The Years, Months, Days: Two Novellas

by Yan Lianke, Carlos Rojas (Translator)

Overview

Yan Lianke—“China’s most feted and most banned author” (Financial Times)—is a master of imaginative satire, and his prize-winning works have been published around the world to the highest honors. Now, his two most acclaimed novellas are collected here in a single volume—masterfully crafted stories that explore the sacrifices made for family, the driving will to survive, and the longing to leave behind a personal legacy.

Marrow is the haunting tale of a widow who goes to extremes to provide a normal life for her four disabled children. When she discovers that bones—especially those of kin—can cure their illnesses and prevent future generations from the same fate, she feeds them a medicinal soup made from the skeleton of her dead husband. But after running out of soup, she resorts to a measure that only a mother can take.

In the luminous, moving title story, The Years, Months, Days—a bestselling, classic fable in China, and winner of the prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize—an elderly man stays behind in his small village after a terrible drought forces everyone to leave. Unable to make the grueling march through the mountains, he becomes the lone inhabitant, along with a blind dog. As he fends off the natural world from overtaking his hometown, every day is a victory over death.

With touches of the fantastical and with deep humanity, these two magnificent novellas—masterpieces of the short form—reflect the universality of mankind’s will to live, live well, and live with purpose.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802126658
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	12/05/2017
Pages:	155
Sales rank:	306,912
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Yan Lianke is the author of numerous story collections and novels, including The Explosion Chronicles, which was longlisted for the Man Booker International and PEN Translation Prize, The Four Books, Lenin’s Kisses, Serve the People!, and Dream of Ding Village. Among many accolades, he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, he was twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, and he has been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Man Asian Literary Prize, and the Prix Femina Étranger. He has received two of China’s most prestigious literary honors, the Lu Xun Prize and the Lao She Award.

Read an Excerpt

From Marrow

Fourth Wife You said, “We are trying to cure his daughter’s illness. There’s nothing to explain.” With this, she entered the tomb, squatted down in front of the coffin and pushed aside a couple of maggots that had fallen onto the leg bones. She looked everything over and saw that, apart from some white moss, the walls of the tomb were completely intact. “Good soil in this tomb,” she remarked. Then she turned and asked, “Did you bring a sack?”

Second Son-in-Law took a white cloth out of his pocket and laid it out in the lighted area at the entrance to the tomb.

Fourth Wife You asked, “Which bone do you want?”

Second Son-in-Law said, “Whenever Second Daughter has an episode, her hand begins to tremble, so let’s take a bone from his hand.”

Fourth Wife You took two bones from her husband’s hand and placed them on the cloth, then asked, “What else?”

Second Son-in-Law said, “Whenever she has an episode she loses the ability to walk.”

Fourth Wife You took one of her husband’s leg bones and placed it on the cloth, then asked, “What else?”

Second Son-in-Law said, “Anything is fine. Just take a few more.”

Fourth Wife You said, “Mental illness is the result of something wrong in the brain, and if the brain can be fixed the illness will be cured. So, we should definitely use the skull.” As she was saying this, she took the skull and held it in both hands as though it were a bowl, then gently placed it on the cloth.

Editorial Reviews

The Years, Months, Days, the first of the two novellas…recalls a Beckett play. Like Beckett's most memorable characters, the Elder is drawn from a long tradition of absurdist sages, barely lucid but often wise…Desolation has rarely seemed so sensual, so insistently alive. In chronicling with extraordinary sensitivity the suffering of an ordinary man, Yan forces us to pay attention…Marrow is a mordant look at a depraved society, more exemplary of Yan's other work—he has handily drawn comparisons to Kafka and the foundational Chinese satirist Lu Xun—than its companion novella…Unlike Lu Xun, whose work pointed to structural shortcomings in Chinese society, Yan doesn't suggest any solutions in his disillusioned fables. The problem, he implies, is human nature. We are all degraded and degrading. There's no help for that.

