Ophelia Field
After Tiananmen
Kinder Than Solitude
By Yiyun Li
Fourth Estate 320pp £16.99
Yiyun Li’s second novel wears its complexity lightly. It shifts between three bright teenagers, a boy and two girls, living in Beijing shortly after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and their stories some twenty years later, after the two women have emigrated to the United States, leaving their friend, Boyang, to become a successful businessman in China. The whodunnit aspect – who poisoned a fourth young woman and why – successfully counterbalances Kinder Than Solitude’s otherwise essayistic tendencies. Li’s writing still shows influence, in other words, of her time at both the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and its Writers’ Workshop for fiction.
It is unusual for a novel to have several main characters essentially sharing the same neuroses, yet this never feels like a weakness. Instead, these shared traits – their studied passive aggression, their ‘skill of self-protection’ through isolation and their ‘compulsive purging of the past’ – operate symbolically on another
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk