Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
About
Ximen Nao was a good landlord — generous, fair, beloved by his tenants. None of that mattered when Mao's Land Reform Movement arrived in 1948. He was stripped of everything and shot. In the afterlife, he demands justice. Instead, he gets reincarnation — first as a donkey, then an ox, a pig, a dog, and a monkey, each life spent on the same land he once owned, watching his former tenants and their descendants live through fifty years of Chinese history. Mo Yan's novel is a farm-animal epic, a Buddhist comedy, and a history of modern China told from the ground up — literally, through the eyes of creatures who see everything and understand more than their owners suspect. A novel that finds in reincarnation the perfect form for a country that keeps destroying itself and starting over.
