Kinder Than Solitude

                      


I just finished reading this book entitled Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li. I came across a lot of references to this novel when I surf the net. Also there is a quote by Salman Rushdie on the cover. Well that is the power of a quote by a famous writer on a prospective reader. Made me very curious and decided to buy the book to find out.

My Take On This Novel
The novel is about the mysterious poisoning of a young lady who in the end dies after 21 years of suffering. The culprit is one of the three close friends of the victim, Ruyu, Moran and Boyang. The present lives of the three suspects, which occupy a large chunk of the book, are as described by some reviews, punitively bleak and sterile. Despite their successes, especially in the case of Moran and Boyang, they suffer the same spiritual equivalent of the victim's physical poisoning. That as a result make for some pretty dull reading in the book. Ruyu and Moran have moved to the US while Boyang has stayed on in Beijing, caring for Shaoai, the victim.

All three are haunted by what really happened in their youth and by doubts about themselves. In California Ruyu helps a local woman care for her family and home and avoids entanglements as she has done all her life. In Wisconsin, Moran decides to care for terminally ill ex-husband, whose kindness overcame her flight into solitude before. In Beijing, Boyang struggles to deal with the inability to love and to deal with the outcome of what happened among the three of them, almost twenty-one years ago. In my opinion this book is about the impact of personality and a person's past on the shape of his or her present and future.

Summary of Kinder Than Solitude
A few months after the Tiananmen Square protests, four teenagers in Beijing become involved in a macabre poisoning that leaves one of them severely brain-damaged. Twenty-one years later she finally dies, confronting the remaining three with their own roles in her drawn-out death.

On a quiet side street in a dusty, unremarkable Beijing neighbourhood in the last days of autumn, 1989, a young woman named Shaoai drinks a glass of Tang — an exotic delicacy — and becomes strangely ill. Taken to the hospital, she slips quickly into a coma. At home, waiting anxiously for her return, are her parents (here simply called Uncle and Aunt); a distant teenage cousin, Ruyu, who lives with them and shares a room with Shaoai; and two intimate friends of Ruyu’s, Moran and Boyang.

“One day,” Yiyun Li writes, “the neighbours in the quadrangle would refer to this time as the days when Shaoai had been mysteriously sick, as they would speak of the May afternoon when an army tank was overthrown and burned down at a nearby crossroads, or the day in June when Teacher Pang’s cousin pedalled three bodies on his flatbed tricycle from the Square to the hospital. . . . Life, in retrospect, can be as simple as a collection of anecdotes, and anecdotally we live on, trading our youthful belief in happiness . . . for the belief in feeling less, suffering little.”

Shaoai was, in fact, a young protester in Tiananmen Square in May and June of that same year,and as a result, just before falling ill, was expelled from her university, ending any chance of finding a meaningful career. Before long, her doctors discover she’s been poisoned, and for a moment the police consider the possibility that she took the poison herself — which would make her a belated martyr, and “Kinder Than Solitude” a very different kind of novel. But no one believes this for long. It was Ruyu who stole the poison — a chemical from the laboratory of Boyang’s mother, a famous scientist — and Ruyu who seems the only possible culprit.

An orphan, raised by two elderly sisters, secret Catholics, Ruyu views the world with a detachment that would seem saintly were it not so profoundly, pathologically neutral: For her, each day is “a replica of the previous day; a place, any place, was merely a spot for resting during one’s migration from beginning to end.” Sent by her guardians to live with Aunt and Uncle and attend a better school in Beijing, she develops, despite herself, a genuine friendship with Boyang and Moran, a talkative, happy pair who spare no effort to coax her out of her shell. But from the moment of their meeting, Ruyu loathes Shaoai’s arrogance and presumptuousness, and resents being forced to room with her in Aunt and Uncle’s tiny house. Shaoai mocks the younger girl’s contempt for the world, but finds her sexually irresistible, and finally forces herself on Ruyu, telling her afterwards: “You have not even been taught to have human feelings. Since they haven’t done that for you, someone else must.”

Given this history, and her possession of the murder weapon, it seems an open-and-shut case; but Ruyu claims the poison was stolen from her room and thus could have been administered by anyone. No charges are filed, the case is closed, and Shaoai lingers, brain-damaged and uncommunicative, for 21 years. She’s watched over by Boyang, who becomes a rich, careless entrepreneur in Beijing, divorced and melancholy, only temporarily diverted by the younger women who want him as their “sugar daddy.” Moran and Ruyu, like so many educated Chinese of their generation, have emigrated to the United States; when the novel opens, at the moment of Shaoai’s death, we find them on opposite sides of the country, secure in American creature comforts but emotionally desolate, divorced and childless, their lives as unresolved as the murder itself.

A Little Bit on Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and came to the United States in 1996 to study immunology at the University of Iowa, with no intentions of being a writer and no knowledge of the Iowa Writers Workshop. Fortunately, for those of us who believe that words have at least as much power to save us as medical science, Li discovered her true calling in Iowa. As a result, she’s has already given us three books. Li’s debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction; it was also shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize and the Orange Prize for New Writers. Her recent novel, The Vagrants, takes place in China in the late 1970s and chronicles the local impact of a young woman’s politically motivated execution. The Vagrants was chosen as an American Library Association Notable Book. Her second story collection, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, which she wrote simultaneously to The Vagrants, released in September of this year.

Li’s stories and essays have been published in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and the O Henry Prize Stories, among others. She has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the MacArthur foundation. She was selected by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35 and was recently featured in the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 Fiction Issue. She is a contributing editor at the Brooklyn-based literary magazine, A Public Space. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at the University of California, Davis.