Life and Death are Wearing Me Out: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Mo Yan (Author)
Key Phrases: wandering god, commune revolutionary committee, tian gui, Lan Lian, Ximen Nao, Hong Taiyue (more...)

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 Description
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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 552 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing (March 19, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559708530
• ISBN-13: 978-1559708531
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #433,769 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 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 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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Experience History, June 4, 2008

By	MC (New York) - See all my reviews

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but wearing me out, November 23, 2008

By	Blind Willie (Helotes, TX) - See all my reviews

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.