Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Kinder Than Solitude
    Kinder Than Solitude
    Kinder Than Solitude
    Audiobook12 hours

    Kinder Than Solitude

    Written by Yiyun Li

    Narrated by Angela Lin

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    When Moran, Ruyu, and Boyang were young, they were involved in a mysterious "accident" in which a friend of theirs was poisoned. Grown up, the three friends are separated by distance and personal estrangement. Moran and Ruyu live in the United States, Boyang in China; all three are haunted by what really happened in their youth, and by doubt about themselves. In California, Ruyu helps a local woman care for her family and home, and avoids entanglements, as she has done all her life. In Wisconsin, Moran visits her ex-husband, whose kindness once overcame her flight into solitude. In Beijing, Boyang struggles to deal with an inability to love, and with the outcome of what happened among the three friends 20 years ago.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateFeb 25, 2014
    ISBN9781470393632
    Kinder Than Solitude
    Author

    Yiyun Li

    Yiyun Li is the author of several works of fiction—Must I Go, Where Reasons End, Kinder Than Solitude, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl—and the memoir Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. She is the recipient of many awards, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Windham-Campbell Prize. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, among other publications. She teaches at Princeton University.

    More audiobooks from Yiyun Li

    Related to Kinder Than Solitude

    Related audiobooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Interlude

      Mar 28, 2022

      Interlude
      10 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Natalie Bakopoulos

      Dec 8, 2020

      I felt so wrecked, so torn apart—yet somehow, miraculously, also shored back up. The post A Year in Reading: Natalie Bakopoulos appeared first on The Millions.

      13 min read

    • Article

      A Look Ahead To The Best New Books In 2021: From Marcus Rashford To Bill Gates

      Jan 7, 2021

      Celebrity self-help titles, race, colonialism, gender and identity politics are the big themes in non-fiction, while in fiction publishers have splurged on commissioning lots of débuts alongside the more established names. Plenty of treats in store -

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Life and Legacy of Bharati Mukherjee

      Feb 27, 2017

      When India-native Bharati Mukherjee was 11 years old, an astrologer prophesied she would move across the ocean, marry a blue-eyed foreigner, and die between July 2003 and July 2004 at the age of 63, surpassing the average life expectancy for Indians

      2 min read

    • Article

      Ten Must-Read Crime Books Set in the American West

      Dec 27, 2019

      This list of must-read crime titles forms part of a lesser-known West, an awesomely weird landscape in which the line between Good and Evil shimmers like a mirage. The post Ten Must-Read Crime Books Set in the American West appeared first on The Mill

      4 min read

    • Article

      Fiction To Look Out For In 2023

      Jan 1, 2023

      During the lockdown years, I kept reading articles by novelists saying how unproductive they were feeling, how virus narratives had colonised their subconscious minds, destroying the creative impulse. 2023’s novels – or at least those of them I’ve re

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Lauren Oyler

      Dec 16, 2020

      As I was waiting in line to buy The Complete Gary Lutz it was discovered that some of the books for sale were partially printed upside down. They wouldn’t sell me one of the messed-up books, though I wanted one and said, “No, no, it’s fine, I want on

      5 min read

    • Article

      Olga Tokarczuk Explores the Live Chain That Connects and Fetters Us in ‘Flights’

      Aug 9, 2018

      In a section of Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk’s Man Booker International Prize-winning novel Flights, translated by Jennifer Croft, the wife and toddler of a man named Kunicki disappear while they are on vacation on a tiny island. After a long day spe

      7 min read

    • Article

      30 Books in 30 Days: Lab Girl

      Mar 13, 2017

      In the 30 Books in 30 Days series  leading up to the March 16 announcement of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle award winners, NBCC board members review the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member Michele Filgate offers an appreciation of auto

