作者简介

Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China and moved to the United States in 1996. She received an MFA from Iowa Writers' Workshop and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review,and elsewhere. She has received a Whiting Writers' Award and was awarded a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX. Her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, Guardian First Book Award, and California Book Award for first fiction. She was recently selected as one of Granta's 21 Best of Young American Novelists. She lives in Oakland, California with her husband and their two sons, and teaches at University of California, Davis.

内容简介

A brilliant writer imagines a fictional conversation between a mother and the teenage son she lost to suicide. Yiyun Li confronts grief and transforms it into art, in a book of surprising beauty and love.

The narrator writes, "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."

Written in the months after the author lost a child to suicide and composed as a story cycle, this conversation between mother and child unfolds in a timeless world. Deeply intimate, poignant, and moving, these conversations portray the love and complexity in a relationship across generations, even as they capture the pain of sadness, longing, and loss.

In writing this book, Yiyun Li was inspired by a line from Proust's Remembrance of Things Past "Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart; the transformation itself, even, for an instant, releases suddenly a little joy."

Meeting life's deepest sorrow with originality, precision and poise, Where Reasons End is suffused with intimacy, inescapable pain, and fierce love.


Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing, China and moved to the United States in 1996. She received an MFA from Iowa Writers' Workshop and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review,and elsewhere. She has received a Whiting Writers' Award and was awarded a Lannan Foundation residency in M...

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豆瓣评论

  • 别的熊
    "Where else can we meet but in stories now?" 读完长叹一口气。李是很聪明的作家,用词简洁但讲究。这书写作家母亲在一个名为nowhere的空间里与自杀的儿子相遇,由此展开的一系列对话——母亲会的和能够使用的只有文字,于是母子只能在文字的空间里重逢,但因这空间是她构筑的,某种意义上来说对话又可能是自身互搏(母亲几乎说什么都会遭儿子反驳)。纸页间满是犀利的箴言金句,而这是提纯过的现实——母子的对话几乎全围绕着抽象的语法与事物——回到现实中一切不可能如此简洁、工整、优雅。写suffering和perfection的几段让人心中有钝钝的痛感。这应该算李的autofiction,感觉她是非常不放过自己的那类人。希望她获得理解,不论从自己身上,还是从他人身上。02-13
  • 舟上不想卷了
    用非母语写作的人能很容易体会这种和语词缠斗、肉搏的感觉。理解语言,不仅是理解它的含义、背后的逻辑和思维方式,更是它承载的生命体验。儿子之死将母亲抛掷到一种独特的存在状态中,全书没有“故事”,只有想象中的母子对话。母亲回忆儿子的感伤不断被儿子的反驳消解,并迅速展开诡辩般对语言的纠缠,小说进入了对文学和语言本身的反思。我们能否避免隐喻和陈词滥调?形容词、名词、副词对我们的生活世界意味着什么?当然,也少不了海外移民女性的诸多体验,一代和二代移民之间的关系等等……09-24
  • jinying
    太悲伤了,悲伤的浓度如此之高,以至于感受到了一种稀薄。感觉有些人是生下来就背负成为艺术家的使命,所以老天赐予Ta种种不幸。只有艺术家才能把这不幸变成人类存活过的证明。10-08
  • seren
    这本书我只差一点没有听完,倒不是觉得太痛苦,而是……到后来反而觉得太平淡。可能整本书从头到尾同质性太强,慢慢让我失去了兴趣。李翊云的书我十多年前不喜欢,这些年倒是越来越喜欢她的文字,尤其最近在纽约客上的几篇散文,有一种既忧伤又可以抚平人心的奇特力量。对我来说,这是一类很神奇的文字,听的时候,它们几乎是透明的,空气一样,不承载含义、意义、甚至内容。它们过耳就消失,不被咀嚼、吸收、或者存储。听这种文字,也像是赤足踩在水中,每一分钟都完全彻底地浸淫在水里,但其实水流并不留下任何痕迹,离开以后,亦不会记得水的形状,因为那几乎不存在,所能记住的,只是水流过时自己主观的感受而已。这么说好像很玄,但又确实是真实的感觉,然而这本书听完,我好像也对这样的文字略微有点腻了。05-01
  • 阿满满
    看的过程中有很多话想说,但看完却觉得说什么都是多余的。这是一场永远不会结束的对话,是生者与死者,现实与想象,琐碎与精细,拥有与失去…理性永远无法抵达终点的对话。虽然词句简单,却蕴意丰富,精致好看。06-29

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