Thi Bui
Harry N. Abrams ($24.95)

by Jeff Alford

The best memoirists reveal familiarity in the foreign. Challenged with the task of presenting their lives as something another person would read, they must find a way to break apart the uniqueness of their history into something more broadly connective, pushing readers towards an abstract sort of reflection and empathy. A story of a mother and a daughter, for instance, should transcend the specificity of motherhood and daughterhood and present to all readers something with which they can connect. In the memoirist’s ether, the personal needs to transfer from writer to reader.

Thi Bui’s comics memoir The Best We Can Do is about her family’s emigration from Vietnam in the ’70s and their naturalization into the United States. A tremendous achievement, the book brilliantly renders its feelings of alienation with inclusivity and empathy, focusing simultaneously on one specific family and corresponding universal themes of love, kinship, and growing up. Bui’s art is immediately accessible, cartoonishly sweet but disarmingly weighty.

When the story opens, Bui is about to give birth. She's shaken with both physical and emotional uncertainty but can recognize that this experience will, for once, definitively give her something she has in common with her mother. “Family is now something I have created—and not just something I was born into,” she writes. Upon the birth of her child, she, like her mother, will have shifted from individual to caregiver, and they will share a parallel responsibility to do the best they can for the life they made.

But did her parents do the best they could? This is a painful question to ask, as Bui’s relationship with them was one more of efficiency than joy. Growing up, they were hardworking and critical, tired and often irritable. Although now divorced, her parents see each other often, seemingly too indifferent to care about moving on. As a new mother, Bui vows to be for her child what her mother wasn't. “Proximity and closeness are not the same,” she astutely notes.

The memoir unfolds backwards into the story of her parents, known simply as Ma and Bo (although careful readers can discover their real names with a little digging). Bui, as an adult, can be seen throughout the book as a considerate listener with a newfound courage, finally asking her parents the questions they never spoke of growing up. “Me and Bố,” she writes, “we’re okay now. To stop being scared of him, I grew up and went away. And now that I’ve come back, we can sit in my mother’s studio, both of us visitors, neither one owing the other.”Alternatively, she confesses “writing about my mother is harder for me—maybe because my image of her is too tied up with my opinion of myself.” Details emerge and color vaguely-remembered outlines about their family of six: stories of miscarriages, illnesses, political pressure, and suicide attempts reframe her parents’ tribulations with all the subtle difficulties that Bui could never have noticed as a child in Vietnam.

Brutal chapters are devoted to her family’s escape from Vietnam by boat, sharing the hull in starving silence with other refugees. Bui provides readers with an important reminder that the war in Vietnam was so much more than a Walter Cronkite narrative or an Eddie Adams photograph: “I think a lot of Americans forget that for the Vietnamese, the war continued, whether America was involved or not.” They land in a camp in Terengganu, Malaysia, and from there journey, briefly, to distant family in Indiana before settling in California.

There, they tried their best. With no outside pressure, the family was left to nurture and cultivate new identities as American immigrants:

Little by little, our parents built their bubble around us—our home in America. They taught us to be respectful, to take care of one another, and to do well in school. Those were the intended lessons. The unintentional ones came from their unexorcised demons . . . and from the habits they formed over so many years of trying to survive.

Now, as a new mother, Bui can see those unexorcised demons for what they truly were: a struggle between identity and selflessness, adrift in homeless disconnection.

In her preface, Bui explains that she was drawn to the graphic novel in an effort to solve “the storytelling problem of how to present history in a way that is human and relatable and not oversimplified.” She writes that she had to learn how to “do comics” in order to tell her story the way she wanted. The results are remarkably polished. Bui approaches her portraiture with a kind of facial minimalism, finding perfectly emotive subtlety in the slightest of marks, like an upturned smile or a slightly furrowed brow. She masterfully synchronizes the themes of her memoir with the style in which it is drawn: she finds the best she can do, embracing its limitations while exemplifying its care.

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Robyn Schiff
Penguin Books ($20)

by Shayna Nenni

Robyn Schiff’s third poetry collection, A Woman of Property, lyrically mixes together Greek historical figures with the qualms of motherhood. Implementing unusual forms allows Schiff to bring together “the ancient tragic scallop-shell- / shaped theatre at Ephesus” with her son’s “dreams of the wolf snail”. Her first-person narration paints a picture of historical figures in their prime even as it connects their past struggles to her own today.

