Reading Where Reason Ends and am completely dazzled by the writer who is also a mother sharing unimaginable personal grief. She chooses to elevate her pain into an art form which makes it more intense for the reader than if she were to just speak to her experience in the raw. Of how it is she came to lose her son, Yiyun Li says:
Is that how a mother loses a child? Is that how any person loses any person, by not understanding the treachery of words, or worse, by thinking one can conquer that with precision? Silence is the best defense and the best offense. What happens when one counters silence with silence, like the ironsmith in the Chinese fable who brags about having cast the strongest armor that would shield against the fiercest spear, and the fiercest spear that would pierce the strongest armor? We would both be quiet ever after.
It is a hard and uncomfortable book to read and I find myself taking many pauses. Each time I return, I ask myself why I do and if readers have a right to trespass upon a mother's grief even if that mother has made it accessible for us to do so.
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