Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Kinder than Solitude - Yiyun Li

Have you ever read something and thought how beautiful the words were put together?  This story has many such phrases.  I marked over 20 passages yet when I finished I hadn't liked the characters.  They were resigned to a blank life because of the poisoning, accidental or deliberate, of a friend in their youth.  Their dreariness was wearing. The writing was wonderful but the story was lacking.

[update]
I found some notes I made of phrases that I thought were beautiful and wanted to record them:

"...her unforgiving sharpness, what a waste that edge had rusted..."

[referring to girlfriend and mother] "...one was too transient in his life and the other too permanent."

"...together they [a group of women] seemed to negate one anothers' individual existence by their predictability."

"This freedom to act and the freedom to judge, undermining each other, amount to little more than a well-stocked source of anxiety."

"The crowdedness of family life and the faithfulness of solitude - both brave decisions or both decisions of cowardice...make little dent, in the end, on the profound and perplexing loneliness in which every human heart dwells."

"...wondered if her chief merit was her willingness to serve as a human receptacle for details".



Published:  2014  Read: June 2014  Genre: Fiction

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