Yiyun Li

I've followed Yiyun Li's work for years and more often than not enjoy and admire her books (an exception being the last novel, The Book of Goose). Wednesday's Child lives up to the line in the nursery rhyme from which the title was taken: "Wednesday's child is full of woe." This is a collection of short stories, most of them sad or, at best, bittersweet. The protagonists are primarily Asian women who are in some way exiled from home or family (traveling, immigrating with family, on an international scholarship, etc.), and each has suffered a profound loss. The loss of a child, of a friendship, of a marriage, of a connection to home. It took me quite a while to complete this collection, partly because I simply needed something other than a downer, partly because other things were going on in my life. As always, the writing is precise and moving.… (més)

An absolutely lovely novel that takes a premise that's already pretty interesting on its face -- a pair of French country girls conspire to write a book of short stories shortly after the end of the Second World War -- and goes to unexpectedly deep, and often sad, places. It's clear from the book's opening that Agnés and Fabienne are a pair: Agnés, our narrator, even cops to being Fabienne's "whetstone." But while Fabienne is the duo's real talent, she's also barely literate: Agnés acts as both her amanuensis and as her public face. Later events suggest that the girls' literary experiment doesn't work when Agnés is left on her own, but that just provides an opportunity for the author to get at her deeper themes. This isn't just a book about fake child prodigies, and there's a lot more going on here than a friendship between two lonely, talented girls.

There's also the tricky question of time. The girls' friendship is intense, but I suspect it might not be any less intense than the friendships that many other girls' their age have before the rest of their lives -- love, sex, work, responsibility and maybe children -- rushes in. In "The Book of Goose" Fabienne and Agnés exist in a sort of liminal space between childhood and adulthood, and what they have is necessarily fragile and fleeting. They're both smart enough to know it. What impressed me most about "The Book of Goose" is that Fabienne's talent is also framed in similar terms. Fabienne has no real desire to be a famous literary type: for her, telling stories is a game. But the game that the girls are playing cannot survive its own inherent contradictions: both separation and exposure would spell its end.

There's a larger story here about the nature of genius and the precarity of all of our lives. The author presents genius as a wondrous, alchemical quality, dependent both on raw talent and on the emotional and social resources that are necessary to give it shape. Fabienne seems to have the sort of detachment that great writers often display in their works, but the fact that she can't really take ownership of her own voice is telling. It's also worth noting that Agnés and Fabienne's story is further marked by other seemingly random tragedies. While the end of their precocious literary career can be seen as another sort of tragedy, the book's two main protagonists are no strangers to misfortune or injustice. By the time we reach the end of the book, it seems a small miracle that Fabienne's untutored literary mind and the girls' difficult life circumstances produced so much as a book of short stories and a close friendship. The world that Li describes in "The Book of Goose" is one that constantly forecloses on our most dazzling possibilities even as it offers us other ways to survive. To say that I found this book unbearably sad verges, if that's possible, on understatement.

I also noted that Li herself is a Chinese-American, currently on the faculty at Princeton, who has lived an interesting and in many ways accomplished life. I could find anything in her biography, however, that might connect her to this novel's rural French setting. Seen from that perspective, "The Book of Goose" is a truly impressive product of the imagination. I was deeply impressed by how well the author evoked a time in which the French countryside felt worlds away from any place of real importance. To avoid all of the usual "life in Provence" clichés would have been more than enough, but this one's a real time machine. It's is one of those works that examines the question of literary talent while, at the same time, announcing its presence. In other words, "The Book of Goose" is a very good novel, and Yiyun Li is the real thing.… (més)

I’ve managed to accumulate several volumes of Yiyun Li but had, for no good reason, never managed to read her until I sat down recently with this collection of stories. I won’t make that mistake again. Although her subjects aren’t quite up my alley, she is a terrific writer and has a knack for completely believable people (albeit in some occasionally unbelievable situations). “Immortality” is about a young man who is a double for the dictator and follows his (the double's) rise and inevitable fall. “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” follows an older Chinese man who visits America for the first time to see his recently divorced daughter. The story is a well-done exploration of cultural and language barriers, about communication and about silence. I enjoyed most of the stories in the volume, the great majority of which take place in China and there is no doubt that Li has little use or love for the Communist Party, the communist system, or what it has done (and is doing) to China (she has lived in the USA since 1996 when she was 24). But her stories are about far more than that and if you have any interest in good modern short story writing, I’d definitely encourage you to look at this. I know I’ll be pulling down the other collections before very long.… (més)