Yiyun Li

"'I had but one delusion, which I held onto with all my willpower: we once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I'm doing it over again, this time by words.' In a world created outside of time, Li and the son who died talk about their lives. Deeply intimate and moving, this story cycle of grief captures the love and humor in a relationship which goes on now in a mother's heart, between a mother and child, even as it captures the pain of Li's sadness and loss. Written in the months following her son's death, this powerful book takes readers intimately and unforgettably into Li's grief, even as she transforms the pain into imaginary conversations of great beauty, humor, sadness and love"--

A Novel

Where Reasons End

laetitia

Days are not the only place where we live, Nikolai said.

Time is not the only place where we live, I said. Days are.

The essence of growing up is to play hide-and-seek with one’s mother successfully, Nikolai said.

All children win, I said. Mothers are bad at seeking.

WHERE REASONS END is about a mother's fictional conversation with her oldest child and son who she lost to suicide. In this conscious narrative, her son is renamed as Nikolai. Bereft of and longing for his presence in her life, she begins willing him into being in her mind and asks him questions, tells him anecdotes which she would have never been able to say to him, now. 

Within 173 pages, this book shredded me, heart and mind, to pieces. I ached and hurt for both of them; so much that after finishing each chapter, I had to put down the book and think about what I just read. Yiyun Li's spare prose is emotional and efficient in cutting hearts. I don't think I have ever come across a story on suicide that does not have a reason prompting the decision; either it's a life full of burdensome expectations, a life standing on a spectrum of nonconformity, or a life torn by endless prejudice and discrimination. The narrator, the mother, describes his a happy one, seemingly fulfilled and peaceful. But along the way she starts to question whether she'd disappointed him. He had numerous good friends He had a generally cynical perspective of the world, true, but it appeared to be used as a tool to irk and question his mother's thoughts and opinion, coupled with his scathing wit. Their conversations, their word play, are soul food for thought to chew on, deeply intimate, roiling with an undertone of sadness, longing and love. They remind me of the discussions I have with my mother, often leading towards a debate. But even when we disagreed with each other, we never lost this intricately-wrought cord of love between us. This reminder only brought more needling pain into my chest, because once upon a time, I had considered attempting suicide for a few reasons.

The answers are never laid on a silver platter and served to the reader as if saying: Here's what you should think. Here's what you should feel. This book does not patronise or lecture. It tells you to feel. Why did he kill himself? The void of an answer is acute. In the end, you never know what lies behind a person's smiling facade.

fairuza hanun

WHERE REASONS END is about a mother's fictional conversation with her oldest child and son who she lost to suicide. In this conscious narrative, her son is renamed as Nikolai. Bereft of and longing for his presence in her life, she begins willing him into being in her mind and asks him questions, tells him anecdotes which she would have never been able to say to him, now. 

Within 173 pages, this book shredded me, heart and mind, to pieces. I ached and hurt for both of them; so much that after finishing each chapter, I had to put down the book and think about what I just read. Yiyun Li's spare prose is emotional and efficient in cutting hearts. I don't think I have ever come across a story on suicide that does not have a reason prompting the decision; either it's a life full of burdensome expectations, a life standing on a spectrum of nonconformity, or a life torn by endless prejudice and discrimination. The narrator, the mother, describes his a happy one, seemingly fulfilled and peaceful. But along the way she starts to question whether she'd disappointed him. He had numerous good friends He had a generally cynical perspective of the world, true, but it appeared to be used as a tool to irk and question his mother's thoughts and opinion, coupled with his scathing wit. Their conversations, their word play, are soul food for thought to chew on, deeply intimate, roiling with an undertone of sadness, longing and love. They remind me of the discussions I have with my mother, often leading towards a debate. But even when we disagreed with each other, we never lost this intricately-wrought cord of love between us. This reminder only brought more needling pain into my chest, because once upon a time, I had considered attempting suicide for a few reasons.

The answers are never laid on a silver platter and served to the reader as if saying: Here's what you should think. Here's what you should feel. This book does not patronise or lecture. It tells you to feel. Why did he kill himself? The void of an answer is acute. In the end, you never know what lies behind a person's smiling facade.

Faith Ho 

“one never makes things up in fiction, i said. one has to live there as one has to live here.”

reading as it is, perhaps whimsical, interesting, profound; reading with the context—knowing why this book exists—melancholic, devastating. there is a sparseness to the (imagined) conversation between mother and child that underlies the sadness of this book. and yet it is not sad in the conventional emotional sense; it is wistful, and deeply moving in the struggles of a parent coming to terms with their child’s decision, and that child explaining and yet not explaining their actions. it covers all manner of topics, from the abstract - living, loving, language - to the heartachingly-familiar - of baking, doing homework, hanging out with friends. 

a few selected quotes:

“what, my child, can i catch now, when all has become invisible? words, mother dear, nikolai said. we will be catching each other's words, don't you see?”

“because people who know you and people who know me meet us where we are. people who don't know you and people who don't know me are only facts. flawed or limited, whichever adjective you prefer. / just as we are flawed facts for them.”

“what if I ask you, what do you do all day? / oh the things you know, i said. reading. writing. cooking. looking out of the window. what do you do all day? / oh the things you don't know, he said. dreaming. dreaming. thinking. dreaming.”

“for years he had asked me: if you write about suffering, if you understand suffering, why did you give me a life?”

“[...] poems and stories are trying to speak what can't be spoken. [...] words fall short, yes, but sometimes their shadows can reach the unspeakable.”

