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The Library Is Open

A blog about books and writing, through rainbow-tinted glasses. Every book gets a gay rating.

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Tag: Farming

Review: The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan (translated by Howard Goldblatt)

A potent depiction of a time and a place, and seething critique of corruption.

China, Farming, Fiction, Nobel Laureate, Novel, Translation

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This huge history of the last 30,000 years of human existence sets out to demolish the myth of progress, that humans started out in simple tribes and ended up in complex Western civilisation.

The second of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels picks up immediately where the first left off, back at the wedding of the brilliant Lila Cerullo to grocer and neighbourhood businessman Stefano Carracci. What follows is a more sprawling but also more contained story, following Lila and narrator Lenu through Lila’s marriage and Lenu’s studies in their early twenties.

Ali Smith is done. At the beginning of this *cough* companion piece to her recent Seasonal Quartet, narrator and artist Sand is bummed out and in isolation, even bored with puns and wordplay (Ali Smith without puns and wordplay!?). It’s 2021 in the UK and lockdown is over but people are still dying by the hundreds.

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