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Bezig met laden... Milder dan alleendoor Yiyun Li
   Books Read in 2016 (2,470) Bezig met laden...
 Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek.  laurenbufferd | Nov 14, 2016 |    ) Hebephrene | Jun 3, 2016 | This is a powerful and intensely meditative novel. Children on the treacherous shoals of their teenage years sense the dangers, but don’t really understand the nature of them, and can be helpless to avoid them, especially if they already feel isolated. They say false things, or do seemingly malicious deeds, without fully appreciating the consequences which may then go on to haunt them. Li writes exquisite prose — this alone is worth the read. These are intensely wrought sentences of astute insights, illustrating rich complexities of thought. “A born murderess, she had mastered the skill of snuffing out each moment before releasing it to join the other passed moments. Nothing connects one self to another; time effaced does not become memory” ”…his voice had left a crack through which loneliness flooded into her room.” “If she had ever felt anything close to passion, it was a passion of the obliterating kind: any connection made by another human being, by accident or by intention, had to be erased; the void she maintained around herself was her only meaningful possession.” The book is littered with aphorisms and observations about the human condition: “…one’s preparation for departure should begin long before arrival” “Do not expose your soul uninvited” “Nothing destroys a livable life more completely than unfounded hope” “It takes courage to find solace in trivialities, willfulness not to let trivialities usurp one’s life.” Solitude and loneliness are tiring to read about, never mind experiencing. By the end I felt exhausted, wrung out, from the tension of repression and loneliness that permeates the story. Nonetheless, highly recommended. Just pair it with the right mood accordingly. (ARC from Random House via NetGalley.) (  )1  TheBookJunky | Apr 22, 2016 | Ruyu is an orphan who was raised by two elderly women who were Christians in a provincial city. Ruyu had been told from her early life that God had a purpose for her. When it came time to enter highschool Ruyu was sent to Beijing to stay with a couple who had ties to the great aunts. This was just a few months after the failed revolution in Tianamen Square. The couple had a daughter, Shaoai, who had taken part in the demonstrations. This placed her under suspicion and eventually she was dismissed from her college. Ruyu and two others from her compound, Boyang and Moran, all go to the same high school and spend a great deal of time together. One day when they visit the university chemistry lab where Boyang's mother works one of them steals a chemical. Shaoai ends up being poisoned by the chemical but it is not clear if it was suicide because she was in despair or if one of the others administered it. Shaoai does not die but her mind is destroyed and she needs constant care. More than 20 years later when Shaoai dies is when the book starts. Boyang, who has stayed in Beijing and seen to Shaoai's care, emails Moran and Ruyu who are both living in the United States about her death. The narrative switches back and forth from present day to the past around the time of the poisoning. We see what Moran, Ruyu and Boyang have done with their lives. All of them have been married and divorced and none seem to have any strong ties to any other person. Salman Rushdie blurbs on the front cover that "This is an exceptional novel..." but I didn't feel that. I can't even ascribe the failings to poor translation because Yiyun Li lives in the US and writes in English. There are some interesting pieces about life in China just after Tianamen Square. The juxtaposition of present day life in China is also interesting but the characters are so wooden and one-dimensional that the whole novel does not work for me. ( ) gypsysmom | Feb 8, 2016 | The focus here is on four individuals and on an incident that occurred 30 years before the novel opens, at a time when the individuals were in their teens, and which left one of them in a vegetative state. After the incident, Moran and Ruyu left China for the US. Boyand has stayed behind in Peking and become a successful businessman. He has kept in touch with the family of Shaoai, the woman in the vegetative state. Over the years, Boyand periodically emails Moran and Ruyu the status of Shaoai, but otherwise there has been no contact between the three. Boyand is not even aware if Moran and Ruyu receive or read the emails. As the novel opens, Shaoai has just died, and Boyand has dutifully notified Moran and Ruyu. The novel proceeds alternating between the contemporary time, the time of the teen friendship of Moran, Ruyu and Boyand, and the lives of the three survivors over the years since the incident. Yiyun Li says the book is about characters who have to make sense of a death. I never really connected with the book, and it was not one I looked forward to picking up each night. 2 1/2 stars (  )3 arubabookwoman | Oct 19, 2015 | geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Onderdeel van de uitgeversreeks(en)Keltainen kirjasto (459)
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML: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. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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 Google Books — Bezig met laden...GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde: (3.48)
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7
I thought the writing was a little woolly in places - especially when compared to the crystalline prose of her short stories - but there is no doubt that Li's a talented writer and this is a brilliant, if upsetting, look at human nature. (