Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

Douban link: Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

Is the rating this high? When I was in high school, Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. At that time I followed the trend and read quite a few of his novels, such as Big Breasts and Wide Hips and Forty-One Bombs. Thinking back to the reading environment then, it was actually very interesting: someone bought a book, and then everyone in the class who was interested took turns borrowing and reading it. In university I also continued reading Frog. Mo Yan’s novels always let one read out a feeling of being oppressed by society and the times. They also strongly reflect the hardship and helplessness of peasants, and are a ruthless satire of social change. Against the backdrop of today’s worsening speech environment, I hope more people can read these books, and that these books can live a little longer.

Read: the plot is good, and the character relationships are quite complex. It involves 50 years of history after the founding of the PRC and three generations of people. Through the protagonist’s six reincarnations, including five lives as livestock, it witnesses that era: land reform, people’s cooperatives/communes, the Great Leap Forward, the three-year famine, the Cultural Revolution, large-scale pig raising, and reform and opening (the central government produced revisionism). One highlight is that Mo Yan appears in the novel as a supporting character, with both arrogance and self-mockery. Many slogans would not feel out of place today.

Life and death are wearing one out, all because of greed. Without desire one becomes strong; let go of hatred. After five reincarnations, Ximen Nao finally lets go of hatred and reincarnates as a malformed person.