---
product_id: 11168484
title: "The Garlic Ballads: A Novel"
brand: "mo yanhoward goldblatt"
price: "€ 36.30"
currency: EUR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 9
url: https://www.desertcart.com.cy/products/11168484-the-garlic-ballads-a-novel
store_origin: CY
region: Cyprus
---

# The Garlic Ballads: A Novel

**Brand:** mo yanhoward goldblatt
**Price:** € 36.30
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** The Garlic Ballads: A Novel by mo yanhoward goldblatt
- **How much does it cost?** € 36.30 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
- **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.com.cy](https://www.desertcart.com.cy/products/11168484-the-garlic-ballads-a-novel)

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## Description

The Garlic Ballads: A Novel

## Images

![The Garlic Ballads: A Novel - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51DS2CbkrOL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    CULTURAL REVOLUTION VS GARLIC FARMERS, 1988
  

*by M***M on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 27, 2012*

Rats so big they tree cats, and swarms of giant insects breeding in fetid water are just incidental to the suffering of peasant farmers ordered to grow garlic by the Communist government in northeast China in 1988.  The setting is Paradise County, inaptly named to say the very least. Growing garlic is tricky, as are many crops, but in particular it spoils quickly once harvested.  After the farmers spend days traveling in makeshift carts with their newly harvested garlic to the county offices, they find the gates locked, and while their garlic rots, they learn that the officials have bought garlic elsewhere.  Led by one of the main characters, an ex-soldier who fought in the Cultural Revolution, now a disappointed garlic farmer himself, the peasants break down the locked gates and burn the palatial county offices.  Once the government identifies the farmers who were there, they are taken from their family huts and imprisoned under such inhumane conditions that it is painful to read about.  The cruelty is so extreme one wonders if ordinary humans could survive such conditions, which of course many don't.The two main characters have very different backgrounds and personalities: one the leader of the protest and the other a peaceful soul who doesn't want to cause trouble.  But degrees of involvement in the farmers' revolt make no difference to the corrupt officials.  A parallel but integral story line is the ex-soldier's valiant attempt to marry the woman he loves despite her arranged marriage.  Their story is also heartbreaking.This book is painful to read but important to know about.  The author, a Nobel Prize winner, was born and grew up lived in Gaorni Township, China, and dedicates the book to the people there.  Although it is fiction, there is an authenticity that clearly resonates.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 







  
  
    This is a well written and interesting and VERY sad story.
  

*by C***S on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 5, 2015*

It's a good story,and well told,  it's just SO BLOODY SAD.  Like most of the writing out of China today- it all feels like an existential novel gone wrong.  The plot is probably based on yet another real life Chinese government fiasco- a group of farmers in one entire district are all told to grow and harvest garlic, to reap promised great profits, only to have a surfeit of garlic in the district.  This is turn results in unrest, a sort of semi-riot, police state responses, and general misery. The story is well told and absolutely rings true, which makes it all the sadder.  It is especially hard to read about the farmers and local peasants trying to figure out what they did wrong, and why they are suffering, when it is so clearly simply a repressive central government that blames the people for its mistakes.  You just end up thinking "God help the Chinese living under the present government".  It isn't the communism that feels so heartless- its just autocratic, repressive and all controlling government making criminals of people trying to live a decent life.  It really is a Very good story- it's just too sad for me, mostly because it is still so very true.

### ⭐⭐ 







  
  
    Misery, Pain, Courage, Humiliation
  

*by B***Y on Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 8, 2012*

I believe Mo Yan is trying to channel Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" and show a society of Chinese people cannibalizing itself. To be fair, the book's criticisms of some government practices (making quotas of what should be farmed, then not being able to pay for the surplus that results)  and some social practices (arranged marriages) faces strong criticism much of which is imaginatively expressed.But the relentlessness of the suffering of the people, the casual brutality of the officials, the animalistic brutality of a family towards their rebellious daughter and her lover--well, it gets to be too much, real fast.[For those who don't want SPOILERS (but will wish they had read this, because it may have saved them the purchase and the time, I say here--spoiler alert.]One of the main characters, for instance, is forced by various people to drink his own urine.  Not once, not twice.  .  .  Copious amounts of it, too.  Another man is forced to eat a rich meal--after it has been vomited up by our protagonist (forced vomiting by punching in the stomach).  Our one sympathetic female character, pregnant in a love relationship, after a conversation with her fetus dentata,  hangs herself on the delivery day.  Characters are beaten with wooden stools, strung up from their hands which have been tied behind their back, anally violated with thorny sticks.  They have lice eating binges.  In one, particularly well-rendered scene, a prisoner with an open sore on his ankle is attacked by a rooster who pecks and pecks at the painfully infected sore until it extracts a tendon, which it gobbles down like a worm.  Oh, the balladeer of the title--tasered in the mouth!There are some redeeming qualities to this book, but sometimes it feels like searching for the diamond hidden in a pile of decaying, amputated limbs.

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*Product available on Desertcart Cyprus*
*Store origin: CY*
*Last updated: 2026-03-02*