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Feb. 9th, 2011 10:44 amThe difference between me and the New York Times, I think, is that the New York Times is just generally more interested in testicles than I am - not only because they are much more likely to review books by men than by women (no surprise to anyone) but also I suspect they probably raise their eyebrows less than I do when a novel contains no less than six individual accounts of testicles being stolen and/or eaten. For the New York Times, this is probably clever and bawdy! For me, this is gratuitous. The New York Times is also I think less annoyed than I am by an excessive pagecount devoted to graphic donkey, ox and pig sex.
. . . there are many other differences between me and the New York Times, obviously, but these are probably some of the reasons that the Times and other literary-type book reviews liked Mo Yan's Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (translated by Howard Goldblatt) more than I did.
(Or maybe I'm just bitter that Mo Yan, according to Wikipedia, wrote the whole five hundred page monster in fifty days. WHAT. WHO DOES THAT.)
Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out has a great premise - Ximen Nao, a landlord executed in 1950 after the Communist takeover, puts up such a fuss in the afterlife about the injustice of his fate that he's eventually reincarnated as (in turn) a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, and a monkey in his own village, giving him a chance to see what happens to everyone after his death. And I actually pretty much enjoyed the first half of the book, gratuitous donkey and ox sex and testicle theft aside; Ximen Nao's exploits as SUPER DONKEY and SUPER OX are kind of ridiculous, but his relationship with Lan Lian, who was his foster son and is now the last stubbornly independent farmer in the village, is really compelling. After that, though, the book becomes all about the next generation, who are pretty much uniformly terrible people, and there's still more testicle chomping and boring animal sex and boring people sex and I started to lose interest fast. (I actually kind of suspect the New York Times started to lose interest around then too, given that they write about the book like it's all about Lan Lian and Ximen Nao's connection all the way through, and also misreport Lan Lian as narrating sections when it is in fact his much less likeable son who does that.)
I also think I was probably missing a lot all the way through, though - I can recognize that there is social satire going on, but I don't know enough about China over the past fifty years to pick out when it's especially funny or on-the-nose, and someone who knew more would probably get a lot more out of the story than I did. I will stand by my statement, however, that there are too many testicles in this book.
. . . there are many other differences between me and the New York Times, obviously, but these are probably some of the reasons that the Times and other literary-type book reviews liked Mo Yan's Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (translated by Howard Goldblatt) more than I did.
(Or maybe I'm just bitter that Mo Yan, according to Wikipedia, wrote the whole five hundred page monster in fifty days. WHAT. WHO DOES THAT.)
Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out has a great premise - Ximen Nao, a landlord executed in 1950 after the Communist takeover, puts up such a fuss in the afterlife about the injustice of his fate that he's eventually reincarnated as (in turn) a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, and a monkey in his own village, giving him a chance to see what happens to everyone after his death. And I actually pretty much enjoyed the first half of the book, gratuitous donkey and ox sex and testicle theft aside; Ximen Nao's exploits as SUPER DONKEY and SUPER OX are kind of ridiculous, but his relationship with Lan Lian, who was his foster son and is now the last stubbornly independent farmer in the village, is really compelling. After that, though, the book becomes all about the next generation, who are pretty much uniformly terrible people, and there's still more testicle chomping and boring animal sex and boring people sex and I started to lose interest fast. (I actually kind of suspect the New York Times started to lose interest around then too, given that they write about the book like it's all about Lan Lian and Ximen Nao's connection all the way through, and also misreport Lan Lian as narrating sections when it is in fact his much less likeable son who does that.)
I also think I was probably missing a lot all the way through, though - I can recognize that there is social satire going on, but I don't know enough about China over the past fifty years to pick out when it's especially funny or on-the-nose, and someone who knew more would probably get a lot more out of the story than I did. I will stand by my statement, however, that there are too many testicles in this book.
