The full text is 2627 words long and takes about 5 minutes to read
"Life and Death Fatigue" constructs an interesting story framework.
Our protagonist, ximen, the well-known first landlord of Gaomi Township in the northeast, began with a gunshot by the villagers of Ximentun during the land reform in 1950.
He reincarnated back to his home for six consecutive lifetimes, but the first five were all in the animal path, becoming donkeys, cows, pigs, dogs, and monkeys, respectively, and the sixth was the big-headed baby born of incest by the grandson and granddaughter of Ximen Hao's wife Yingchun.
Because he was born at the turn of the century, he got a name called Blue Chitose.
Under the arrangement of fate and the author Mo Yan, Meng Po Tang was useless to Ximen, so the big head Lan Chitose — or the big landlord Ximen Hao — retained the memory of generations and decades, he was a witness and witness to history, and he could even be said to be history itself.
Borrowing the tone of the big head Lan Qiansheng, Mo Yan used his magic realism technique, ostensibly telling the rise and fall of the villagers of Ximentun in Gaomi Township, Northeast China since 1950, but in fact recording Mo Yan himself as a witness and witness of that period of lost years, all the occurrences and developments he observed in this chinese land, mixed with his Interpretation and Infinite Remembrance of that period of lost years.
The whole book is a total of 500,000 words, and Mo Yan's self-description of the first draft took only 43 days to create, and there was no computer, all handwritten.
I was amazed at the speed of his writing and marveled at the quality of his work. Being able to create such a wonderful novel in such a short period of time made me admire Mo Yan's creative ability.
One of the advantages of the short creative time is the coherence and fluency of the writing, although the whole book has more than five hundred pages, it actually does not look tired at all, and even very up, always want to read it in one breath.
After reading it, I flipped through the comment area of the book in the major APP and found that like me, there were still many students who read this book to the top, at least it showed that Mo Yan's ability to tell stories was first-class.
Embellishing ordinary ordinary lives with some magical colors and putting on a fairy tale coat of cold and cruel reality is a major feature of Mo Yan's novel, but in the book "Life and Death Fatigue", this layer of characteristics is particularly special.
That is to say, even if you only use this book as a story reading for bedtime pastime, and purely want to feel the magic reality of Mo Yan's small theater, this book is qualified and interesting.
In this book, you can see the blood of a male donkey fighting a wolf in pursuit of love, you can see a ploughing cow in order to repay its owner's reluctance to die, you can see a breeding pig in order to freely chase the clouds and catch the moon to lead the madness of hundreds of beasts, you can see a dog relying on smell and hearing to control the high technology of the whole city.
We don't encounter such crazy or even dreamy things in reality, so when we read such a plot, we will find it interesting and even shocked.
This is the role of literature, it is a bridge between dreams and reality.
For the author, with the help of words, their dreams of sorrow or joy, or of magnificence or subtlety, or of reality or magic, are sealed.
What is more interesting for the reader is that with the help of literature, we can feel the dreams of others. Through the embodiment of words, we have the opportunity to feel the creator's dreams of grief or joy, or magnificence or subtlety, or real or magical.
So I sometimes think that people who read books regularly are often said to have a unique temperament, probably because they have experienced too many dreams of others through reading.
In their limited lives, they have already felt the infinite script, so when they return to reality, they will appear more calm than ordinary people.
Just as soldiers who have experienced war are not afraid when they face street thugs, chefs who have served state banquets are not nervous when they face home-cooked side dishes.
A bit far away. I write this to show that from a story point of view, "Life and Death Fatigue" is actually suitable for all ages, even elementary school students, just look at the stories in it can be read with relish.
But I'm no longer a schoolboy. As an adult, when reading novels, I often ask myself what is so good about this book, what the author of this book wants to express, what I have after reading this book or what I should gain.
I'm sure many readers have actually asked themselves the same question. Although this is a bit like the sequelae left to us by the language of the college entrance examination, if almost everyone has such doubts, it is very valuable to clarify the answer to the above questions.