Schiff’s Greek references, placed sporadically throughout the collection, are fortunately never overwhelming, and are often enlightening when it comes to her concerns as a woman. She begins by alluding to confinement, writing, “Greek tragedy / staged around a doorway / the imagination strains to enter”, and continues this allusion when she brings in mythological stories that focus on women. From Antigone, who committed suicide because of her entombment after mourning her brother, to Iphigenia, who was killed by her father as a sacrifice, Schiff declares her own place among these women, stating, “I am a woman / of property. The milk of the footlights”. Juxtaposing Greek mythology with life’s mundane task of laundry, Schiff challenges the idea of what it means to be a woman—“Get back / in the house, I / said to myself, and made myself useful”—highlighting the different, but still pressured, expectations of women throughout the ages.

Experimenting with form, Schiff utilizes the full width of the page to establish one of her most important themes--the hardships of motherhood. She also uses italicization to create an embodiment of dialogue:

There was no deed? Exactly.
There was no deed on record?
I didn’t do anything.                          Exactly. Plaintiff
claims neglect of property.                     But
I didn’t do anything exactly. That’s my way.

Schiff’s first-person narration deepens our understanding of her anxieties towards being a good mother. The parallel between this story—her failure to cultivate her land—and her confession that she “didn’t do anything exactly” foreshadows a later poem when she asks, “How will I know / what to do, I wondered”. Schiff uses two poems that are almost (but not quite) the same to suggest that there are aspects of a mother’s life that she can or cannot control. “A Doe Does Not Replace Iphigenia on the Sacrificial Altar” and “A Doe Does Replace Iphigenia on the Sacrificial Altar” can be read as Schiff’s attempt to relieve some of her own motherly anxieties.

In the midst of the collection are explicit remarks about the swine flu virus, global warming, and the attacks of September 11; these contemporary tragedies add yet another component to Schiff’s poems regarding cultivation, mythology, motherhood, science, and the supernatural. In the end, A Woman of Property has the ability to elevate us into the lives of infamous Greek figures while taming us to the ground, where a gardening task is “like being delivered / into my own body”.

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Amy Uyematsu
Red Hen Press ($15.95)

by Julia Stein

A contributor to the pioneering 1971 anthology Roots: An Asian-American Reader, Amy Uyematsu published four books of poetry before her latest, Basic Vocabulary. In her first two books of poetry she breaks through silence to write powerful personal story poems about her parents and grandparents interned at Gila and Manzanar during World War II, and about the U.S. wars in Asia in the 1960s. She constructs her own bilingual language and reality when she writes about striving for Japanese-American cool as a teenager and the elegance of geishas in an Utagawa print, or when she brilliantly describes burning and hope during the Los Angeles 1992 riots in “The Ten Million Flames of Los Angeles.” A longtime math teacher, she’s also one of our few math poets.

For the opening title sequence of Basic Vocabulary, Uyematsu uses thirty-five simple words to examine our decades of war with hard-edged, philosophical reflections in a tour-de-force. The poem starts with “blood”: “we don’t even pretend our hands are unstained / one century bleeding into the next / as we try to assure ourselves / there is nothing one little life can do . . . ” In the first ten sections the facts of war seem overwhelming, but the eleventh section, “give,” advises us to listen “to the counsel of mystics— / give it all up, give it all up—” as a way out of war. Detailing the ravages of war in the simplest of words leads at the end of the final section, “year,” to the words “this year, this second / let thy enemy / be forgiven // no beginning, no end / just a prayer / to awaken.”

In the book’s second section, “When the Numbers Don’t Add Up,” the war outside the nation bleeds into the war within when Uyematsu hauntingly describes how a student of hers was killed over a Sony Walkman. Other poems such as “Graduation” give numbers that sadly describe many students, as two boys sign up for the Marines while most “memorize the prices / of the latest Nikes.” “Found Poem: Echoes from Zuccotti Park” offers a brief moment of hope in the global occupations, but the next few poems relentlessly provide more dispiriting numbers of drones used, citizens homeless, and black men killed.

As the poet turns to her growing old and surviving cancer, she finds solace in the natural world and mysticism. In “Learning from Stone,” Uyematsu hears the stones telling each other how “inside this deep ocean bed / we grow smooth and bow,” and in “The Fit” she relates how she has abandoned the protests of her youth “blaring with slogans” to now walk with Thich Nhat Hanh, where she and others “make a roar so loud / as this wordless silence.”

