A review by wentingthings
Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li

5.0

i found myself in a paper library the other day – my mother had placed some holds out of the blue, and i offered to bike over to get them (she wanted to drive the car, horror). although out of the habit, i could not resist the draw of shelves. new yorker seems popular, the only issue i could find was from october and it looked like a stampede of dogs had run it over. i settled in the fiction section but felt aimless. all the titles that stood out to me were the same as perhaps five years ago, like time has stuck in amber. i browse superficially, going by jacket design, covers, so perhaps this isn’t surprising; i squinted harder. just when i was about to give up, i picked out a completely unremarkable spine. it was the author’s name that drew me in. ambivalently, i checked kinder than solitude out along with my mother’s tai chi manuals, and headed home. the moon was close to the horizon, pale pink against a sort of purple sky behind the close roofs of suburbia, and i had low expectations of the book. but it surpassed these expectations, and has wormed its way through my brain. days after, i am still thinking about it. neither boyang, ruyu, or moran are able to let go of a past they share. is it perhaps that they aren’t allowed to? i found myself thinking of the three of them in communist beijing, as my father’s car drove past willow trees half a world, decades, and a layer of reality away. and i can’t help but feel profoundly moved by the way the characters in the novel held immoveable views of one another, truths they believed so wholly about other people that when these things were revealed to be wholly wrong when the narration switched perspectives, i didn’t really question the dissonance.