"Life and Death are Wearing Me Out" is a 2005 novel by Mo Yan, published in Chinese as "生死疲劳". It was translated into English by Howard Goldblatt in 2008. Although the Nobel Prize for Literature is not awarded to specific works, it was one of the novels that Mo Yan published before his 2012 prize, and was probably one of the works that earned him the prize. I coincidentally begin reading the book just a week before Mo Yan's prize was announced.
The book is about Ximen Nao, a moral and hardworking landlord who is executed by the Communist Party in 1950. Pleading his case to Lord Yama, the ruler of the underworld, he is allowed to be reincarnated back in his home village. However, Lord Yama decides to not send him back as a human, but rather as a series of animals: a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, and a monkey, before he is reincarnated as a human 50 years later. In his animal forms, Ximen Nao witnesses the intertwined lives of his family and friends, as well as five decades of tumultuous Chinese history. His adventures as an animal are comic, and full of salty humor, while the encapsulation of Chinese history is tragicomic. This book is long, as befits a five decade saga, with my edition coming in at 500 pages.
Despite having a complex cast of characters, I found this book easy to read. Like other recent books I have read, I found it hard to decide what exactly the author was aiming for after having read it. The book takes a Buddhist cosmological framework as its central device, although I don't know if this is for spiritual reasons as much as for narrative convenience. It is a political and social history, with some very cutting satire of the Communist Party, although I don't know how to interpret that, since apparently Mo Yan has had a complex relationship with the Communist Party. It is a folktale of sorts, with intelligent animals engaging in trickery. And it is a sprawling, blue collar soap opera with generations of families engaging in feuds. Which is the "correct" reading? Like any good book, the fun is that all of them are.
As a last note, I have been disappointed in the past when reading books by Nobel Prize winning authors, because it sets my expectations so high. Since I started reading this book right before Mo Yan won the prize, I wasn't picking it apart as much as I might have if he had already won. But even besides that, in many ways Mo Yan is not typical of some recent prize winners, and this books shows it. While it is, indeed, "literary fiction", it is also meant to be a book read by anyone, not an experimental or avant-garde work.
Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out
Written by Mo Yan, Translated by Howard Goldblatt.
540 Pages
Arcade Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-55970-853-1
Library of Congress Catalog Number: PL2886.O1684S5413 2008
Dewey Decimal: 895.1352