In the last section of Basic Vocabulary, “Mysteries, Medical and Celestial,” the poet faces head-on a second bout with cancer. Uyematsu especially shows great courage in a series of meditations on her radiation treatments; in “Zap #30” she gratefully acknowledges how “blessings arrive / in orchids and cards / the lighting of candles / a homecooked meal.” Other poems delve into more cosmic matters; “Three Quick Studies of Math Art” explores a photo of electrons in her body, a Persian mathematician’s seven-pointed stars, and a labyrinth. The final poem leaves us with hope as Uyematsu identifies infinity as feminine and glories in being a woman who embraces love and wonder.

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Eugene Lim
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($14)

by Robert Martin

Despite the suggestively sci-fi title, Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs is not a futuristic picaresque about sentimental robots. Rather, it’s about artists and poets and painters, and the glimmers of compassion found between these individuals and their pursuits; it’s also about superheroes, holograms, detectives, and sentient search engines. Which is to say: this book sets out to defy categorization, and it thoroughly succeeds. A wild and wildly intelligent work, Dear Cyborgs skillfully employs elements of essay, noir, fantasy, and pop in order to question the limitations of identity in the Internet age.

While that description might conjure bombast, for the most part this is a quiet novel concerned with a group of talkative young artists in Chicago. The scenes in the book describe idle hours at karaoke bars and diners in which the characters take turns musing at length about geekdom, fine arts, literary theory, diaspora, and most crucially, political activism. The fact that they happen to be a crime-fighting supergroup called “Team Chaos” comes as a surprise, toward the end of the third chapter:

Even though she works as a social worker and even though she’d rather be a poet and a painter, Muriel is actually a foundling extraterrestrial sent from a far superior civilization. She can fly, walk through walls, and shoot powerful beams from the palms of her hands. . . . I’m a mere Earthling and therefore far less inherently powerful, but I’ve mastered various physical disciplines and martial arts as well as having proven myself in battle with a certain technical wiliness, which seems to impress. Despite these accomplishments, as you no doubt will notice, I tend to be depressed and anxious much of the time.

This is the first unrealistic detail in Dear Cyborgs, and it plays no role in the arc of the chapter. Other details of this sort pepper the novel throughout, in hints dropped mid-sentence or buried in asides. Lim occasionally indulges his nods to the fantastical later in the book, devoting a short chapter to the pursuit of Team Chaos’ arch nemesis, Ms. Mistletoe—but when Ms. Mistletoe is cornered, instead of a battle scene we get to listen to her recount the events that let up to the dissolution of her marriage, a tame and thoughtful soliloquy on her dissatisfaction with the daily grind.

These subdued blockbuster-esque details effectively defamiliarize the otherwise mundane conversations and armchair philosophies of the characters. It’s an off-kilter slant that pervades the book, and it fissures the narrative in a calculated way. Dear Cyborgs, like many experimental novels, is not a story about what it’s about as much as it is about how it’s told. Nearly every chapter utilizes a narrative frame. We rarely see direct action on the page; instead, characters tell stories or recall memories as they sit in a booth or walk home from the bar. They do not act—they think, or they speak.

Frame narratives are nothing new, but Lim’s persistence with the device colors his topic of choice: namely, multiplicity of identity. This can be seen with Muriel, who is both an artist and a super-powered alien (though we never do see her powers in action), and with how our narrator’s day-job as a martial-arts expert government operative coincides with his true passion of drawing comics. These overt dual identities are reinforced by each narrative frame: whenever a character tells a story about himself or herself, that character exists simultaneously as the narrator and as the protagonist.

Multiplicity of identity is positioned as a strength in Dear Cyborgs, but a dangerous one. The strongest character is the evil Ms. Mistletoe (is she evil? Readers will sympathize with her thoughtful explications on protest movements, support of workers’ rights, and desire to inspire others to improve their living conditions; it is curious that she is the target of our protagonists’ ire). Yet we never meet Ms. Mistletoe directly—in fact, we often encounter her through multiple frames. Her first appearance, for instance, is via a memory of the narrator’s. In the memory, the narrator watches a hologram of Ms. Mistletoe (that’s two degrees of separation), and the speech had been prerecorded (three degrees). The content of Ms. Mistletoe’s speech, which is presented in full, is a recollection (four degrees) of a conversation between her and her friends after the initial protests in Zucotti Park—a conversation included as dialogue in a scene (five degrees).

