這是一部關於鄉土中國當代史的大敘述。
也是一部豪情壯闊、充滿自由自在性格的小說。
《生死疲勞》敘述了1950年到2000年中國農村50年的歷史，圍繞土地這個沉重的話題，莫言闡釋了農民與土地的種種關係，並透過生死輪迴的藝術圖像，展示了新中國成立以來中國農民的生活和他們頑強、樂觀、堅韌的精神。
──在這個大敘述裡，有家族的仇恨，有情欲的糾葛，有驚人的貧困和匱乏帶來的焦慮，有狂熱的理想國追求的幻滅和失落，有新的市場化之下鄉土中國的新希望、困擾和挑戰……
這是一部向中國古典小說和民間?事致敬的大書。在這次的「認祖歸宗」儀式中，小說將六道輪迴這一東方想像力隱沒在全書的字裡行間，寫出了中國農民對生命無比執著的頌歌和悲歌。
在莫言對偉大古典小說呼應的那一刻，聆聽到了「章回體」那最親切熟悉的聲音；莫言承受著生死疲勞的磨礪以及冤纏孽結，將中國人百感交集、龐雜喧嘩的苦難經驗化為純美準確的詩篇，莊嚴而寧靜，祥和而自然。
《生死疲勞》：「動物之眼」述50年鄉村史
● 小說的敘述者，是土地改革時被槍斃的一個地主，他認為自己雖有財富，並無罪惡，因此在陰間裡他為自己喊冤。在小說中他不斷地經歷著六道輪回，一世為人、一 世為馬、一世為牛、一世為驢……每次轉世為不同的動物，都未離開他的家族，離開這塊土地。小說正是通過他的眼睛，準確說，是各種動物的眼睛來觀察和體味農 村的變革。
莫言解讀：鄉村人物的個性價值
■寫作速度創紀錄。莫言隻用43天寫就長達55萬字的《生死疲勞》。從八月起，最多一天寫作1.65萬字，平均一天隻睡三小時，突破了他自己寫作速度的最高紀錄，自稱睡覺時也有一半的腦細胞在工作，有的夢也變成現實。
●書名來自佛經。《生死疲勞》來自佛經中的一句：「生死疲勞由貪欲起，少欲無為，身心自在。」莫言說，佛教認為人生最高境界是成佛，隻有成佛才能擺脫令人痛苦的六道輪回，而人因有貪欲則很難與命運抗爭。
■ 以人物的命運作突破口。「沒有土地，農民像浮萍一樣飄搖。」莫言稱，20世紀80年代之後，農民不再是單純的土地使用者，而是土地的經營者。如今，「當年 眷戀土地的農民紛紛逃離土地。」莫言說，農民飽經患難的歷史，實際上反映了一種螺旋上升的歷史規律。但他坦言，寫作的時候，他並未按照這一規律寫作，而是 以人物的命運作為突破口。
●探索鄉村人物的個性價值。莫言認為，歷史大致由兩種人物擔當，一種人是有價值的個性，而另一種人是無價值的個性。《生死疲勞》中就有這樣的兩個主人公。“這是個性相似的兩個人走了不同的方向，互為正負，合起來是一個人，像一枚硬幣的兩面。
作者簡介
莫言，山東高密人，一九五五年二月生。
少時在鄉中小學讀書，十歲時輟學務農，後應徵入伍。曾就讀於解放軍藝術學院和北京師範大學，獲文學碩士學位。一九九七年脫離軍界到地方報社工作。著有 《紅高梁家族》、《酒國》、《豐乳肥臀》、《紅耳朵》、《食草家族》、《檀香刑》及散文集《會唱歌的牆》、《小說在寫我》等。
Born Again
In the summer of 1976, as Chairman Mao lay on his deathbed in Beijing, the pigs at the Ximen Village Production Brigade Apricot Garden Pig Farm in Gaomi County, Shandong Province, also began to die. The first batch of five were found with “their skin dotted with purple splotches the size of bronze coins, their eyes open, as if they’d died with unresolved grievances.” The commune vet declared they had succumbed to “what we call the Red Death” and ordered them to be cremated and buried immediately. But it had been raining for weeks and the ground was too waterlogged. Dousing the carcasses with kerosene and trying to set them alight simply filled the farm with vile-smelling smoke. Soon 800 more pigs were infected. A fresh team of vets arrived by motorboat with more sophisticated medicines, but their ministrations were of little help. Dead pigs were piled up throughout the farm, their bloated forms expanding and exploding in the heat.
LIFE AND DEATH ARE WEARING ME OUT
By Mo Yan.
Translated by Howard Goldblatt.
540 pp. Arcade Publishing. $29.95.
Unable to bury the corpses, the farmers “had no choice but to wait until the veterinarians left and, in the fading light of dusk, load the carcasses onto a flatbed wagon and haul them down to the river, where they were tossed into the water to float downstream — out of sight and out of mind.” The farm was in ruins, proof that its “glorious days” were “now a thing of the past.” The foundations of the hog houses collapsed, and raging flood waters toppled the utility poles, cutting the commune off from the wider world. Thus it was only through the village’s single transistor radio that these farmers learned Mao had died. “How could Chairman Mao be dead? Doesn’t everyone say that he could live at least 158 years?”
set piece 或 setpiece 或 set-piece
Mo Yan’s powerful new novel, “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out,” contains many such vivid set pieces. His canvas covers almost the entire span of his country’s revolutionary experience — from 1950 until 2000, in the so-called “reform era” of post-Deng Xiaoping China. At one level, therefore, “Life and Death” is a kind of documentary, carrying the reader across time from the land reform at the end of the Chinese Civil War, through the establishment of mutual-aid teams and lower-level cooperatives in the early and mid-1950s, into the extreme years of the Great Leap Forward and the famine of the late ’50s and early ’60s, and on to the steady erosion of the collective economy in the new era of largely unregulated “capitalism with socialist characteristics.” At the novel’s close, some of the characters are driving BMWs, while others are dyeing their hair blond and wearing gold rings in their noses.
