mine belongs to you only, and if you wished to eat it, I would unhesitatingly dig it out for you ... I've fallen in love with your bright pink face, your lively nones, your soft lips, your fluffy hair, and your sparkling eyes; I've fallen in love with your voice, your smell, and your smile. Your laughter makes me dizzy, makes me want to fall to my knees, wrap my arms around your legs, and gaze up at your smiling face ...

Frog is at times a dull book and at other times a didactic one, but only at times. The bulk of it is a horrifying extended impression of a people under unthinkable, intensely psychological pressure (and the American version is beautifully designed by Nayon Cho, who also designed the arresting cover for Susan Bernofsky's translation of Kafka's Metamorphosis) - a pressure expertly personified in the character of Gugu, whose certainties and terrors will linger a long time with readers. With this book, even more than with Mo Yan's Red Sorghum, repressive, censorship-prone China may well have a literary superstar in its midst. That sounds like a novel right there.