Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

My story begins on January 1, 1950. In the two years prior to that, I suffered cruel torture such as no man can imagine in the bowels of hell.

So begins a dizzying journey of literary ingenuity, effortlessness and sheer mastery of style and narrative. Mo Yan's Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006) is a thoughtful voyage deep into the self, a kind of inverse Christmas Carol (1843), a chronicle of the times equal to One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) of such epic complexity it's unfathomable that Mo Yan[1] wrote this masterpiece by hand in mere 42 days.[2] I read it in 18 days, so it took him only twice the time to literally put pen to paper.

What can I say, I'm hooked. I don't care what other books I might have had the craving for, they're queued as of now. What I'm going to read is more Mo Yan. Two days after finishing Life and Death I'm already halfway through Sandalwood Death (2001) and loving every word of it. You know that feeling one everything that clicks? It's glorious, and it's a glorious thing to be in the beginning of my journey and knowing that there are six more novels and a collection of short stories to read after Sandalwood Death.

I think I'm going to have to revisit Gao Xingjian after Mo, since there is a similar burning love I remember feeling toward Soul Mountain (1989). The thing about this book is that Mo Yan is simply so brilliant a writer that it seems he throws everything at you and, contrary to all expectations, makes it all stick. It is gruesome, funny, beautiful, grotesque, philosophical, mundane, historical, fantastical, depressing and entertaining all at the same time. Not only does his literary genius shine through, it's also a very deep commitment to observing humanity and the silly things we do. Mo Yan is able to write things that bring out laughs, but at the same time he's able to make us laugh in such a way that reminds of the undeniable hardness of life, like bedrock, beneath the surface. He hides the tragic in the comic, and vice versa, alighting both processes with his immaculate style:

“‘Party Secretary Hong, from this day forward, all boars are my father, and all sows are my mother!'”

“That's what I like to hear!” Hong said joyfully. “Young people who view our pigs as their mother and fathers are exactly what we need.”

Life and Death

No one who has read this novel, which won the inaugural Newman Prize for Chinese, could ever, in good conscience, characterize Mo Yan as a government stooge.[3]

Endnotes: