Kinder Than Solitude Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00HWZ9HZA | Format: EPUB
Kinder Than Solitude Description
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 20 years ago.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 12 hours and 3 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Recorded Books
- Audible.com Release Date: February 25, 2014
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00HWZ9HZA
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.
Kinder Than Solitude Preview
Link
Please Wait...