Kinder Than Solitude: A Novel - Softcover

Li, Yiyun

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812980166 ISBN 13: 9780812980165

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2015

Synopsis

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 incident 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, avoiding 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 before.
 
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
 
“This is an exceptional novel, and Yiyun Li has grown into one of our major novelists.”—Salman Rushdie
 
“Yiyun Li infuses the traditional form with a fresh, rigorous beauty and a sense of permanence and increasing value.”—Mona Simpson, author of My Hollywood
 
“[A] sleek, powerful novel about the weight of memory, the brunt of loss and the myriad ways the past can crimp the soul . . . Li gives us gifts of gorgeous prose. . . . Rarely are ordinary humans given such eloquent witness.”—The Washington Post
 
“What makes [Kinder Than Solitude] so vivid is its humanity. . . . It is an inquiry into how the past scars us, shaping present and future, and some deeds, once committed, can never be undone.”—Los Angeles Times
 
“[Li’s] true gift . . . is old-fashioned storytelling [and] a sense that a life, a whole life, can be captured on pages.”—The Boston Globe
 
“A stunning, dark, and beautiful book . . . Yiyun Li writes with characteristic genius.”—Paul Harding, author of Tinkers and Enon

About this title

Review:

Excerpted from a Conversation Between Yiyun Li and Mona Simpson

MS: The organization of both your novels emanates from a central, extremely dramatic event. The structure is almost a wheel, with spokes coming out from a center. The motors in your stories feel very different. Can you talk about how an idea settles in you for a novel? Is it different with stories?

YL: I love the description of a wheel with spokes coming out, and indeed both of my novels open with a death that the novel and the characters have to make sense of and deal with in all kinds of ways. For me, a novel starts with a situation, and a story starts with a character or a set of characters more than a situation. Kinder Than Solitude started with the situation that a woman was poisoned yet lived in a prolonged state of unnecessary misery for twenty-three years. Who was she? Who were the people involved? Why did the case remain unresolved? And what happened when the woman eventually died? These questions from that central situation were all mysteries to me when I started the novel.

MS: Beijing is almost a character in this novel, as it is in a few of your recent short stories. What is it like writing about Beijing in English for an English speaking audience?

YL: I once wrote to a friend and said that this novel was going to be my love letter to Beijing. I have given my fondest memories of Beijing to the three characters when they were teenagers, not only the tourist sites Boyang and Moran took Ruyu to see, but also the fabric of everyday life: old men sitting under a tree and expecting a fresh and forgettable story from Ruyu; Boyang and Moran on bicycles, free as Mongolian children on horsebacks; puddles after the rain; watermelon rinds rotting by the roadside.

Several Westerners living in Beijing have commented to me that the city I write about is mostly gone, and it is true, but its people haven’t changed much. Human nature evolves much more slowly than a city does, which is heartening. That’s why I love to read Jane Austen and Dickens. So writing about Beijing in English is like writing about California in English: the landscapes are characters that interact with the people.

MS: What does being a Chinese writer writing in English mean in terms of identity? We're each odd examples of global modernity. (I'm half Syrian, though I grew up in the US and write in English.)

YL: As novelists, we are transparent so our characters won’t be. I think this global world seems to make it even easier for a writer to blend in and to be invisible: I don’t call myself a Chinese writer, or an American writer, or a Chinese-American writer, because I don’t feel the pressure to solve my identity; my only urgency is to stay as un-intrusive as possible when I write about the characters.

MS: You're a Chinese woman living in America, and you've cited William Trevor as your primary teacher. Which cultural lineage seems most significant to you: your national history or your literary legacy?

YL: I often think of one’s national history as one’s genes: something given, something predetermined. Literary legacy is, at least in my case, a choice. I only started writing in my late 20s, and by then I could decide whom to include in my literary genes: Tolstoy, Turgenev, Elizabeth Bowen, and of course William Trevor who, as you mentioned, is a primary influence. So my literary legacy comes from Irish literature and Russian literature.

MS: You’ve recently become a US citizen. Have you been sworn in? It's hard to imagine either Ruyu or Moran becoming naturalized.

YL: I became a citizen in August, 2012, and yes, I have been sworn in. I think I knew the immigration status of both Ruyu and Moran—they are American citizens—and yet I refrained from making it too obvious in the novel. For Moran, her citizenship offers psychological shelter from the violence she does not understand; for Ruyu, the citizenship is, like everything else in her life, something she accepts and can discard without a second thought. In a deeper sense, however, both of them are so bound to the past that it is hard to imagine that becoming American citizens would change them in any fundamental way.

About the Author:

Yiyun Li is the author of four works of fiction—Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of many awards, including a PEN/Hemingway Award and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the “20 Under 40” fiction writers to watch. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University and lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with her husband and their two sons.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0812980166
• ISBN 13: 9780812980165
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352