A couple of novel reviews

While subbing in a math class last week (where I had no comments to add to the teacher's assignment of in-class exercises), I was able to finish reading A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, a beautiful collection of short stories by Yiyun Li. My sister sent the book on the recommendation of S. Riddle – and my pleasure in it is thus some small justification of time spent reading blogs.

The stories in this collection are all either set in China or about the experience of Chinese Americans; they reveal a deep love of the human person in contradiction to the facelessness of Communist ideology.  But I think what I most enjoyed about this book is that the stories were good stories well told. Perhaps the dominant impression this book left on me was that love is worth the risk of pain and betrayal. Despite the fact that others remain essentially unknowable, that they are never completely who they appear to be, love continues to seek connection and knowledge. Love makes people more interesting, as in “The Princess of Nebraska,” the story of a love triangle between a middle aged man, a young college girl, and a male opera singer who sang female roles: The girl muses about her rival, the older gentleman: “A man like Boshen should have an ordinary life, boring and comfortable, yet his craze for Yang made him a more interesting man than he deserved to be.”

These stories circle around the idea of betrayal, marked by emotional restraint, but also by faith in the redemptive power even of unrequited love. In “Love in the Marketplace” Sansan holds onto bitterness 10 years after a betrayal, but feels tenderness for a street man who seems to hold to principle, like herself. Uncle Bing in “The Arrangement” remains a celibate devoted to serving the object of his love, a sickly, bitter woman, whose parents rejected his proposal of marriage in favor of a more wealthy suitor, who came with money but not love.

Another story, "Extra," has a girl singing a song with this line: “The happiness of love is a shooting meteor; the pain of love is the darkness following.” This first story was perhaps my favorite, about an old cleaning lady’s love for a little rich boy ignored by his family. She gets fired from her job for losing track him, but holds onto his sock collection as a memento of her love affair.

I also liked the insight into parental love in “Son”: “Her god is just like a Chinese parent, never running out of excuses to love a son. But he stays quiet when he looks up at his mother, her eyes so eager and hopeful that he has to avert his own."

And in “The Princess of Nebraska”: “Being a mother must be the saddest yet the most hopeful thing in the world, falling into a love that, once started, would never end.”


I almost put the book down after reading “After a Life,” about a couple hiding their grown handicapped daughter. For a week or so after reading this story with its ambivalent ending, I put the book down, not sure whether or not I wanted to spend more time with it, but I returned to finish them before my mom and sister came to visit. I'm glad I did, otherwise I would have missed out on this: from “Death is Not a Bad Joke If Told the Right Way”: “I wish Mrs. Pang would smile at me when she puts away Mr. Pang’s clothes, and I would know that she is proud of him, earning his life between hills of envelopes at seventy-nine, being a useful man, defending himself, dying with dignity.”

****

Also finished Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, which I loved until I reached the last page. I can’t decide if the ending has soured the entire book, a book that transfixed and transported me into another place, Haiti in the 1930’s. Danticat writes about Amabelle Desir, a Haitian living in the Dominican Republic as a serving girl at the beginning of the story. But when the Presidente Trujillo turns on the Haitians, Amabelle, her lover, and his sister decide to escape. Only she survives, along with a friend of her lovers, because they were not with the people planning to escape at the time. They are still tortured and next to death when they finally cross the river in Haiti.


The second half of the book is weaker than the first; it gives glimpses into Amabelle's life while hoping for the return of her lover, but her character is shadowy. It's as if Danticat really just wanted to tell the first half of the story and then didn't know what to do with the second.  I kept expecting Amabelle to learn to love Yves, the friend. Their one attempt at love-making results in a deeper sense of alienation. They never intrude again on each other’s person. Amabelle lives primarily on her own, sewing for others and reliving her memories. Some 20 years later she returns to the Dominican Republic to visit her former mistress, who also has lived a life set apart, alone, because her husband, a military man, helped execute the massacre of Haitians. After this brief visit, Amabelle returns to the river where her parents drowned, and her friends were shot. The ending is reminiscent of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening – I’d like to hope something gave her reason to live.


Was browsing my sister’s The Art of Fiction while she was here and came across John Gardner’s opinion that taste in writing is a nobility of sentiment that never discourages lonely old people, angst ridden teens, or disappointed middle agers from living: "To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write [...] so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write [...] so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on. If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living. The true artist [...] gets his sense of worth and honor from his conviction that art is powerful." Amabelle seems determined to persevere through the massacre, and she seems to want to provide some record of those who died so they won’t be forgotten – perhaps in keeping alive the memory of the dead, she gives up the will to live, even those she seems to be want to be a comfort to the mother of Yves. Does she give up in the end or just go for a swim to feel a moment of communion with all those she lost in the river?


Not the ending I expected, instead it is an ending that prevents me from recommending this book, even though I was captivated by the story, because the ending suggests that if you lose all you love, life isn’t worth living, you can’t really start again after such a great tragedy – so is it a tasteless ending? If I put down the book knowing something I never knew before about a forgotten tragedy, while the murderer exists in history books, was it worth reading?