To Live

About

Fugui starts life as the spoiled son of a wealthy landowner, gambles away the family fortune, and spends the next four decades surviving everything China throws at him — civil war, revolution, famine, the Cultural Revolution — losing everyone he loves along the way. The novel follows his entire life, from reckless youth to grieving old age, in prose so direct it reads like testimony. Originally banned in China, To Live became one of the country's most influential novels — a work that strips away ideology to reveal the irreducible human experience of endurance. Yu Hua writes suffering without sentimentality and survival without heroism, creating a character whose persistence feels less like courage than like the body's stubborn refusal to stop. A novel about a man who loses everything — and keeps living, because living is what bodies do.

Awards

• ★Prix Femina(1994 - Foreign)