Keywords: Chinese literature, Chinese fiction, loneliness, isolation, death
Genre: Fiction
Length: short medium long
Country: China
Review .
“When people talk about starting over, it’s only wishful thinking: what came before, what happened yesterday, did not come or happen in vain.”
Kinder than solitude | Yi Yun Li
Three friends whose lives have been scared by one death unveil the deepest yearnings and pains of the act of being alive.
What strikes the soul when encountering this book is precisely the image of one gnawing at themselves and their world in an effort to carve a sort of extension of a shell, a sort of space where only they and themselves would fit, would be welcomed.
It underlines the inherent solitude that each of us bears in their being. Of course, the main “plot” has its intrigue, its development, its mystery and all that. I didn’t care about it though. What stayed with me all this time was the honesty in the author’s writing and just like another quote says “I don’t think truth ever tastes good to anyone’s palate.”
After the disaster that turned their lives around, each of the characters chooses different kinds of solitude: the solitude found in surrounding yourselves with other people, being a witness to their lives while keeping your own to yourself; the solitude of throwing yourself in relationships with no real end or connection; the solitude of martyrizing yourself, of making choices which exclude connection.
And maybe this is why I liked it so much. It managed to show all the ways in which you can be lonely without being alone. And it was almost poetic.
“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.”
Kinder than solitude | Yi Yun Li
Musings of a reading addict 
Leave a comment