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“... When the English translation of Mo Yan’s novel Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996) was published in 2004, it was seen by some critics as his bid for global literary prestige. It hit all the right notes: it was a historical saga of modern China featuring a proliferation of stories, it was unceasingly violent and nasty, and it came near to puncturing Party myths ...”

“... feels obliged to remove redundant passages or rewrite them (his editors agree). Take note: the Mo Yan you have in English is a Goldblatt version of the original. It’s rumoured in China that Mo Yan passes all the royalties from his novels in English to his ambassador-rewriter, who remarked drily about the ...”

“... Mo Yan’s novel opens with a kind of prospectus for itself: ‘I didn’t realise until I’d grown up that Northeast Gaomi Township is easily the most beautiful and most repulsive, most unusual and most common, most sacred and most corrupt, most heroic and most bastardly, hardest-drinking and hardest-loving place in the world ...”

“... to publish for a Chinese readership, and his fiction might look much more like that of Zhu Wen and Mo Yan – writers he has criticised for failing to show solidarity with exiled or imprisoned intellectuals. Beijing Coma, unlike The Noodle Maker, seems to have been written for an exclusively Western audience. Although it contains a touch of fantasy ...”