Examining the details of Ms. Mistletoe’s speech through the lens of Lin’s framing technique provides the clearest sense of his motivations. Musing on the purpose of Occupy Wall Street, Ms. Mistletoe says,

"It’s asking people to wake up to the fact that their desires have been manufactured, that the lives they are leading are modeled after flawed received ideas. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
"As well, hidden in this remorse is another guilt, a knowledge that the entire social contract is contaminated, tainted, since it requires the hard labor of the unfortunate, as well as a violence to the earth and, importantly and even more subtly, an embedded faith in the eventual good of selfishness and greed."

The theory at work here suggests commercial oppression is a by-product of multiple simultaneous identities. How else would we explain people repeatedly voting against their self-interests? Lim’s book suggests that those who control technology use it in order to manipulate us into complacency, but not through propaganda or marketing—rather, through the psychological refraction that technology represents. “Divide and conquer” does not only apply to groups of people: it applies also to individuals.

If Dear Cyborgs makes a claim as to what’s at stake when we give our memories, knowledge, and problem solving skills, over to the Internet, it is this: the splintering of identity has led to our complacency. Our arch nemesis is our own conscience, losing its foothold due to click bait and constantly updated feeds. Lim’s narrator warns,

(Some seem unaccepting of this transformation, and it indeed has been gradual. In a sense it began when the first simple machines were invented. But now, to deny the change requires a willful ignorance since, if you observe bodies clothed in steel flowing over highways, or how we’ve outsourced half our memory to these devices, these exobrains we carry around, and if you note how even our most intimate relationships occur remotely, at great distances from one another, if you see all this, well, it isn’t such an original observation, dear cyborgs, to say that human and machine long ago merged inextricably.)

The cyborg state is upon us, we are inured to it, and our identities will never be the same. Only time will tell how well we will navigate our many lives in the Internet age.

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Virginia Heffernan
Simon & Schuster ($17)

by Michael Workman

The basic premise of this offbeat volume, which mixes a dishy personal voice with one of wonderment and relish, is that the Internet, which has made so many things—corded phones, ticket counters, socializing—disappear, has also left in its wake a deep sense of the loss of the world those things once defined. Moreover, these seismic cultural shifts have happened with such breakneck spontaneity that, given such an accelerated, technologized hunger for converting the “brick and mortar” world into prosthetics for the distant user, such a sense of loss is not only palpable but transformative. Questions adhere: what have we gained from it? Is it sustainable? Why do we love it all so much?

Heffernan, a New York Times Magazine regular, spends much of the book weighing the gains and losses of our information age in all its digital-versus-analog splendor. She's deft at plying forth the essence of these questions and presenting the outcomes on a moving, human scale—for instance, when she discusses how much she used to think about “people who rhythmically and mysteriously inhaled and exhaled cigarette smoke while they talked or left long silences or didn't hang up immediately after saying goodbye.” Doubtless, soon it will be hard to remember why people smoked tobacco, with all its aromatic, jittery pleasures. Not only has that emotional indulgence faded from public view; fading too is our general register of the human body, with all its breathy, smelly, analog presence. Digital communication has scooped out all the subtlety of “over- and undertones” of mediated experience and reduced the magic of a living presence down to the transactional expectation of information exchange.

In much the same way, YouTube for Heffernan is a home for the “vernacular avant-garde,” and her descriptions of the early 'net in all its BBS glories are salutary for those who used to poke around in virtual hangouts like The WELL. This basic joy translates, by extension, into the immediacy of the availability of information, as in her depiction of a required Formal Logics course in philosophy, which fortuitously came with computer lab access. There, she could drop a "tablet of ecstasy" and explore “without emotion the inconsistencies in my twenty-two-year-old applications of ancient principles of modus ponens and modus tollens to Ps and Qs, to see the formality of it,” and thus how these systems allow the patterns of life to reveal themselves. Those minds compelled to grasp such mysteries find their own way to them, of course, but Heffernan's detailing of her course is part of the logic here, of the longing for connection that feels engrained into the fiber of becoming a person. That alone is enough to recommend this book for those curious about what life was like before we had machines to remember human history for us.

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Willa Cather

by Dennis Barone

Perhaps the best short novels rely more on character than plot. Because of their brevity they will have a limited number of characters and settings, and time may be condensed or leaped. There is, too, a theatrical quality, with everyone appearing once more at the end for a final curtain call of sorts. Willa Cather’s Alexander’s Bridge, a short novel of ten brief chapters and an epilogue, fits this pattern snug as a glove.