Yet although one can say that the political dramas narrated by Mo Yan are historically faithful to the currently known record, “Life and Death” remains a wildly visionary and creative novel, constantly mocking and rearranging itself and jolting the reader with its own internal commentary. This is politics as pathology. From the start, the reader must be willing to share with Mo Yan the novel’s central conceit: that the five main narrators are not humans but animals, albeit ones who speak with sharply modulated human voices. Each of the successive narrators — a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, a monkey — are the sequential reincarnations of a man named Ximen Nao, as determined by Yama, lord of the underworld.
Ximen Nao, a 30-year-old wealthy landlord in Gaomi County, is shot on a cold December day at point-blank range by one of his fellow villagers in the first period of land reform after the Communist takeover. Confident that his life on earth has been honest, constructive and valuable to the community, that he has been a good son and devoted father, a loving spouse to a principal wife and two concubines, Ximen Nao protests against the injustice of his fate. Yama responds by observing that it is well known that many people “who deserve to die somehow live on while those who deserve to live die off.” Therefore, Yama agrees to grant a transmigration for Ximen Nao, and it is from that moment that he returns to earth, first in animal and finally again in human form.
Such a fictional procedure is, of course, fraught with difficulties of tone and narration. The five different animal narrators must describe their own experiences in their own animal voices, tinged with some of the emotions and knowledge of their previous lives on earth. Their main anchor to what we might call reality lies in the fact that each has some connection to Ximen Nao’s surviving hired hand, Lan Lian, a tough, dour, hard-working farmer who insists on clinging to his own small plot of family land and adamantly refuses to join any of the successive socialist organizations. Willful, proud and enduring, Lan Lian is the owner or companion of each of the animals in turn. They share their scanty rations and labor together. Though they cannot talk to one another, Lan Lian somehow senses in each of these five beings some joint and nostalgic memory of his own murdered landlord.
Such a brief summary may make the book sound too cute when it is, in fact, harsh and gritty, raunchy and funny. The revolutionaries’ village politics are deadly; sex in the village (whether human or animal) is flamboyant and consuming. Death is unexpected and usually violent. Coincidences of plotting abound. The zaniest events are depicted with deadpan care, and their pathos is caught at countless moments by the fluent and elegant renderings of the veteran translator Howard Goldblatt. One might have thought it impossible, but each animal does comment with its own distinctive voice — the mordant view of the multiple deaths on the pig farm, for instance, comes largely from the reincarnated pig persona. In addition, either Lan Lian or some other human will often pick up the burden of narration and commentary.
The book’s author is also frequently in evidence within the narrative structures. His limitations as a writer and a person are consistently mocked, and we are regularly reminded by Mo Yan the author that the character of Mo Yan represented in the novel is not to be trusted. “Mo Yan was never much of a farmer,” we are told. “His body may have been on the farm, but his mind was in the city. Lowborn, he dreamed of becoming rich and famous; ugly as sin, he sought the company of pretty girls; generally ill-informed, he passed himself off as a knowledgeable academic. And with all that, he managed to establish himself as a writer, someone who dined on tasty pot stickers in Beijing every day.” By the end of the novel, Mo Yan has developed a separate existence as one of the main characters. It is at his home in the city of Xi’an that Lan Lian’s son is able to take shelter with his lover for five difficult years. Mo Yan even makes sure that the couple have a supply of Japanese condoms.
“Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out” is not unremittingly hostile to the Communist system, and at times Mo Yan seems eager to rebuild the very bridges he has been burning. “I have nothing against the Communist Party,” Lan Lian says at one despairing stage, “and I definitely have nothing against Chairman Mao. I’m not opposed to the People’s Commune or to collectivization. I just want to be left alone to work for myself.” But such reassurances of party loyalty seem frail in the context of such a vast, cruel and complex story.
The kind of critique that we find in this book has many echoes within China today. In his new novel, “Wolf Totem,” Jiang Rong includes a ferocious account of the battle between a starving wolf pack and a herd of wild horses that seems tightly geared to showing the value of older ways of living in the steppe, in contrast with the ultimately disastrous values insisted on by the Party. Mo Yan has his own version of such a battle in his account of the donkeys’ struggle against the wolves near the collective farm. Yan Lianke’s “Serve the People!” gives a common soldier and his mistress, the wife of the division commander, a summer of passionate lovemaking, culminating in a wild and randy spree in which they smash all the once-treasured artifacts and memorabilia of Mao Zedong and his outmoded, pointless policies. Such antipolitical passion also surfaces in many of the sexual entanglements Mo Yan describes in “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out.” It seems that novels in China are coming into their own, that new freedoms of expression are being claimed by their authors. Mao has become a handy villain. One wonders how much longer his successors will be immune from similar treatment.
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