Frog by Mo Yan

Name: Mo Yan

Year Won: 2012

Read: Frog

Original Language: Mandarin

Reason: "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary"

About: Frog follows the life of several characters (the most interesting to me being a midwife) through a fictional Chinese village (in which the children, strangely, are all named for body parts.)

The midwife (Gugu) deals with the one child policy, sexism, and just existing in Communist China.

What I liked: The characters are generally interesting and it's a really intriguing look at a turbulent time and era from the past.

What I Disliked: The story is written almost as a fable, which makes things often feel flatter and less impactful than I think they otherwise might. I get why this was done (censorship and maybe to create a sense of timelessness), but it often for me, at least, dampened the seriousness of the subject matter.

Should it have won a Nobel: Probably. It's the sort of thing that the committee likes (arty and literary), while also covers significant subjects. It's definitely more *important* than a lot of the books on this list.

Next Up: "Lives of Girls and Women" by Alice Munro (this will be...interesting)