Must I Go
Yiyun Li
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Must I Go
Yiyun Li
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Lilia Liska...is a fascinating character, filled with resentment and regret, but compelling enough that the reader is unable to look away.
... a nostalgic, even rather fond, view of the lusty womanizers of yesteryear.
Where [Li's] previous book is stripped down, a bundle of exposed nerves, Must I Go is upholstered with the nested narratives, intricate back stories and details of a historical novel. For all their differences, their concerns are knotted together. They reach into realms that the author and characters feel are unspeakable.
Li’s intricate nesting of Lilia’s memories produces a stop-start rhythm that’s sometimes painfully short on momentum, as Lilia casts a withering eye over fellow characters from five generations.
Though Must I Go contains the sketchy architecture of an intergenerational, historical novel, its rooms and stories remain more conceptual than actual. Characters act as analogs for one another based on shared status as widow and widower, orphan and bereaved parent. Husbands and wives are easily swapped. The defiant workings of memory are more important than memories themselves. Lives are annotated rather than recorded. Aphorisms, and the tendency of Li’s characters to offer universal truths, are frequently exposed by Lilia’s sharp pen as platitudinal wish-fulfillment.
While Li’s prose is exquisite after a precise fashion, it never blows its own unflashy horn.
Lilia bears some resemblance to Elizabeth Strout’s indelible character Olive Kitteridge.
Most poignantly, Must I Go can be read as an extension of Li's 2019 semi-autobiographical novel, Where Reasons End.
Must I Go can be read, at least in part, as an attempt to dramatise that insight about the way we sift and shape the detritus of the past, fashioning what we call 'memories' out of those scraps of 'evidence'.
Of the two voices, Roland’s is the less compelling and convincing. He is cold, acquisitive and, by his own account, intellectual and literary; to match this, his diaries needed to be a feat of voice, to sound like The Portrait of a Lady’s Gilbert Osmond, looter of words as well of artworks and people; or perhaps, as he immerses himself in wartime Britain, to take on the orotund tones of the political diarist Alan Clark. But Bouley writes in the same 21st-century style as the rest of the book: no speech marks, few semicolons, short sentences and contemporary vocabulary choices...The style is so limpid it could almost be translation, and in fact the more we read of this American/European hero, the more Chinese he begins to seem.
The juxtaposition of Lilia’s wizened cynicism with the pathos of Roland’s conflicted disposition makes for a compelling diptych, but Li’s prose is blighted by her excessive recourse to aphoristic metaphors.
In [Li's] first title with a non-Asian-specific cast (as if creating some semblance of distance), an adult child’s suicide propels a multilevel narrative that sprawls through relationships, perspectives, and responses.
... the book has nothing in common with Li’s most recent work: it is much longer, more diffuse and less driven than her last two books, and unfortunately less successful.
Although priding herself on her independence and hardness, [Lilia's] reflections reveal abiding grief, loneliness, and regret, which she refuses to confront.
Li...writes with relentless seriousness about a woman taking stock of her past while living in a nursing home.