After watching Professor Yan Lianke's novel "Year Month Day", I can't help but think of the apocalyptic science fiction film "I Am Legend" that won the Saturn Award for Best Actor for Will Smith. The two have the same idea in terms of situation, character setting, and the theme they want to express.
In the story of "Year, Month and Day", a rare drought lasted for a long time, and all the villagers who did not harvest fled the wilderness. Only the grandfather was too old to stay alone in the village, with only a blind dog by his side. In the days of surviving the disaster, in order to prepare seeds for the villagers who returned from the wilderness, the grandfather and the blind dog overcame one difficulty after another and persevered to fight against the whole environment for the growth and reproduction of a corn.
Compared with "I Am Legend", both stories take place in the midst of an irreversible human disaster, and because of the disaster, the male protagonist is completely isolated, and their emotional communication is only for the ineffable dog. In this way, the simplest and smallest characters are set off with the most vast background, and the situation where only one person and one dog stand between heaven and earth lasts almost the entire story, creating a desolate and sad atmosphere. Moreover, the life that should have been boring day after day, but because the two lonely heroes held a sense of responsibility to fight for the "seeds of hope", they were not crushed by the disaster and let it go. They fight with the heavens and the earth, and in the ordinary daily life, they intertwine one tense survival struggle after another, and one person interprets the contradictions and conflicts of the story. It is also in this struggle that the creators express their praise for the struggle between human beings and difficulties, as well as their concern for the future and destiny of mankind.
Of course, due to the different cultural backgrounds of the creation, there are also obvious differences between "Year, Month and Day" and "I Am Legend". "I Am a Legend" is in New York City in the reinforced jungle, while "Year, Month and Day" is in the countryside familiar to Professor Yan Lianke, and the countryside is inseparable from the land, so it also has the image of corn and seeds. The seed is "hope", there is no doubt about it. Corn and the grandfather reflect each other, the grandfather with the elderly life irrigated the growth of a single corn, every point of growth of corn carries the endless joy of the grandfather, and its every illness and weakness indicates another struggle of the grandfather. The lonely corn is the hope sown in the coming year, and the lonely grandfather is the creator and guardian of this hope.
In fact, the story of "Years, Months and Days" is not complicated or brain-burning, but the simple story does not have the film picture impact and sound effect blessing of "I Am Legend", which still makes people linger in reading. This is all thanks to Professor Yan Lianke's writing skills, it is a deep power, both the roughness of the peasants, but also the magnificence of the environment, the metaphor is always unexpected and amazing, any paragraph can not bear to jump, hate can not break open the words to see the burst of brilliance inside.
In short, compared with "I Am Legend", "Year Month Day" has a similar setting, but different performance. The whole book is worth the price of the book just by appreciating professor Yan Lianke's words.