In fact, the essence of several problems is the same, that is, our innate curiosity is at work, like to explore the reasons behind the phenomenon, the motivation behind the story.
We are not satisfied with just seeing the story of the novel, and we are convinced that since the author spent so much energy on creation, he must have buried an Easter egg in it. So if we only focus on the story, it is equivalent to seeing only the tip of the iceberg, less or even most of the fun.
This is, of course, the subjective assumption of the reader, but since the phrase "a thousand readers have a thousand Hamlets" is so famous, it shows that once a literary work is published, its interpretation is no longer the exclusive right of the author, and the reader's ideas are equally important.
So how do you dig up the author's Easter egg, or to put it another way, how do readers get fun outside of the novel's story?
This is actually a bigger problem, and it is difficult to say clearly in a few words. I will probably write a special article in the future to explain my own views on this.
Since this article is the main speaker of "Life and Death Fatigue", here are only a few clues for everyone to find the fun that Mo Yan secretly buried outside the story of donkey cow, pig, dog and monkey.
(1) Pay attention to the scattered statements that the author or carefully or unintentionally intersperses in the story that insude to reality. For example, in the chapter On the Donkey Toss he writes:
“... The female donkey I am following should be one of the female donkeys who drive the ore or the female donkeys who pull the cart, and besides, in such an era, under strict organization and iron discipline, is there a second donkey hiding somewhere in heat? ...”
“... There were many toads chirping in the river, and occasionally bursts of cheering and drumming came from far away, and I knew that it was the hysteria of fanatics in their imaginary victories..."
Thinking about the actual occurrence of donkey tossing, you can appreciate that Mo Yan is complaining about the restlessness and madness of people in the Great Leap Forward era.
(2) Pay attention to Mo Yan's white depiction of the environment, some paragraphs may have a limited role in promoting the storyline, but those beautiful sentences that appear at first sight are ironclad evidence of Mo Yan's writing skills, and they are also real Easter eggs, which cannot be missed. Like what:
"I suddenly smelled the clear water of the river, and the smell of ice melting rapidly, and the smell of thawed dirt and the smell of hot baked cow urine. The smell of cow urine, the smell of estrus, spring has come, everything has revived, and the season of mating is about to begin. Snakes, frogs, toads and many insects that had been dormant for a long winter also awoke, and all kinds of wild grasses and wild vegetables were also alarmed, and woke up, and the white gas under the ground rose upwards, and spring came. In this way, the cow chased Hu Bin, the Ximen Golden Dragon chased the cow, and I chased the Ximen Golden Dragon, and we ushered in the spring of 1965. ”
"I saw the river water like fluctuating mercury, shimmering with dazzling light, I heard countless autumn insects among the grass and trees, ensembled to a variety of music, I saw fireflies intertwined into green ribbons, swaying among the trees, I saw the moon has traveled west to the sky above the fifth cotton processing plant, under its belly, the iodine tungsten lamp on the roof of the cotton processing factory lint packing workshop flashed up and down, like a green egg just laid by the moon, I also heard the rapid and rhythmic dull sound of the electric hammer of the forging machine tool factory hitting the steel, as if it were a heavy punch, hitting my heart at once. ”
(3) Like a treasure hunt, go to the work to find the author's favorite role, see what qualities the author has injected into him, and what difficulties he has experienced.
I'm not going to write out the character name here, right to leave a suspense, in fact, people who have seen the original should easily guess who I am talking about.
I can only say that Mo Yan gave this character too much preference in "Life and Death Fatigue", so that he has the most resolute personality, let him experience the most suffering, and let him fight the torrent of the times with a simple body.
The tragic nature of this character is so obvious that Mo Yan simply wants to portray him as the Sisyphus who always pushes stones in ancient Greece, so much so that I think that a few poems in the author's inscription can only be said from his mouth:
The world is rotating, and the tides of the world are high and low. The Buddha's eyes are low, and life and death are tired.
Life and Death Fatigue Author Inscription