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Kinder Than Solitude

    3.5/5

    73 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      This book is being discussed by my book club for February 2016. If it wasn't for that fact I am not sure I would have finished it. I'm not saying the book is poorly written but I didn't understand the motivation of the characters nor what the book's overall message was. Ruyu is an orphan who was raised by two elderly women who were Christians in a provincial city. Ruyu had been told from her early life that God had a purpose for her. When it came time to enter highschool Ruyu was sent to Beijing to stay with a couple who had ties to the great aunts. This was just a few months after the failed revolution in Tianamen Square. The couple had a daughter, Shaoai, who had taken part in the demonstrations. This placed her under suspicion and eventually she was dismissed from her college. Ruyu and two others from her compound, Boyang and Moran, all go to the same high school and spend a great deal of time together. One day when they visit the university chemistry lab where Boyang's mother works one of them steals a chemical. Shaoai ends up being poisoned by the chemical but it is not clear if it was suicide because she was in despair or if one of the others administered it. Shaoai does not die but her mind is destroyed and she needs constant care. More than 20 years later when Shaoai dies is when the book starts. Boyang, who has stayed in Beijing and seen to Shaoai's care, emails Moran and Ruyu who are both living in the United States about her death. The narrative switches back and forth from present day to the past around the time of the poisoning. We see what Moran, Ruyu and Boyang have done with their lives. All of them have been married and divorced and none seem to have any strong ties to any other person. Salman Rushdie blurbs on the front cover that "This is an exceptional novel..." but I didn't feel that. I can't even ascribe the failings to poor translation because Yiyun Li lives in the US and writes in English. There are some interesting pieces about life in China just after Tianamen Square. The juxtaposition of present day life in China is also interesting but the characters are so wooden and one-dimensional that the whole novel does not work for me.
    • 4/5
      Solitude is not kind in the world of this novel. But there is little that is kind, so solitude becomes a refuge and false haven.

      This is a powerful and intensely meditative novel. Children on the treacherous shoals of their teenage years sense the dangers, but don’t really understand the nature of them, and can be helpless to avoid them, especially if they already feel isolated. They say false things, or do seemingly malicious deeds, without fully appreciating the consequences which may then go on to haunt them.

      Li writes exquisite prose — this alone is worth the read. These are intensely wrought sentences of astute insights, illustrating rich complexities of thought.
      “A born murderess, she had mastered the skill of snuffing out each moment before releasing it to join the other passed moments. Nothing connects one self to another; time effaced does not become memory”

      ”…his voice had left a crack through which loneliness flooded into her room.”

      “If she had ever felt anything close to passion, it was a passion of the obliterating kind: any connection made by another human being, by accident or by intention, had to be erased; the void she maintained around herself was her only meaningful possession.”

      The book is littered with aphorisms and observations about the human condition:
      “…one’s preparation for departure should begin long before arrival”

      “Do not expose your soul uninvited”

      “Nothing destroys a livable life more completely than unfounded hope”

      “It takes courage to find solace in trivialities, willfulness not to let trivialities usurp one’s life.”

      Solitude and loneliness are tiring to read about, never mind experiencing. By the end I felt exhausted, wrung out, from the tension of repression and loneliness that permeates the story. Nonetheless, highly recommended. Just pair it with the right mood accordingly.

