Book of the Week: Life and Death are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan

Image from Fantastic Fiction

This is quite a serious book to read but the reason I am making it a post is because the central characters are all animals. “Life and Death are Wearing Me Out” by Mo Yan is actually a picture of China’s transitions from the Cultural Revolution in the 60s and 70s to the new fangled capitalist ideas of the 90s.

The chief narrator is Ximen Nao, a rich landowner who is impoverished by the Land Reform Movement begun by Mao. Life becomes really bad and Nao dies and goes to Hell. But he is reborn in a lot of forms, beginning as a donkey and then as an ox, a pig, a dog and a monkey. These characters speak out from their unique vantage points about life in China. Apart from them there are three narrators, Mo Yan himself being one of them, all of which makes it into a pretty hefty volume. But it is unusual to find such a host of colorful characters in a book with a powerful and serious theme as this and I would definitely like to give it a dekko when I go to my neighborhood bookstore next.

Life and Death by Mo Yan has got some good reviews from various sources including The New York Times