书籍介绍
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.
Yiyun Li is the author of two novels, The Vagrants and Kinder Than Solitude, and two short story collections, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, as well as the memoir, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She has won literary awards including the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was...
AI导读
核心看点
- 虚构母子对话直面丧子之痛
- 以英语精确性对抗语言局限
- 探讨理性思辨与悲伤的边界
适合谁读
- 李翊云文学爱好者
- 关注亲子心理读者
- 非母语写作研究者
读前提醒
- 需耐心适应开篇疏离感
- 关注词源辩论背后的焦虑
- 警惕过度理性化的解读
读者共识
- 文字精准却令人窒息
- 母爱深沉但具压迫感
- 悲伤中蕴含深刻思辨
本导读基于书籍简介、目录、原文摘录、短评和书评生成，不等同于全文精读。
精彩摘录
- "Perfect. Imperfect. A pair of adjectives that come over and over again, in all seasons, day in and day out, taunting us, judging us, isolating us, turning our isolation into illness. Is there a more accoplished adjective than perfect? Perfect is free from comparison, perfect rejects superlative. We "
- "I don’t like making friends with older people. Besides, one can’t really be friends with one’s mother. Can one not? No. 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. You did find me. Not as your "
- "I suppose you’re right, I said. Still, I wish you knew how much you are missed by many people. Mommy, Nikolai said, and the way he said it almost made me weep. Mommy, you know that’s a cliché. What if life could be saved by clichés? What if life must be lived by clichés? Somewhere tomorrow and somew"
- "Rules are set to be broken, he said. Deadlines are set to be missed, I said. Deadline as a word used to fascinate me, a word that connects time and space and death with such absoluteness. Promises are made not to be kept, he said. Love is made not to last, I said. A contestable statement, though he "
- "Poor you, he said. Waylaid by time. Waylay, I said. I’ve never used it in my writing. No offense, but you don’t have an expansive vocabulary. Luckily my mind is not limited by my vocabulary, I said. (In my head I used the same tone that I had used when Nikolai had introduced me to his kindergarten c"
- "Days are not the only place where we live, Nikolai said. Time is not the only place where we live, I said. Days are. I don’t have to have days to live now. And yet I have to live in days, I said. I’m sorry, he said. Days: the easiest possession, requiring only automatic participation. The days he ha"
- "If memory were a fetter, he said, many people would envy me. Why? Each day they live makes the fetter more unbreakable than the day before. What if, I thought, that is life’s necessity? Still, I said, aren’t you able to know the poem even if you can’t remember? It doesn’t work the way you imagined. "
- "I’m rather dense, I said. Gormless, you know. Dense and gormless were the favorite adjectives Nikolai and his brother used to describe me. Do you really believe that? Why not, I said. How I always hate your hypocrisy, he said. Oh, I said. I was taken aback. I was surprised that I had forgotten this:"
作者简介
Yiyun Li is the author of two novels, The Vagrants and Kinder Than Solitude, and two short story collections, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, as well as the memoir, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She has won literary awards including the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was listed among Granta's 21 Best of Young American Novelists 2007. Her stories have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review and elsewhere. She is a MacArthur Fellow and a Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University.
目录
1. Do Not Let Mother Dear Find Us (3)
2. Waylaid by Days (11)
3. The Trespassers (20)
4. Then the Button Came Undone (31)
5. Catchers in the Rain (41)
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用户评论
母亲说有些人靠图像活着与记忆，有些人靠声响，而她依凭文字。漫长而无序的对话里她只在最终问出最想问的问题，答案如预期般空置。解脱于文字又suffer于文字。母与子。形容词，名词，perfectionist。
In order to live, in case of end of reasons, one need blind hope, resolutions, love, and maybe, ceasing to die for perfection.
非母语写作好的令人发指
Words fall short,but sometimes their shadows can reach the unspeakable.
可我抓不住那个声音。我听到的只有沉默、沉默、无声无息。我其实有好多责备、好多追问、好多歉然、好多不忍、好多忧虑、好多心碎和所有所有想念你。可如果能再见一面，如果能再讲一句，这些就都不必提，我只是想问do you still suffer now ？如果你现在快乐，我一个人往下活也没关系。
啊 长长的叹息
太私人了有时难读下去，但大概本身就不是写出来为求共情的作品。
到头来一场空
“You are a good mother.”
“Not good enough to make you stay.”
“你是个好妈妈。”
“没有好到让你愿意留下。”
会想到安卡森的《Nox》：搜集每个关于你的字句，重新为你编撰词典；Yiyun同样以诗人式的严苛去和words较劲：明知道说多错多（imperfect），可我们只能用这样的方式继续对话，而你永远享有challenge我话语的权利，包括用adjectives去描述我的nouns。“Words don’t have shadows.” 可整本书都关于阴影，通过它抵达nowhere，诉说the unspeakable open wounds，和秋日里所有“欲说还休”。
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