THE YEARS, MONTHS, DAYS

Two Novellas

By Yan Lianke

Translated by Carlos Rojas.

192 pp. Black Cat. Paper, $16.

The first Chinese recipient of the Franz Kafka Prize and a frequent target of government censorship, the novelist Yan Lianke creates imaginary wounds in real blood. Yan was born in Henan province in 1958, and his childhood coincided with the worst years of the Great Leap Forward, when China’s rush toward modernity thrust millions into biblical-level famine and privation. (His mother, Yan later recalled, was forced to teach him the most edible forms of bark and clay.) As his translator, Carlos Rojas, explains in his introduction, these experiences profoundly marked Yan’s sensibility. Yan has called his style “mythorealism.” His books read like the brutal folklore history couldn’t bear to remember, and his characters feel stranded, forgotten by time.

“The Years, Months, Days,” the first of the two novellas collected in this volume, begins with an arresting line: “In the year of the great drought, time was baked to ash.” Set after a mass migration, the story has three major characters: a 72-year-old man known as the Elder, a sun-blinded dog and a cornstalk. The minimal staging 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. He talks to his dog, weighs sunlight on a scale and waters the cornstalk with his own urine.

The Elder’s world is nauseatingly vivid, reminiscent of the too-sharp smells and sounds associated with a migraine. When he licks the powder from a flour jug, “the pure white taste of wheat” blossoms in his mouth. When the sun is at its height, he hears his hair burning. 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.