      (ARC from Random House via NetGalley.)
    • 2/5
      Three young people — Boyang, Moran, and Ruyu — are thrust together by circumstance and familial connection in a poor neighbourhood in Beijing shortly after the Tiananmen Square uprising. They must balance loyalty, fealty, and self-interest in their individual efforts to survive in a world beyond their grasp and possibly their comprehension. For some, love is the prime motivator. For others, the happiness of others. And for still others only the protection of an enclave of privacy matters. A suspicious possible poisoning and long-delayed death explodes their tiny network and the three take very different trajectories through life finding, each, their separate existential solitude. And whatever small additions that they allow to accrue or intrude upon that solitude.This is difficult novel to like. Li’s theme of existential estrangement carries over into the structure of her telling as she follows the lives of the three young people separately twenty years after the events of their youth. Connection is frustrated (Moran and Ruyu never reply to Boyang’s email updates). Love, and even friendship, are impossible. To survive at all seems to require retreat into a theoretical shell of a human being. ‘Theoretical’ because it often feels as though Li is working through a narrative challenge set by French and Russian writers, some of whom she references, rather than exploring real relationships, if ‘real’ here can mean anything more than mundane. While I grew to respect the problem that Li had set herself, I didn’t warm to the execution, neither the structure, the characters, nor the plot, such as it is. Of course maybe I’m not supposed to warm to such cold figures. But then I think I would prefer even more heightened representation of reality to achieve that Brechtian emotional distance.Perhaps on another day I might have appreciated this novel more. But for now, not recommended.
    • 3/5
      What happens if you strip all your characters - indeed, your whole story - of sentiment? Answer: you get this bleak exploration of solitude and isolation that delivers as a literary experiment in modernism but shortchanges such traditional storytelling elements such plot, pacing, and authenticity. In this case, you really can summarize the plot in a single blurb: 21 years later, three former friends struggle to cope with the mysterious death of a friend by ruthlessly expunging their lives and souls of sentiment. It’s easy to summarize the plot because there’s so little of it. Even the “mysterious death” isn’t truly mysterious; the tragedy merely serves as a narrative device to explain why the characters have decided to strip their lives of sentiment, and for the author to explore the complex tangle of perception and self-denial that they use to justify their lives of emotional isolation. Friend #1, Boyang, dooms himself to solitude by choosing to keep the tragedy - and its consequences - entirely secret from everyone else in his life, thereby ensuring that none of his relationships will ever be honest or emotionally fulfilling. Friend #2, Ruyu, as an orphan, is literally lonely from birth; just to underscore the point, however, the author provides her with a set of cold, manipulative adoptive aunts who raise her to place herself apart from others. Friend #3, Moran, creates her own loneliness by ruthlessly purging herself of past and future. In sharing their stories, author Li likewise ruthlessly strips her prose of sentiment, refusing to judge her characters or their choices. (The one exception to this is the author’s descriptions of Beijing; perhaps her overly-sentimental descriptions of the city’s beauty and history are meant to serve as an intentional counterpoint for the rest of the tale?)Even so, it’s hard not to interpret this as a moral admonition about the consequences of living your life without courage, without connections, without love. While each of these characters appear outwardly successful and happy, their internal lives are unrelentingly bleak. Plenty of books before this one have struggled with “the purpose of life” – is it enough to exist, or is existence without connection somehow “wimping out”? For all Li’s care to withhold judgment, by the end of the book it’s hard not to conclude that any human interaction, no matter how shallow, is still “kinder than solitude.” Even the novel’s major subplots – in which various Chinese citizens resign themselves to living in oppression rather than risk voicing their true feelings - seem to affirm this conclusion. For the most part I found this exercise in literary experimentation to be novel and worthy, if not particularly entertaining or diverting. However, the pacing of the novel was problematical for me. While Li may refuse to pass judgment on her characters, they themselves appear trapped in endless, vicious loops of self-examination. Rarely do they allow a decision, an idea, even a sentence of spoken dialog to pass without at least 1-2 paragraphs of meticulous dissection and reflection. Mind you, thanks to Li’s narrative gifts, these reflections are often beautiful and penetrating. It’s just that there’s so MUCH reflection … after a time, I began to understand why writers are urged to “show, not tell.” Between the slow-as-molasses plot, the difficult-to-sympathize-with characters, and Li telling us pretty much everything, there’s just not that much left over to keep a reader engaged.
