From the Chinese author Yiyun Li you can find a couple of books of stories published in Spain. The Lumen publishing house took the lead in bringing it into Spanish with Good wishesin 2007, the year in which the writer was anointed by the magazine Granta as one of the best American novelists under 35. In 2013, Galaxia Gutemberg published Golden boy, emerald girl.
Recently, Chai Editora hit bookstores with Dear friend, from my life I write to your life (translation by Virginia Higa), a set of essays about books, about writers who marked her life and with whom she continually talks, about language and the past, about family ties, about the change of language.
Yiyun Li, born in Beijing in 1972, immigrated to the United States in 1996, seeking (among other things) a career in immunology. Instead, despite her promising future, she left science to devote herself to writing. And she changed her language.
A frequently cited case is that of Vladimir Nabokov, a writer who switched from Russian to English and who experienced that experience, in personal terms, as a tragedy. Stronger and stranger is the statement of Yiyun Li, for whom renouncing one’s mother tongue represents a “salvation.”
There is no need to make extravagant associations to think of the link between language and mother. The author makes it clear and notes: “Writing is the only part of my life that I have taken beyond my mother’s narrative.”
Yiyun Li’s work is one of those cases of absolute dedication to writing, and therefore it is also a serious case of deep investigations through reading. Her interlocutors (raised to the rank of adversaries, in some cases) are Katherine Mansfield, William Trevor, Ivan Turgenev, Philip Larkin, Kierkegaard or the unfathomable Marianne Moore. She delves into fiction but also, very frequently, into letters and diaries.
Dear friend, from my life I write to your life It is also a book of frayed, elusive memoirs. Her years in China are revisited and interrogated with a breathtaking acidity.
There is a radical, dissolving pessimism, contained in extremely convoluted arguments, sometimes very clear: “Many times I think that writing is a useless effort, the same as reading, the same as living.”
Loneliness and detachment (having a home, language, ties, is a way of being possessed, sentence) are for Yiyun Li a kind of necessity, which he turns around and around. Another topic is suicide.
There are suicidal writers in the book, such as Stefan Zweig, as well as constant references to a period of hospitalisation and psychological breakdowns that the author suffered. In a perhaps not so elliptical way, is Yiyun Li pointing out that suicide is what is ahead, latent, as if to say that ending her life is the work she is doing in a slow way, stretching out time?
- Dear friend, from my life I write to your life. Yiyun Li. Chai Editor. 176 pages. $19,000
