Mo Yan's re-creation of the Boxer Rebellion begins, as it will end, with first-person narratives by voluptuous Meiniang and the four men in her life: her father, an opera singer leading the rebellion against the German railroad workers; her husband, a dull, muscular butcher of dogs and pigs; her father-in-law, the imperial executioner assigned to punish the rebel leader; and her rich lover, the magistrate who betrays her father to the foreign invaders where the sandalwood death will be his punishment. The plot of Sandalwood Death has all the ingredients of an operatic tragedy; indeed, the monologues that form the opening and closing chapters each begin with lyrics from a Chinese folk opera based on the same story.
Zhao Jia, the imperial executioner, is such a cold-blooded, cunning, ruthless fellow that only the novel's first sentence, revealing that the heroine will stab him to death in seven days, gives the reader the courage to read on as he performs hideously cruel public executions as well as shaming, abusing and tormenting the more likable pawns in this dark, suspenseful love story. Fortunately, the heroine's not-so-bright husband provides comic relief, blundering along good-naturedly, blind to the obvious, falling out of bed when she screams in her sleep with desire for another man.
Mo Yan is a mesmerizing storyteller and a daring one, constantly showing the other side of characters you thought you knew. He gives away plot turns before they happen; he introduces one character in flashback after showing him publicly executed by the hideous slicing death of 500 cuts. Though his irrepressible trademark humor has little opportunity to shine here, the scenes are just as knockdown powerful, and he knows how to prolong suspense with a sense of theatricality, delivering wallops of surprise as he brings to life a collapsing empire from an era where long beards are sexually attractive, dogs are herded and butchered as food and public executions are long set pieces of ceremonial horror.
It's only near the end of this huge novel that Mo Yan gives us a glimpse of the staggering finale he has painstakingly prepared--detail after detail quietly building over hundreds of pages until a mounting tsunami of information comes together in a catastrophic spectacle including all the main characters--a once-in-a-lifetime ending no reader will ever, ever forget. --Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: Nobel laureate Mo Yan's tangled operatic love story set against the Boxer Rebellion is wildly creative and frequently horrific in bringing to life the last Imperial dynasty's collapse.