    • 4/5
      This is a highly introspective novel with lucid but depressing literary snapshots of three companions who journey from their teenage years to maturity in China and the United States and back again. The lead character Ruyu appears unable to express emotions and this trait remains throughout the story. The narrative at best is disconnected but it does display what one might call the “Chinese” mind in its bluntness. Unlike the author’s earlier novels I felt this story lacked clarity or at best some continuity. The focus on introspection casts too many shadows for the characters to become fully mature or understandable.
    • 3/5
      Death would be kinder than solitude.I loved Yiyun Li's previous book, The Vagrants (5 stars), but I just didn't click with The Kindness of Solitude in the same way. I found this latest book to be a much denser read, with too much philosophising for my taste. It was also billed as a mystery around who was responsible for the poisoning that is central to the novel, but there was no twist, we knew early on who had committed the crime.Ruyu is an orphan, who was very lucky to be adopted by the two ladies on whose doorstep she was left. She is less fortunate that they seem to be emotionally stunted and raise her to be the same way. She is sent to Beijing at the age of fifteen, to live with a family and go to a school that recognises her talents for the accordion. The family's daughter is several years older and they must share a bed in the small house in the communal quadrangle. There she meets Moran and Boyang, who are of a similar age to her, and they all go to school together.'The poisoning' is alluded to early on in the book and we gradually gather various facts pertaining to this incident. Meanwhile there are frequent diversions both back and forward in time, which are well handled, if somewhat erratic. This event was a turning point in the lives of everyone involved and Moran and Ruyu emigrate to America, while Boyang remains in Beijing.A large part of the book is spent with these characters as adults. They all seem to be struggling to find a place in the world, failing at both marriages and friendships.For me, there was too much about how the characters felt and why they felt that way. I enjoyed the book most when the narrative took over from the psychological analysis. However, I did enjoy the image of the communal quadrangle, with all the families working together as a unit, sharing what little they had.I would highly recommend The Vagrants, but The Kindness of Solitude was disappointing in comparison.
    • 4/5
      Author Yiyun Li’s new novel, Kinder than Solitude, follows the lives of four young people who came of age in Beijing at the time of Tiananmen Square. There is Moran, gentle, kind, and caring, Boyang, son of wealthy academics, Ruyu, secretive and seemingly cold, by her own description a ‘lonely, vicious, remorseless orphan’, raised by her strict Catholic aunts, and, finally, Shaoai, older and a political activist. When Shaoai is poisoned, their quiet lives are changed completely. Shaoai survives and lives for 21 more years but is left with severe and irreversible brain damage.The story moves back and forth between this early period and later to when Shaoai finally dies, between the promise of their younger selves and the stagnant banality of their lives after the poisoning. Moran and Ruyu have both moved to the United States. Moran has returned to her ex-husband who is suffering from terminal cancer, Boyang has become a wealthy businessman moving from one relationship to another with younger women, and Ruyu is working for a young egotistically liberal couple who mistakenly believe she sees them as friends. As each of the three learns of Shaoai’s death, they reflect on their lives and we slowly learn who poisoned her and why. Although only one is directly guilty, it is clear that there is at least a sense of shared culpability and Shaoai isn’t the only one infected by the poison. As adults, the three seem incapable of making intimate connections with others, leaving in their wake failed marriages and relationships. Each of them is aware of their failings and how it affects any who enter into their sphere but they seem unable, unwilling, or too selfish to change. Kinder Than Solitude is a beautifully written, often slow, almost unrelentingly bleak novel of lives less lived, poisoned by political events and social relationships. It is more social commentary than mystery and it is impossible not to see it, at least on some level, as an allegory of China, the hope expressed by a generation and how that hope was extinguished first by the massacre and then by the realities of the new China. It is not an easy read with mostly unlikeable characters who are not trustworthy narrators and, as such, it will not appeal to everyone. But for fans of literary fiction who don’t shy away from the most unappealing aspects of the human heart, it is well worth the effort.
    • 4/5
      This is a rather dark, unsettling, meditative novel about three friends who meet as young teens and are all connected by a mysterious incident involving a fourth acquaintance. This incident has lifelong consequences and ties them together for life. Part coming of age, and part reflection on the lives they have lived, this novel takes place in China and in America in the 1990’s.