“The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make Heav’n of Hell, Hell of Heav’n” wrote Milton. A testament to how we think about things have the power to make them appear so. Yet while immediate thoughts can emerge with very little, rather involuntary, effort from us, given that the brain is a ‘thinking’ organ, to pierce one’s way through the noise of involuntary thinking, however, or to transcend above it, requires concentrated mental activity.
My encounter with such elevated forms of thinking have been either through poetry, (or ‘condensed prose’), or through writers like Li: where in both cases it was particularly difficult for me to, first understand, and then comprehend what was written. In poetry, the brevity might compel its writers to play around with words in order to come up with something more sophisticated and complex than plain prose; mostly though it would involve highly specifics words, words that are rare in every day usage, to convey highly specific ideas or feelings. Li’s memoir is not in verse, yet the first time I read it I wasn’t able to continue it because the reading experience, and what I seek out of it, was overtaken by my constant need of mental efforts to understand her words.
Kundera’s ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’, as I remember, also give me a challenging time upon its first reading, which too, I had to discontinue after a few chapters. Now, I’ve read both ‘The Unbearable Lightness’ and ‘Dear Friend’, although after I read other books of these authors, and as it so happens, I thoroughly enjoyed them both.
Upon my second reading, I’ve found the prose to be deceptively easy; that is, while the writing is easy to understand, the idea that’s being conveyed by the sentences and paragraphs are much more complex in themselves. Kundera, I daresay, writes, or is translated into, an averagely simple English prose, readable by all without much effort. Li, however, because she chooses to write only in English and not in Chinese, writes a more rigorous English; meaning she layers her writing, encodes and deciphers it, opts for complex sentence structures, and talks about ideas that require the readers to rise up or push through to reach them.
With the exception of a few philosophy books, Li’s memoir was one of the most analytical and critical book I’ve ever read. This is no ‘flat’ memoir where the author’s efforts go into writing a feel-good book while taking the readers on their life’s journey. Li intentionally makes things complicated by talking about the impressions and ideas of things she has been through rather than the events themselves. Every event she writes about from her life is written with intent of arriving at a far-reachingly critical insight about life and living. So much so, that it becomes part psychological, part philosophical discourse, chained together with this constant and strong urge of bringing the two together, mostly in contradiction to her feelings, and reach an insight into our human condition.
‘It becomes…’ I write, because at first this rare method of highly analytical or critical writing feels exhilarating, given all the insights one receives into human mind, but as the memoir continues, so does Li’s stubbornness of choosing to write so - with undeterred rigor and increasing difficulty. It’s a memoir about suicide, about reading, about being an author amidst other authors; it’s about self-contradiction, a conflict of normal with the highly critical, a conflict of heart and mind, and a difficult and enforced marriage of them; a memoir of isolation, of melodrama, of being hidden…
I loved this book with heightened emotions and thoughts; not only did it touch my heart, but more robustly, it mechanized my mind in many different ways. Yet despite being a pessimist, a thinking person, and a melancholic myself, or because of it, Li’s memoir showed me how intellectually as well as emotionally exhaustive and innately lonely such a life, at times, can be.
Ratings: 5/5***** December 2, 2021_