Book Discussion “Red Sorghum”

Posted on 26/4/2014

Book Discussion

EVENT DETAILS

Pearl Institute (Formerly was known as Anatolia Cultural & Dialogue Centre) is giving a start to a view to bringing people together and achieving critical, open and meaningful discussion series.

PI organizes a range of book discussion groups in different formats throughout the year at its office in Wan Chai.

Book discussions include a wide range of issues related to Dialogue and Social areas of interest, encompassing topics, and speakers, beyond the usual remit of social organizations.

These discussions attract diverse policy-makers, academics, researchers, journalists, professionals, students, community leaders and others.

Through this engaging and expansive environment, readers and members of the groups engage in constructive and critical dialogue on a miscellany of issues affecting their personal, professional and communal lives.

Such events provide a rigorous, methodical context for the scrutiny and evaluation both of dialogue practices and of social and political issues pertinent to these. They also encourage fruitful interaction between people engaged in academia, policy, and the community.

We seek to further aims of a just and equitable society by promoting dialogue as a path to social harmony.

Reading Group Choices selects discussible books and suggests discussion topics for reading groups.

If you are, or know, someone who loves to read and discuss books with his or her friends, please have them contact us.

Red Sorghum: A Novel of China or Red Sorghum Clan (literally “red sorghum family”) is a Chinese language 1986 novel by Mo Yan. It was Mo’s first novel and remains one of his best-known works.

The novel consists “Red Sorghum”, “Sorghum Wine”, “Dog Ways”, “Sorghum Funeral”, and “Strange Death” volumes, which were first serialized in magazines in 1986.

Red Sorghum’s plot revolves around three generations of the Shandong family between 1923 and 1976. The narrator tells the story of his family’s struggles, first as distillery owners making sorghum wine and then as resistance fighters during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The novel also details civil disputes between warring Chinese groups, including rival gangs and political powers. The book also refers to the Cultural Revolution and the 1972 resumption of diplomatic relations between China and Japan.

Mo Yan employs a terse style in the novel that is characterized by brevity and non-chronological storytelling written in the first-person. The work contains elements of folk-tale that blend into myth and superstition, placing it in the magic-realist genre.

*Those who are too busy to read can watch the film and come to the book discussion too:

Film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=415CReI3zps

Venue: 909 CCWU Building, 302-308 Hennessy Rd, Wan Chai, HK

Time: 26th April 2014, 6.30-8.30 pm

Discussion Language: English

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