Mo's Better

I'm familiar with the literary term "magical realism" to describe some Latin writers such as Gabriel García Márquez, who bagged a Nobel lit prize 30 years ago. This year's winner, Chinese author Mo Yan, seems to play a twist on that theme.

The Swedish Academy praised his work which "with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".

Those two might overlap (Magic Mushroom Realism?), but Mo would have been hard-pressed to be reading a lot of western avaunt-guard lit while being in the PLA, so he might have stumbled into that style on his own.

Interestingly, Mo's been able to do his work without running afoul of the authorities by and large. Setting stories in the past has allowed him to write without being directly critical of the Communist government, only getting into trouble when things got too sexy.