If Yan’s memoir owes its existence to family, it is because every blessing in Yan’s life owed its existence to family, as Yan’s unflinching self-examination demonstrates plainly ... arresting ... as a peasant who was able to write himself out of the fields and into international celebrity, Yan poignantly shows that the most effective antidote to death is gratitude.
... delicately translated ... moments spark extended passages of philosophical reflection. The timeline contributes to the feeling that this is not a traditional memoir. Major life events such as marriage and the births of children get passing mentions, while others, such as the university admissions test, feature repeatedly in different contexts, throwing light on his relationships with his father, First Uncle and Fourth Uncle. Indeed, Three Brothers is more about them than it is about Yan ... His prose is at once reverential and detached. It’s clear that although he means this book to be a tribute to the three brothers, he also suspects it might be meaningless.
After decades of glimpsing autobiographical hints in his always intriguing, often surreal novels and short stories, Anglophone audiences get access to Yan Lianke's real life ... Carlos Rojas returns as Yan's excellent translator ... Meandering through his past, Yan shows you can--and should--go home again
... an elegiac homage to the people and places no longer present for Yan ... The work of memory is often laborious, its insights frequently uninvited, but memory relies on language, and Yan’s can be inventive and even exquisite. Within the margins of his text, as in the margins of the lives of his father and uncles, one encounters unexpected moments of everyday beauty.
... [a] vivid and faithful translation ... Perhaps the best way to describe Yan’s writing is that of brutal honesty. In this world of harsh masculinity—there are very few mentions of women in the book—life consists of the most important stations in life ... In this book, Yan opts for strategic silence. Nowhere in the text is the [Communist] Party celebrated, or thanked[.]
The harshness of life described in Three Brothers is frequently unbearable ... Fans of Yan’s fiction will be disappointed by the guileless tone of Three Brothers. Yan seems content to just detail his family’s comeuppance—and their struggles—in chapter after chapter ... One yearns for the transgressions of the two lovers in Serve The People!, who are turned on by smashing statues of Mao; or the absurdity, in Lenin’s Kisses, of the maimed villagers trying to buy the Soviet hero’s embalmed corpse. Remembering the occasions his father hit him as a child, Yan suggests that perhaps his father should have beat him up even more. 'I feel that if only Father could still curse and beat me today the way he used to, I would feel happy and secure.' For once, Yan appears to be saying something untoward in an otherwise solemn book.
A leading Chinese novelist tells the story of his family’s hardscrabble life with surprising tenderness ... Yan admires [his family's] selflessness, and their persistence in the bleakest of times, and renders their portraits in loving detail, knowing that he is the beneficiary of their sacrifices. But Yan also admits to wanting to flee and needing to create a bigger life, even if it means dodging his filial obligations. It is this tension, together with Yan’s unadorned prose, that leavens a sentimental account of peasant life into something complicated and powerful.
Throughout the book, Yan depicts his provincial relatives with enormous heart and respect, acknowledging their sacrifices in a dark yet poignant meditation on grief and death ... A memoir steeped in metaphor and ultimately tremendously moving.
