Kinder Than Solitude: A Novel Author: Yiyun Li | Language: English | ISBN:
B00EX4FFNQ | Format: EPUB
Kinder Than Solitude: A Novel Description
A profound mystery is at the heart of this magnificent new novel by Yiyun Li, “one of America’s best young novelists” (
Newsweek) and the celebrated author of
The Vagrants, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Moving back and forth in time, between America today and China in the 1990s,
Kinder Than Solitude is the story of three people whose lives are changed by a murder one of them may have committed. As one of the three observes, “Even the most innocent person, when cornered, is capable of a heartless crime.”
When Moran, Ruyu, and Boyang were young, they were involved in a mysterious “accident” in which a friend of theirs was poisoned. Grown up, the three friends are separated by distance and personal estrangement. Moran and Ruyu live in the United States, Boyang in China; all three are haunted by what really happened in their youth, and by doubt about themselves. In California, Ruyu helps a local woman care for her family and home, and avoids entanglements, as she has done all her life. In Wisconsin, Moran visits her ex-husband, whose kindness once overcame her flight into solitude. In Beijing, Boyang struggles to deal with an inability to love, and with the outcome of what happened among the three friends twenty years ago.
Brilliantly written, a breathtaking page-turner,
Kinder Than Solitude resonates with provocative observations about human nature and life. In mesmerizing prose, and with profound insight, Yiyun Li unfolds this remarkable story, even as she explores the impact of personality and the past on the shape of a person’s present and future.
Praise for Kinder Than Solitude
“There’s something about the poise, the tidiness, the seemingly effortless calm of Yiyun Li’s writing that makes it easy to see her as an author who, like Jhumpa Lahiri, employs a Chekovian neutrality. . . . But look again. . . . There’s a withering, vibrating sarcasm at work in the juxtaposition of national and personal tragedies.”
—The New York Times Book Review “Li turns an intricately plotted mystery into something more profound, one that queries the meaning of crime and punishment in the moral murk of contemporary China.”
—The New Yorker“The surface of Yiyun Li’s prose is deceptively still, but just beneath the surface are the sadness, pain, and tragedy of three lives, each one driven into a kind of damaged solitude by the memory of the past. Li’s characters are portrayed with a harsh beauty, and one’s emotions become deeply engaged with their fates, and with the mystery of a poisoned woman, a crime which has shaped—perhaps deformed—them all. This is an exceptional novel, and Yiyun Li has grown into one of our major novelists.”
—Salman Rushdie“Li is something of a connoisseur of loneliness and despondency—in this she is reminiscent of the . . . bard of solitude, William Trevor—and her book is rich in such elegant, fine-grained expressions of despair.”
—The Wall Street Journal“Yiyun Li has such an authentic voice, and she is not afraid of cutting to the bone to get to the truth of relationships and emotions. I believe
Kinder Than Solitude is her best novel yet.”
—Lisa See
“[Li] writes with acuity and nuance about ordinary lives set against broader cultural and social divides. . . . What makes [
Kinder Than Solitude] so vivid is its humanity, the idea that nationality and history are less important than the vagaries of the heart.”
—Los Angeles TimesFrom the Hardcover edition.- File Size: 1201 KB
- Print Length: 337 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1400068142
- Publisher: Random House (February 25, 2014)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00EX4FFNQ
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,400 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #17
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Women's Fiction > Psychological - #26
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Psychological - #36
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
- #17
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Women's Fiction > Psychological - #26
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Psychological - #36
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
Generally, I think there are two kinds of great writers. The first engages one emotionally, often by creating characters with stories we love or care about--everyone from Tennessee Williams' fragile and breakable Katherine to Chabon's Kavalier and Clay, ordinary Berks making their way through monumental times. These are the writers we think speak to us, whom we trust, believing they would know and like us as well.
The second group are the philosophers, those who consider us "warts and all" but somehow manage to focus most especially upon the warts making disquieting observations about our selves. Everyone from Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov to Updike's commercial and self-absorbed Rabbit. One instinctively knows these writers wouldn't much like us or we them, for that matter.
Of these two broad characters Yiyun Li fits firmly in the second camp. Her gripping and powerful new work, Kinder Than Solitude is a brilliant meditation on human fear, cowardice, deception and ruthlessness. Using the Rashoman starting point of different people telling the story of a murder (Li's poison victim, more tragically, lives on 20 years but so devastatingly diminished as to be a jerking, slobbering corpse) gone awry.
The influence of Kurasowa's Rashoman and perhaps even Iain Pear's medieval mystery Instance of the Fingerpost is clear. But I was struck by the author's keen debt to Faulkner, particularly his brilliant observation "the past is never dead. It isn't even past.". This, in a nutshell, sums up Kinder Than Solitude. The remainder of the story is the delineation of lives of three childhood acquaintances, impacted by the the tragedy of an attempted murder and the realization which one of them is to blame.
I won't summarize the story as other reviewers have done so. Instead I'll give my impressions of the mood of the book so you can decide if this is something that you would enjoy.
I've loved Yiyun Li's short stories and admired her writing for a long time, so much so that when this book came out I snatched it up immediately.
What I found compelling about the book was, besides her writing, the psychological depth. This is not a mystery in the traditional or commercial sense. Rather, it's a quiet examination of how the death of a close friend, under suspicious and unconfirmed circumstances, impacts three young people as they grow into adulthood. The book alternates among the three characters and goes back and forth between the present and past, until we see, near the end, the events leading up to the poisoning of the deceased friend. The chapters dealing with the present show how these teens, now adults, are coping through the choices they have made in their lives. All have failed marriages. All are dealing with self-isolation of one sort or another.
The reason I say in my subject heading that this book is not for everybody is that it is a "slow," contemplative read. Another reviewer used the word "introspective" and I very much agree with that description. Take this passage, about Moran's decision to stick with her Chinese name in America rather than using an English name:
"If forgetting is the art of eliminating a person, a place, from one's history, Moran knew that she would never become a master of it. Rather, she was like a diligent craftsman, and never gave up a moment of vigilance in practicing the lesser art of not looking back, not thinking about the past.
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