Alexander’s Bridge has four main characters (Bartley Alexander, Winifred Alexander, Hilda Burgoyne, and Lucius Wilson), four minor characters (Mainhall, MacConnell, Horton, and Marie), and four locations (Boston, London, New York, and Morlock, Canada). The story has a tight time frame, but for the epilogue which occurs six years later in London, and even though the protagonist, Bartley, has been dead those half-dozen years, he is present as Professor Wilson describes to the actress Hilda Burgoyne his last visit to Boston and to Winifred Alexander’s house. Wilson says, “I found that I still loved to go to the house. It always seemed as if Bartley were there, somehow, and that at any moment one might hear his heavy tramp on the stairs. Do you know, I kept feeling he must be up in his study.”

Bartley makes his first appearance midway in the first chapter, and his entrance has the air of the stage about it. Cather writes: “When Alexander reached the library door, he switched on the lights and stood six feet and more in the archway, glowing with strength and cordiality and rugged, blond good looks.” Each of the ten chapters has the feel of a theatrical scene, and chapter six seems positively operatic: Bartley, in London now, has determined to end his affair with Hilda, but, alas, though he can build the finest bridges in the world, he cannot sever his mid-life crisis dalliance.

At forty-three, this famous engineer doubts his accomplishments; Morlock Bridge would be “the longest cantilever in existence. Yet it was to him the least satisfactory thing he had ever done.” On a work-related trip to London, he by chance comes across Hilda, his first flame as a young man and the woman he loved before having met Winifred. Craftily, Cather notes that when Bartley walks with Hilda, he actually strolls with “someone vastly dearer to him than she had ever been—his own young self.”

In her depiction of an identity crisis in the life of an affluent capitalist, Cather displaces any criticism of the world she knew. Throughout the tale, social problems or inequalities hover as if behind a scrim. Hilda employs “a very pretty and competent French servant who answered the door and brought in the tea.” On the last page Hilda confesses, as if to attest to or support Bartley’s appeal, “I can’t help being glad that there was something for him even in stupid and vulgar people. My little Marie worshipped him.” Some of these “vulgar and stupid people” cause problems for the brilliant engineer by going on strike, “delaying Alexander’s New Jersey bridge.” Of course, Bartley’s individual problems draw the reader’s attention away from the social ones that hover off to the sides. This is a work of human psychology rather than social realism—more Henry James than Stephen Crane.

Most of all, Cather’s sentences in this, her first work of fiction longer than a short story, startle and delight. Consider this description of a London cityscape: “There was a blurred rhythm in all the dull city noises—in the clatter of the cab horses and the rumbling of the busses, in the street calls, and in the undulating tramp, tramp of the crowd. It was like the deep vibration of some vast underground machinery, and like the muffled pulsations of millions of human hearts.” Cather next turned to writing about pioneer Nebraska, work that made her famous, but Alexander’s Bridge—a very succinct and urban novel—will always command a special place on my shelf of favorite works.

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Rebecca Gayle Howell
Eyewear Publishing ($14.49)

by Kent Weigle

In American Purgatory, Rebecca Gayle Howell drops the reader into a dystopian world torn apart by industry and environmental cataclysm. In a work camp set in the American south, “Persons held to service / and labor” maintain huge fields of cotton and survive purely through biological impulse. It’s a world of dust storms, rampant crop dusting, disfigurement, and death.

Knowledge and access to knowledge plays a simple yet powerful role in this book. Everything we learn comes through the protagonist’s perspective; what’s known for sure is that no one escapes. The desert outside the town turns anyone into a desiccated corpse at the side of a highway:

. . . People
talk about leaving as if they could walk out
a door. They want to hear what it sounds like.
Few animals make it. The scorpions do okay,
but the big hides need water, and no one shares.
Bodies lie open on routes that lead out,
and the stink carries on the winds.

To the inhabitants, the outside world is nothing more than geese flying overhead or the traffic of cars and cargo trucks that rush through. It’s a corrupted commune with all of the inhabitants sharing duties. Some count those left alive at the end of the day, some thin voracious herds of jackrabbits, some find new sites to dig wells, some “landscape. Fire watch. Pave the lots. Cut / hair. Bartend. Plumb.”

