Qin Qiang is music as plaintive and poignant as a life spent trying to eek a living from Shaanxi's loess plateau. It's also the title of one of this year's Mao Dun literary award winners. Jia Pingwa penned Qin Qiang as a sprawling tribute to the lives of Shaanxi peasants during China's reform period.

Unsurprisingly for great literature, Qin Qiang is a deeply personal account, drawing on Jia's rural Shaanxi childhood, as well as family anecdotes and legends. The fact that Jia burned incense at his parent's shrine on hearing of his win indicates the traditional authority in Qin Qiang. So too does Jia's claim that his father urged him to build a stele for his hometown out of words. Jia revealed the complex depth of his intimacy with the subject matter at a press conference after receiving the award:

"This book is about my own folks back home, my last and most precious resource for writing. I wouldn't touch this material if I had any other choice, as it tells a lot of personal things that happened to my family. Before I began writing this book, I paid homage to all my dead relatives of the past ten years, and gave a glass of wine as offering for those still living on Dihua Street. During the writing process, incense burned night and day in a giant vase in my study, and the smoke swirled around my ceiling. Then all the spirits of the dead walked before me. I wrote down all those things that happened to my father's generation with respect and unease."

A prize-winning story by a man who didn't want to touch the material? Jia's win is wreathed in contradiction, but fittingly so. "Mao Dun" was the pen name of novelist Shen Dehong, and means "contradiction". He adopted it in response to the welter of conflicting revolutionary ideology which roiled China during its turbulent 1920s.

Jia is therefore a fitting successor to Shen. To begin with, the novel for which he was previously most famous constituted a radical departure from his farming roots. Fei Du, The Abandoned Capital, was a sexually explicit slice of modern life. In China the book was banned, and he was widely branded a crass vulgarian, assuaged somewhat by the 1997 French Prix Femina Prize.

Another layer of contradiction enfolds the subject matter. Despite Jia's undeniable skill at interweaving a town-full of narratives into one gritty panorama, the dreary lives of marginalized farmers is hardly what the stereotypical urban reader with disposable income and leisure for novel-reading desires in a story. Where are the portraits of modern Chinese faces, the salary man, the yuppie, the urbanite wrestling not with hunger but existential angst? In today's rush to stand shoulder to shoulder with the West, China's farmer is as popular as the olive drab canvas sneaker. Not that someone with Jia's artistic integrity lets that bother him:

"I am a farmer: good and disciplined, and selfish and ambitious at the same time. I am hardworking and never complain. I am proud that I am a farmer. I also thank my hometown. It helps me remain strong, shining at night like a little firefly with its own light and flourishing like vivid flowers with their own colors all over the mountains and plains."

Finally, it is contradictory that someone with Jia's undeniable literary talents is getting widely panned on technical grounds. Despite the praise heaped on Qin Qiang by the Mao Dun Prize committee, even they had to admit that the novel posed a great challenge to ordinary readers. That in itself is understandable: how many westerners bring Ulysses to the beach? But those very same standard bearers of Chinese literary tradition announced "We must always go against tradition to achieve artistic innovation."

As for many a reader in the street, Qin Qiang goes overboard with the authenticity, clogged with obscure dialect and idiom, and flying from side plot to side plot with all the incoherence of a senile Shaanxi farmer telling his great-grandchildren of the old days.

The detractors won't have Jia to kick around for a while. Emotionally wracked from wrestling with his familial past, he has announced a ten-year hiatus from novel writing. It will be another three years until the eighth Mao Dun award, and hopefully another healthy dose of contradiction and controversy.