The Years, Months, Days
Translated by Carlos Rojas
About
A terrible drought devastates a small Chinese village, and the residents decide to flee — all except one old man and his blind dog, who stay behind to tend a single surviving cornstalk. The novella follows their vigil through the drought's worst days, as the old man and the dog form an alliance against extinction, keeping each other alive through stubbornness, tenderness, and the refusal to abandon the last living thing. Yan Lianke's fable is concentrated and luminous — a story stripped to its essentials about what it means to care for something when all rational reasons for caring have dried up. The prose matches the landscape: spare, parched, and intensely alive. A story about the last man and the last dog in the last village — and the cornstalk that gives them both a reason to stay.