The world given to the reader is hazed over by heat shine. More questions are raised than answered and the answers shift and shimmer in the distance. The lack of information is a constant murmur that uneases. There’s very little in the way of a past or future; the protagonist once had a mother and the mother died during her childhood. Perhaps she was sent to the camp in the same way paupers in Victorian England were made to work until their short lives ended. There are also the store rooms filled with “bloated, pickled heads, conjoined / tongues, limbless stumps.” Why are the dead brutes kept? There are no answers. The mix of uncertainty and the grotesque creates a forbidding atmosphere through suggestion: it stands to reason that there is an outside force actively condoning these atrocities. As well, the natives themselves seem more like robots than humans in that they care little for the ungodly strings that control and feed off of their lives. All that exists is the deranged present in an equally deranged town.

It’s also a world of corrupted American values. Religion becomes openly destructive, atavistic in its actions behind a crusade of environmental subjugation:

It’s prophecy, Slade says. We’ll be delivered
but we must utterly destroy all the places.
I think to what I’ve read. The heave offering.
Indulgence tax. We’re laying street today;
tar can’t get hotter.

Here, the faithful quietly lose their faith:

The last will be first, Slade says. The pitch
of his voice river-low, as if he’s getting shed
of a remorse, and I can almost not hear him,
but I do. I say, Could you repeat that? He says,
The last will be sad. Now that I believe.

Capitalism has become cancerous and insatiable. “The economics will satisfy. One plus one equals / legion. Fight them for a share.” Hard work ripped straight out of the American Dream doesn’t pay off and might just strengthen the chains. If one wishes to glean a message from this collection, it’s that unbridled industry, capitalism, and environmental decay leads to a hostile world full of human chattel.

American Purgatory is a tantalizing prophecy that predicts one of the many possible futures at the logical end of capitalism. It’s tantalizing because at the end of the collection, the reader is left with a match and a wet fuse. The atmosphere that Howell creates is as charged and anxious as a southern evening, but the thunderstorm never comes.

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Yiyun Li
Random House ($27)

by Donna Miele

You need not be a Yiyun Li fan to appreciate this meditation on the literary life, but you should be willing to immerse yourself in the concept of being a devoted reader of literature. As she relates in this collection of autobiographical essays, the writers that formed her became her lifeline as she endured crushing feelings of isolation and suicidal depression.

“Between two hospital stays,” Li writes in the chapter “Amongst Characters,” “I was in London for a few days by myself. The hotel, a narrow house on a quiet street, had a strip of garden guarded by high walls, and I spent much of the time there reading Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks.” Here as throughout the book, Li resists discussing her struggles as central; rather, she uses acute episodes of depression as milestones along her life’s journey with her most admired literary figures. Li goes on, for instance, to delve deeply enough in Mansfield’s notes to find and pore over minutiae like grocery lists. She devotes pages to Philip Larkin’s obsession with Thomas Hardy, while only using a page and a half on personal musings such as, “Is the wish to escape suffering selfish?”

While writing from a deeply wounded perspective, Li’s commentary on literature’s importance should resonate with many readers:

Isolation, I was reminded again and again, is a danger. But what if one’s real context is in books? Some days, going from one book to another, preoccupied with thoughts that were of no importance, I would feel a rare moment of serenity: all that could not be solved in my life was merely a trifle as long as I kept it at a distance. Between that suspended life and myself were these dead people and imagined characters. One could spend one’s days among them as a child arranges a circle of stuffed animals when the darkness of night closes in.

Li’s unique and devastating meditations on language also play into this self-portrait. The chapter “To Speak Is to Blunder but I Venture” covers her abandonment of the Chinese language for English; she characterizes the shift not only as a transition from one form of communication to another, but as a choice she makes to immerse herself in a private, highly literary world. She becomes unreachable in many ways to the China she left behind, but also acknowledges the difficulties she encounters as a result. “People often ask about my decision to write in English,” she writes;

The switch from one language to another feels natural to me, I reply, though that does not say much, just as one can hardly give a convincing explanation why someone’s hair turns gray on this day but not on the other, or why some birds fly south when the temperature drops. But these are inane analogies, used as excuses because I do not want to touch the heart of the matter. Yes, there is something unnatural, which I have refused to accept. Not that I write in a second language—there are always Nabokov and Conrad as references, and many of my contemporaries as well; nor that I impulsively gave up a reliable career for writing. It’s the absoluteness of the abandonment—with such determination that it is a kind of suicide.

Yiyun Li’s autobiographical discussions of literature and isolation are not to be approached lightly. This book is for the reader willing to acknowledge that language and literature have the power to influence, form, and even save us.

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