Life and Death are Wearing Me Out: A Novel | Mo Yan

Life and Death are Wearing Me Out: A Novel | Mo Yan | Experience History

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Life and Death are...

	Life and Death are Wearing Me Out: A Novel Mo Yan Arcade Publishing, 2008 - 552 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
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Masterpiece

This book is written masterfully and encompasses a half century with sorrow and wit. Mo Yan is brilliant and the world he creates is both real and fantastical, while never settling for sentiment or fabulism. The only complaint I have about this book is the number of typos, which ranged from missed periods to misspelled words to forgetting page breaks between voices. I imagine Arcade Publishing is to blame and would hope they would take more time with an author whose work will probably win him the Nobel Prize.

Experience History

The experiences of the last 60 years in the PRC from the anarchic internal point of view of a mordant observer and participant. Think Lawrence Sterne and Mark Twain, reporting on a developing peasant society.

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The perils of reincarnation

Ximen Nao was a rich landowner who loses his land and his life to Mao Zedong's Land Reform Movement. He was known as a fair and just man, but was consigned to Hell. Lord Yama, King of the Underworld, forces Nao to be reborn over and over again, until Nao's anger at his perceived injustice is purged from his soul. He returns as a donkey, as an ox, as a pig, as a dog, as a monkey and finally as a boy.

During Nao's reincarnations, China went through major and violet changes: Mao and the coming of Communism, the Cultural Revolution and the introduction of capitalism. Nao relates the life of his peasant village and its people through those 50 years of struggle.

Yan has Nao tell the story in each reincarnation's own voice:

"Some time later, when I was reborn as a dog, a friend of mine, an experienced, knowledgeable and wise German shepherd assigned to guard a city government guesthouse, concluded: People in the 1950s were innocent, in the 1960s they were fanatics, in the 1970s they were afraid of their own shadows, in the 1980s they carefully weighed people's words and actions, and in the 1990s they were simply evil."

"Much as I hated being an animal, I was stuck with a donkey's body.... The awareness of a donkey and the memory of a human were jumbled together, and though I often strove to cleave them apart, such intentions invariably ended in an even tighter meshing."

"'Unless I'm mistaken,' I ventured under the wild, piercing gaze of the big-headed child, Lan Qiansui, 'you were a donkey that was hit over the head by a starving villager. You crashed to the ground, where your body was cut up and eaten by a gang of starving villagers. ... My guess is ... after many twists and turns, you were born into the world once more, this time as an ox."

" ... I [Nao as a donkey] reared up and aimed my hoofs at one of them, but it darted out of the way, so I spun around and landed on the back of the second wolf, driving it under the water, where I held it as bubbles rose to the surface. Meanwhile, the first wolf leapt onto the neck of my beloved. Seeing the danger she was in, I abandoned the drowning wolf and kicked out with my rear hoofs, hitting the attacker square in the head."

Yan has created 17 major characters, each of them alive filled with the smells, sights, fears and violence of animal intelligence. Cruelty, vengeance, strength and courage wax and wane. Howard Goldblatt makes this wonderful novel come alive in English.

Robert C. Ross 2008

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Good, but wearing me out

A good book and an excellent study of rural China in its dramatic last half of the 20th Century. It's a good read and a good story, but it also meanders and bogs down at times. I'd recommend it, but at times, "Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out" was wearing me out.

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