Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
A landlord shot in 1950 is sent back by the underworld as a donkey, then as an ox, a pig, a dog and a monkey, always within sight of his former village. Through animal eyes he follows land reform, the communes and the market boom, and the stubborn peasant who refuses to join the collective. It draws on Buddhist rebirth and the Chinese vernacular novel, and is among the books the Swedish Academy cited for Mo Yan's Nobel.
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