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3.5

This was an interesting read. At first, I found the writing playful, but I couldn’t attach to it, couldn’t get inside the world of the novel. It’s structured so that we briefly follow a young male narrator who happens upon an old man. The young man’s POV is told to us in italics, intermittently throughout. The old man’s story is the heart of the novel. Because of this, it feels like a story being told - yes, well told - but told, rather than shown.

A book that spans Chinese history from the Second Sino-Japanese war starting in the 1930s, to the civil war between the Nationalist and Communist parties, to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in under 200 pages is one that doesn’t bring the reader into real time all that much. And yet� there were times when I felt pure joy reading about Fugui’s life, with all its simple pleasures and devastating losses. It focuses on one family (from when Fugui was a child to the birth of his grandson), and the effects of historical events on this family (Land Reform, The Great Leap Forward, The Great Chinese Famine, etc.). It’s interesting to see how the family becomes part of different economic classes at different points in history due to personal choices or political climate.

I recently read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which contains short stories by Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Gogol, and I felt like the novella, To Live, complemented the reading of those Russian stories. There was something about the smallness and simplicity of life, with its inevitable drama, coupled with the experience of living under a Communist government, that felt similar.