Life and Death are Wearing Me Out: A Novel [Hardcover]

Mo Yan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 19, 2008

Ximen Nao, a landowner known for his generosity and kindness to his peasants, is not only stripped of his land and worldly possessions in Mao's Land Reform Movement of 1948, but is cruelly executed, despite his protestations of innocence. He goes to Hell, where Lord Yama, king of the underworld, has Ximen Nao tortured endlessly, trying to make him admit his guilt, to no avail. Finally, in disgust, Lord Yama allows Ximen Nao to return to earth, to his own farm, where he is reborn not as a human but first as a donkey, then an ox, pig, dog, monkey, and finally the big-headed boy Lan Qiansui. Through the earthy and hugely entertaining perspectives of these animals, Ximen Nao narrates fifty years of modern Chinese history, ending on the eve of the new millennium. Here is an absolutely spellbinding tale that reveals the author's love of the land, beset by so many ills, traditional and modern.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Steven Moore

To encompass the ideological insanity of Mao Zedong's policies and the unimaginable horrors he inflicted on the Chinese people requires a boldly unconventional style. That need has been filled by this wild man of Chinese fiction: Mo Yan -- a pseudonymic phrase meaning "Don't speak." Over the last 20 years, Mo Yan has been writing brutally vibrant stories about rural life in China that flout official Party ideology and celebrate individualism over conformity. (How he has escaped imprisonment -- or worse -- I don't know.) He also flouts literary conformity, spiking his earthy realism with fantasy, hallucination and metafiction.

His previous novel, the voluptuously titled Big Breasts & Wide Hips, revealed the horrors of Chinese life during the first half of the 20th century; his new one, the exuberantly imaginative Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out, covers the second, even worse half. The story, which revives the Buddhist notion of reincarnation, begins on Jan. 1, 1950, in hell. Lord Yama, king of the underworld, is examining a benevolent landowner named Ximen Nao, who was brutally executed two years earlier (like thousands of landowners) so that his land could be redistributed to peasants. Frustrated that Ximen will not admit any guilt, Yama punishes him by sending him back to his village in the form of a donkey.

Ximen remains in that form for the next 10 years, witnessing the Land Reform Movement and the disastrous Great Leap Forward that killed tens of millions of people (and an unrecorded number of Chinese animals -- the novel reminds us this Earth belongs to them, too). The donkey is angry at first when he learns his trusted farmhand Lan Lian has married Ximen's concubine, but he's mollified as Lan carries on as a fiercely independent farmer, the last holdout in collectivized China. The donkey is killed during the great famine, accompanied by appropriate animal imagery: "Then the famine came," Mo Yan writes, "turning the people into wild animals, cruel and unfeeling. After eating all the bark from trees and the edible grass, a gang of them charged into the Ximen estate compound like a pack of starving wolves." Ximen is reincarnated next as an ox, then a pig, a dog, a monkey and finally -- on New Year's Eve 2000 -- as a child. On his fifth birthday, the child and elderly Lan Lian get together and, taking turns, narrate the novel we've just read.

It's a grimly entertaining overview of recent Chinese history. As a "wise German shepherd" summarizes it, "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." But brave individuals emerge as the true heroes; aside from the animal reincarnations of Ximen Nao, these include Lan Lian for refusing to give in to communal pressure, and his son Lan Jiefang, who defies convention by abandoning his legal wife (from an arranged marriage) for a woman he loves, ruining himself in the process. The most colorful individual is the novelist himself, who pops in and out of the story, usually to the annoyance of the other characters.

But I don't want to leave the impression that this is a gimmicky book that makes light of recent Chinese history. Born in 1955, Mo Yan endured the worst of it -- he, too, was so poor that he ate tree bark -- and there are descriptions that will shock readers into realizing this is no literary game. Indeed, reality keeps outrunning the author's satire. Near the end of the novel, a born-again capitalist devises a Cultural Revolution theme park, as tasteless as a Nazi theme park in Poland. And yet there are now Cultural Revolution-themed cafés in China, favored by urban hipsters with an almost American ignorance of history.

Mo Yan offers insights into communist ideology and predatory capitalism that we ignore at our peril. This "lumbering animal of a story," as he calls it, combines the appeal of a family saga set against tumultuous events with the technical bravura of innovative fiction. Catch a ride on this wheel of transmigration.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 552 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing (March 19, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559708530
• ISBN-13: 978-1559708531
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #576,210 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The animals tell all!, February 23, 2009

By 

Raymond Cooper "China buff" (Buxton, Maine, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Life and Death are Wearing Me Out: A Novel (Hardcover)

What a great book. I have been reading a lot of books on 20th century China, both fiction and non-fiction, and this is one of my favorites. Not many writers take on the tumultuous events of the Communist era from a rural perspective, but this book does just that. Northeast Gaomi Township is full of characters, fully fleshed out characters, whose stories are followed through a period of over 50 years. Much of the book is very funny, especially when the narrator is one of the animal reincarnations Of Ximen Nao (he returns as a donkey, an ox, a pig, and a dog) commenting on the foibles of humans and the many reforms of the Mao era. The pig farming part of the book alone is worth the price of admission. The one confusing part of the book is the use of multiple narrators. At first I was sometimes not sure of who was talking, but as the book progressed and I got to know the characters better, that became much less of a problem. One interesting aspect of the book is the author inserting himself as a character in the story, and a not too pleasant one at that. Amazingly, the book gets rather sad and rhapsodic at the end, but from this author nothing is unexpected. I plan to read some of his other books. Highly recommended.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Masterpiece, May 18, 2008

By 

Archer C. (MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Life and Death are Wearing Me Out: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow, August 9, 2010

By 

wbjonesjr1 (São Paulo, Brazil) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Life and Death are Wearing Me Out: A Novel (Hardcover)

I can't say enough about "Life and Death..." It will rank among my very favorite novels ever: Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"; Helprin's "Winter's Tale"; Bulgakov's "Master and Margarita". Each of these has a certain "fantasy"/"magical realism" element to it that for me adds tremendously to the fun of reading.

But each (with perhaps exception of "Winter's...") is also a pretty incisive look at the society and politics of its particular time and place. "Life and Death..." is a neat way to get an inside perspective of post-WWII China. And each is also a "ripping yarn": the plot lines are fast and fascinating; the drama intense. But the intense drama does not preclude humour: some parts of "Life and Death..." are very funny, in particular those parts in which the author, Mo Yan, makes wicked fun of his own character in the book. We get "comic relief" with a neat literary trick all for the price of one.

Another aspect that amazed me about the book is Yan's ability to keep each "reincarnation" as powerful as the preceding ones. Readers afraid to dive into the book for its length should just get with it: they will be getting 5 exceptional, unique stories, each with its own tremendous charm and each completely original.

If I have a very small quibble it has to do with the characterizations. Very few of the "supporting cast" are quite fully developed. But as if to compensate each reincarnation is wonderfully accomplished with each animal having its own, unique personality, and, especilly, attitudes (many of which quite funny)

All in all one of my best reads ever. I am very happy to have "discovered" Mo Yan and will look forward to his other works