The Republic of Wine

Liquorville is a highly experimental novel Mo Yan wrote in the early 1990s; its Douban rating holds steady at around 8.2, confirming that it has withstood the test of time among readers and critics. Though not Mo Yan’s best-known work, it pushes literary exploration remarkably far. It fuses seemingly unrelated elements—detective fiction, gastronomy, officialdom, and the magical—into a bizarre allegorical world called “Liquorville,” bitingly satirizing social corruption and human greed. Using a “book within a book” structure—the main thread follows Ding Gou’er, a top investigator of the Provincial People’s Procuratorate, investigating the “braised infant” case, while the secondary thread consists of correspondence between the author “Mo Yan” and a young literary man, “Li Yidou,” along with short stories by Li Yidou—Mo Yan constructs a self-referential narrative labyrinth in which the real and the imagined generate each other. This complex structure makes the act of reading itself a process of puzzle-solving and speculation. Mo Yan’s language is vast and unrestrained, his imagination wild and bold, and he pushes the image of “liquor” to its limit: it is at once the lubricant of power, the corrosive of human nature, and the catalyst of absurd reality. Readers of Liquorville should not expect a linear, complete story, but should immerse themselves in its carnival of language and intricate structure, and experience how Mo Yan uses the most absurd form to touch the most serious core of society and human nature. For understanding the overall trajectory of Mo Yan’s writing, and even the avant-garde explorations of Chinese literature in the 1990s, this book is an indispensable key text.