Granddad, a large and violent man, begins his career while still a boy by murdering his mother's lover, then alternates between manual labor and banditry until emerging as a feared guerrilla warrior after the Japanese invasion. Grandma, a remarkably strong and free-spirited woman, inherits a distillery while still a teenage girl and proves more than equal to the task of managing it. Though the characters' proper names are given, they are chiefly referred to by relationship as 'Granddad,' 'Grandma,' 'Father,' 'Little Auntie,' etc., thus reaffirming the narrator's invisible presence. These shifts in time occur frequently throughout the novel as though the principal characters are remembering their past, with the 1939-1941 timeline being the principal one. The story then shifts back to 1923 for the marriage of the narrator's paternal grandmother. This battle will be the central event in the novel. He begins his account in 1939 as his father, a teenage boy at the time, is preparing to participate in a partisan ambush of a Japanese convoy. The first-person narrator revisits his home town in the 1980s to construct his family's history. In 1937 the Japanese occupied the province, leading to years of violent repression and resistance. During the first part of that period the region was loosely governed by one of China's many warlords. Most of the events in the novel take place between 19.

Surrounded by progress, I feel a nagging sense of our species' regression.' Thus the narrator of Mo Yan's novel states the theme of Red Sorghum.The setting for the novel is the author's native village of Northeast Gaomi Township in the province of Shandong near the tip of the Chinese peninsula that points toward Korea.

They killed, they looted, and they defended their country in a valiant, stirring ballet that makes us unfilial descendants who now occupy the land pale by comparison. Copied from another's review: 'Over decades that seem but a moment in time, lines of scarlet figures shuttled among the sorghum stalks to weave a vast human tapestry.

Red sorghum author