If you’re denouncing the Great Chinese Novel, and if your name is Eric Abrahamsen, then you’re having a great week. Eric, who’s the Chinese lit genius and translator behind our May title Running through Beijing, has been tearing up the Internet with his distaste for gigantic novels that try to sum up the state of China.

Not that they’re necessarily a bad thing. We can all get behind a brick of paper (and for the record, I do love J R), but on Monday Eric was interviewed alongside translator Canaan Morse at the Wall Street Journal about Chinese literature, and when the subject of the GCN came up, he pointed out that since Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize, there’s been a serious case of elephantiasis among Chinese publishers:

Abrahamsen: One of the ironies about Mo Yan is that his style of writing is a kind of Chinese literature that international publishers are getting tired of and are deciding not to continue publishing—the very long, epic novels about China’s rural problems and recent history. There’s a real fatigue among publishers and among readers.

WSJ: How about translators?

Abrahamsen: The most fatigued of all. There’s a disease of the ‘great China novel’ that’s attacking Chinese writers. They feel they have to produce these enormous things that explain all of Chinese society and are filled with philosophy and ideas and thoughts. And they tend to believe that’s more important than story or character.

Read the full article in Two Lines Press here: http://twolinespress.com/the-excessive-focus-on-the-great-chinese-novel

See also:

• The Mo Yan Effect on China’s Literary Scene

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