[2] It features an old man, 72 years of age driven from the village he served as an elder, along with his neighbors,[3] by a drought.
Jamie Fisher of The New York Times described the elder as "barely lucid but often wise", and compared him to a typical character of a Samuel Beckett play.
She learns that her children can gain intelligence if they drink a soup produced from bones of the people related to them.
[4] He added that since human excretions and large women's breasts "almost qualify as secondary characters", the stories show "Yan’s world [as being] earthy, male and often very juvenile".
[4] Peter Craven of the Sydney Morning Herald praised the "metaphorical lushness" in the text and that The Years, Months, Days is "a hopeful book Yan Lianke has made out of the very essence of hopelessness.