“to love is to trespass (on the mind)” “to live, too”

Beau

Laura sent me a link to an Instagram review someone had written for this book. The person who penned this reflection captures my emotions and frustrations so beautifuly that I can't help but just share it here:

[Where Reasons End] is a book of imagined conversations between a mother and her recently-deceased son. I can best describe this book as autobiographical fiction as the author, #YiyunLi wrote this novella in the aftermath of her own son’s suicide. Which is perhaps why it doesn’t make sense; it comes from a place of incredible pain, and oftentimes with grief, try as much as one can, the world doesn’t make sense. In the case of this book, the words don’t make sense.

With a verbose mess of sentences debating the use of nouns, adjectives and adverbs, and basically, writing in general, this book does its best to keep you out of touch with any kind of emotion. Every other character, I don’t know if I can call them that, as no one features for more than two sentences here, even the younger brother and the father. It’s just mom and son meeting up in a world devoid of time or tense, made up of words only. Through this made-up conversation, Li seems to have one purpose - criticising her parenting prowess and her writing skills. And the critique comes in the voice of her son. Why?

So basically, I don’t understand this book. Sentence after sentence, relentlessly, one philosophical rumination leads to another. It’s just too much, especially when they lead nowhere. Also, it is not entirely believable when you make a 16-year old sound like Socrates.

However, all said and done, I cannot contest that Li is a magnificent writer, and I’ll definitely pick up some of her earlier works of fiction someday, but I do contest the purpose of this book. 2 stars!

https://www.instagram.com/p/B7OF_6eg5...

I echo how beautifully written this book is. I'll definitely check out more of Li's work but this read had me not only confused but frustrated at the unbelieveability of the protagonist's grief and the blantent ignorance of the son. Conceptually it's brilliant, though.

Sourav Arora

Teeeeeesha

A fearless writer confronts grief and transforms it into art, in a book of surprising beauty and love, "a masterpiece by a master" (Elizabeth McCracken, Vanity Fair). "Li has converted the messy and devastating stuff of life into a remarkable work of art."--The Wall Street Journal WINNER OF THE PEN/JEAN STEIN AWARD * LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD * NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST FICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Parul Seghal, The New York Times * NPR * The Guardian * The Paris Review The narrator of Where Reasons End writes, "I had but one delusion, which I held on to with all my willpower: We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I'm doing it over again, this time by words." Yiyun Li meets life's deepest sorrows as she imagines a conversation between a mother and child in a timeless world. Composed in the months after she lost a child to suicide, Where Reasons End trespasses into the space between life and death as mother and child talk, free from old images and narratives. Deeply moving, these conversations portray the love and complexity of a relationship. Written with originality, precision, and poise, Where Reasons End is suffused with intimacy, inescapable pain, and fierce love.

Meniah

'Profoundly moving. An astonishing book, a true work of art' Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers 'Heart-wrenching, fearless, and unlike anything you've ever read' Esquire 'I sit here shaken and, I think, changed by this work' Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers 'A devastating read, but also a tender one, filled with love, complexity, and a desire for understanding' Nylon 'The most intelligent, insightful, heart-wrenching book of our time' Sean Andrew Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less 'Captures the affections and complexity of parenthood in a way that has never been portrayed before' The Millions 'Ethereal and electric, radiating unthinkable pain and profound love' Buzzfeed From the critically acclaimed author of The Vagrants, a devastating and utterly original novel on grief and motherhood 'Days: the easiest possession. The days he had refused would come, one at a time. They would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into an ally or an enemy to myself.' A woman's teenage son takes his own life. It is incomprehensible. The woman is a writer, and so she attempts to comprehend her grief in the space she knows best: on the page, as an imagined conversation with the child she has lost. He is as sharp and funny and serious in death as he was in life itself, and he will speak back to her, unable to offer explanation or solace, but not yet, not quite, gone. Where Reasons End is an extraordinary portrait of parenthood, in all its painful contradictions of joy, humour and sorrow, and of what it is to lose a child. Praise for Yiyun Li: 'A masterpiece...[Puts] you in mind of Tolstoy or Chekhov' Sunday Times on The Vagrants 'This is a book of immense power and it will leave you reeling' New Statesman on The Vagrants 'Controlled understatement, scrupulous and unsparing lucidity... A work of great moral poise and dignity.I have not read such a compelling work in years' Independent

Francesca

Ditipriya Acharya

Marek R

Deepika Ramesh

Emma

YIYUN. LI

From the critically acclaimed author of The Vagrants, a devastating and utterly original novel on grief and motherhood 'Days: the easiest possession. The days he had refused would come, one at a time. They would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into a friend or an enemy to myself.' A woman's teenage son takes his own life. It is incomprehensible. The woman is a writer, and so she attempts to comprehend her grief in the space she knows best: on the page, as an imagined conversation with the child she has lost. He is as sharp and funny and serious in death as he was in life itself, and he will speak back to her, unable to offer explanation or solace, but not yet, not quite, gone. Where Reasons End is an extraordinary portrait of parenthood, in all its painful contradictions of joy, humour and sorrow, and of what it is to lose a child. Praise for Yiyun Li: 'A masterpiece...[Puts] you in mind of Tolstoy or Chekhov' Sunday Times on The Vagrants 'This is a book of immense power and it will leave you reeling' New Statesman on The Vagrants 'Controlled understatement, scrupulous and unsparing lucidity... A work of great moral poise and dignity.I have not read such a compelling work in years' Independent

Where Reasons End A Novel

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