Nobel Prize in LiteratureSandalwood Death
Translated by Howard Goldblatt
About
During the Boxer Rebellion of 1898-1901, a community of North Chinese farmers and craftsmen rises against Western imperialism — and against their own corrupt officials. At the center stands Sun Bing, an opera singer and folk hero who will face the novel's ultimate horror: execution by sandalwood death, one of the most prolonged and grotesque methods of capital punishment ever devised. Nobel laureate Mo Yan braids three narrative voices — the victim, the executioner, and the woman who loves them both — into a novel that is simultaneously a love story, a political critique, and an unflinching meditation on cruelty as spectacle. The opera traditions that structure the narrative give the violence a ritualistic quality that makes it more, not less, disturbing. A novel about the point where political resistance, personal love, and state violence converge — rendered in prose as vivid and merciless as the punishment at its center.
Awards
- ★Nobel Prize in Literature(2012 - Winner)
