Desert Rites

Desert Rites

Desert Rites, Xue Mo’s first novel, is one of his desert trilogies that takes him twelve years to fi- nish with elaborate care and f ina- lly makes him achieve immense literary acclaim and launches his career as a nationally recognized writer. The novel, which is set in the Hexi Corridor of Gansu Province, is remarkable not only for its huge cast of characters and psychological scope, but also for its precise and detailed episodic records of the famers’ life in China’s west typical of the middle and the end of 20th-century Chinese society. It vividly portrays the everyday life of peasant Lao shun’s family who struggles to survive when there is extremely short of material support, and shows their brave resistance against their miserable fate and the unremitting pursuit for a better life, which mirrors the farmers’ harsh living conditions in China’s western countryside and their spiritual outlook at that time. This novel has been adapted for the TV series “Desert Ties” and received extensive attention as well.

In 2016, Howard Goldblatt, who is regarded as the best translator of Chinese comtemporary literature, translated the fiction into English with his wife Sylvia Li-chun Lin.It’s noted that they also translated works of Chinese writer Mo Yan, the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature winner.