The New York Times Book Review - Jamie Fisher

★ 10/02/2017
Lianke’s talent for the fantastical shines in this collection of two novellas. In the title piece, an elder stays behind after a long drought drives his fellow village residents to more amiable climates; he claims he’d “surely die of exhaustion” if he joined their pilgrimage. With only his blind dog by his side, and battling both the elements and encroaching wild beasts, the elder toils under the hot sun to survive, nursing a lone corn seedling and devising various schemes to stay alive. “Marrow,” the second novella, features a devoted mother who will stop at nothing to provide her disabled children with happiness. A widow, she speaks to her husband’s ghost as she wheels and deals to land suitors, promising grains and goods to potential mates and leaving herself with little to survive. Though they contain dark subject matter, Lianke’s fables of personal sacrifice are also sharply observed and funny. Lianke’s narratives feel much larger than their page count suggest, almost epic. Agent: Laura Susjin, the Susjin Agency. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for The Years, Months, Days

* A New York Times Editors’ Choice
* One of Bookforum’s Best Book of the Year, chosen by Colm Tóibín

“Yan Lianke creates imaginary wounds in real blood . . . His books read like the brutal folklore history couldn’t bear to remember.” —New York Times Book Review

“Filled with a deep melancholy mixed with a ghostly comedy and a rare sort of narrative energy. Utterly unpredictable and brilliantly weird.” —Colm Tóibín, Bookforum

“[Yan’s] characters inhabit a bleak, harsh world. In bitterly hard circumstances, they show courage and ingenuity, defiance and grace. His renderings of real-world desolations are imaginative and wondrous; these austere fables are minimal, but beautifully composed.” —Shelf Awareness

“The Years, Months, Days finds the Chinese master at the top of his game . . . His satirical eye and generous heart are finely rendered.” —Toronto Star

“[Yan’s novellas] showcase his hallucinatory imagination and satiric wit.” —BBC

“Lianke paints vivid scenes of desolate circumstances with an incredible mastery of words and control of his imagery. His masterpieces are sure to engage readers.” —Booklist (starred review)

“These two compelling novellas both exalt emotional bonds and warn against their fatal consequences . . . this work again directs the author’s unflinching gaze on life’s impossible absurdities, exposing a surreal mixture of brutality, openness, even sly humor.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Lianke’s talent for the fantastical shines in this collection of two novellas . . . Though they contain dark subject matter, Lianke’s fables of personal sacrifice are also sharply observed and funny. Lianke’s narratives feel much larger than their page count suggest, almost epic.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Apocalyptic, eerie visions in two novellas by much-honored Chinese writer Yan . . . Inspired, one imagines, by the terrible headlines of famine, climate change, and simple uncertainty; Yan draws on the conventions of folklore and science fiction alike to produce memorable literature.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From the Publisher

07/01/2017
A Franz Kafka Prize winner who has been short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize (twice) and the Man Asian Literary Prize, renowned Chinese author Yan doesn't sugarcoat his narratives. "Marrow," the first of these two novellas, features a widow desperate to provide for her four physically and mentally disabled children, who makes them soup from their father's bones because she hears that might heal them. In "The Years, Months, Days," a Chinese best seller that won the Lu Xun Literary Prize, drought has forced everyone out of a village but an old man, who cannot endure the march through the mountains and instead survives on a single ear of corn.

Library Journal

★ 2017-09-18
Apocalyptic, eerie visions in two novellas by much-honored Chinese writer Yan (The Explosion Chronicles, 2016, etc.).Imagine: in some near future, after Fukushima has finished pumping its tons of irradiated water into the Pacific, the incidence of hereditary disease skyrockets. So it is in the village where a woman named Fourth Wife You is working the unusually bountiful fields with her four "idiot children," all born apparently normal and then fading into some sort of penumbra of consciousness, a world of their own that is probably happier than ours. The doctor is no help: "You have four children and all four are idiots," he says. "You could have eight, and you'd have eight idiots." Apparently other such diseases have sprouted up, for when a stranger comes into view in Yan's meaningfully titled novella Marrow, he announces himself as a "wholer," a touch worse for the wear but still all there. The cure that Fourth Wife You discovers is perhaps worse than the disease itself, as she warns her children from the grave with less a curse than a promise. In the title novella, which would do Friedrich Dürrenmatt proud, drought falls on an already suffering village, eventually driving all but one of the residents into flight. He reasons, "I'm seventy-two years old, and would surely die of exhaustion if I tried to walk for three days. If I'm going to die either way, I'd prefer to die in my own village." It is up to this Robinson Crusoe to stave off catastrophes that come in the form of spectral wolves and plagues of rats; like Fourth Wife You, the old man—called, indeed, Elder—must sacrifice himself in order to satisfy the mad gods of nature in a world now "so peaceful you could even hear the bright sound of the sunrays knocking against one another and the moonbeams striking the ground."Inspired, one imagines, by the terrible headlines of famine, climate change, and simple uncertainty; Yan draws on the conventions of folklore and science fiction alike to produce memorable literature.

Kirkus Reviews