The Years, Months, Days: Two Novellas

by Yan Lianke, Carlos Rojas (Translator)

Overview

Over the last decade, Yan Lianke has been continually heralded as one of the “best contemporary Chinese writers” (The Independent) and “one of the country’s fiercest satirists” (The Guardian). Among many awards and honors, he has been twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize and he was awarded the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize for his impressive body of work. Now, for the first time, his two most acclaimed novellas are being published in English.

“Timeless” and “marvelous” (Asian Review of Books), Marrow is a haunting story of a widow who goes to extremes to provide a normal life for her four physically and mentally disabled children. When she finds out that bones “the closer from kin the better” can cure their illnesses and prevent future generations from the same fate, she feeds them a medicinal soup made from the bones of her dead husband. But after running out of bones, she resorts to a measure that only a mother can take.

A luminous, moving fable, The Years, Months, Days—a bestselling classic in China and winner of the prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize—tells of an elderly man who stays 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. Tending to a single ear of corn, and fending off the natural world from overtaking the village, every day is a victory over death.

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802188816
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	12/05/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Yan Lianke is the author of numerous short story collections and novels, including The Explosion Chronicles, The Four Books (shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize), Lenin's Kisses, Serve the People!, and Dream of Ding Village, which was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and adapted into a film. He was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize and two of the most prestigious literary honors in China, the Lu Xun and the Lao She prizes.

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

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