Edition: U.S. / Global  BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A Rural Chinese
'Catch-22' You Can Almost Smell  Published: June 12, 1995  THE
GARLIC BALLADS By Mo Yan Translated by Howard Goldblatt. 290
pages. Viking. $23.95  The setting of this raw, brilliant,
eventful new novel by one of China's best writers is called, no
doubt ironically, Paradise County. It is a rude and unforgiving
place where the farmers have been ordered by county officials to
plant only a single crop, garlic, and are then enraged when
those same officials, after stuffing their pockets with fees and
taxes, announce that the warehouse is full and they will buy no
more of the harvest.  Paradise is full of lazy and overbearing
tyrants, of truculent, superstitious peasants, of daily
violence, of grime and of hard, earthbound lives wherein, as the
great Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu once put it, "everybody alike
schemes for a full belly."  No wonder that "The Garlic Ballads"
was banned in China when it came out in the late 1980's, even
though Mo Yan, the author of