Yan Lianke’s latest English translation finds the Chinese master at the top of his game ... Taken together, Lianke’s pair of works, while set in rural China, offer a golden opportunity to reflect on our own fraught times. His satirical eye and generous heart are finely rendered in Carlos Rojas’ superb translation. These are tales to savour.
These are emotionally loaded stories, and the clichés in Carlos Rojas’s translation frequently pitch them into outright melodrama. But it’s hard not to be moved by the running theme of self-sacrifice. The solitary elder gives his body to fertilize the cornstalk that will eventually replenish the village. When she is told that bone-marrow soup has miraculous healing powers, the mother in 'Marrow' does the same for the sake of her disabled children. The stories echo books like Yu Hua’s Chronicle of a Blood Merchant and Mr. Yan’s own Dream of Ding Village, in which characters literally drain their blood for the wellbeing of the state. The Years, Months, Days avoids the tripwire of politics, yet still pays homage to the fated generation upon whose flesh and bones modern China was built.
The Years, Months, Days, winner of the Lu Xun Literary Prize, is the magnificent story of an elderly man’s decision to remain in his village during a terrible drought to raise a single corn seed ... Lianke paints vivid scenes of desolate circumstances with an incredible mastery of words and control of his imagery. His masterpieces are sure to engage readers.
There is a rich tradition in China, going back to the advent of written narrative and predating fiction, called zhiguai: accounts of the inexplicable and occult, often featuring ghosts. 'Marrow' is a saucy sendup of that genre ... Yan’s world is earthy, male and often very juvenile: snot, urine, phlegm and voluminous breasts almost qualify as secondary characters. It’s also funny, although Rojas’s otherwise smooth translation mishandles Yan’s curses ... Unlike Lu Xun, whose work pointed to structural shortcomings in Chinese society, Yan doesn’t suggest any solutions in his disillusioned fables. The problem, he implies, is human nature. We are all degraded and degrading. There’s no help for that.
Lianke finds unlikely drama in the slow growth and endurance of the cornstalk. He conjures suspense from the starving, thirsting, sometimes frankly repulsive horror that everyday life has become for the Elder and Blindy, a formerly wild dog whose weeping, well-like eyes have been seared by the sunlight. Their survival demands teamwork and selflessness, and when it becomes apparent that survival is no longer an option, they approach that with a moving devotion, too. 'Marrow,' the book’s ghostly second tale, is similarly concerned with brutal self-sacrifice, though there is a sardonic flavor to its dark ending. Unsettling in its own way, this novella is imbued with a different kind of surreality.
Apocalyptic, eerie visions ... Inspired, one imagines, by the terrible headlines of famine, climate change, and simple uncertainty; Yan draws on the conventions of folklore and science fiction alike to produce memorable literature.
Lianke’s talent for the fantastical shines in this collection of two novellas ... Though they contain dark subject matter, Lianke’s fables of personal sacrifice are also sharply observed and funny. Lianke’s narratives feel much larger than their page count suggest, almost epic.
