Must I Go
A Novel
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
“One of our major novelists” (Salman Rushdie) tells the story of a woman reflecting on her uncompromising life, and the life of a former lover, in this provocative novel.
“Yiyun Li is one of my favorite writers, and Must I Go is an extraordinary book.”—Meg Wolitzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Female Persuasion and The Interestings
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MARIE CLAIRE AND ESQUIRE
Lilia Liska has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair.
Increasingly obsessed with Roland's intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events, revealing the surprising, long-held secrets of her past. She returns inexorably to the memory of her daughter Lucy. This is a novel about life in all its messy glory, and of a life lived, by the extraordinary Lilia, absolutely on its own terms. With great candor and insight, Yiyun Li navigates the twin poles of grief and resilience, loss and rebirth, that compass a human heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Li (Where Reasons End) writes with relentless seriousness about a woman taking stock of her past while living in a nursing home. Lilia Liska, 81, works on annotating the collected letters of Roland Bouley, a Canadian writer, and writing a personal history for her favorite granddaughter, Katherine, while most people around her have "droopy lids and fogged-up eyes." Despite Lilia's five children and three marriages, Lilia is a solitary soul, harsh and short with family and strangers. Li presents Lilia's notes on Bouley whom Lilia had a brief affair with as a girl that resulted in the birth of Katherine's mother, Lucy and Lilia's writings to Katherine as windows into her interior, and the meandering story is laden with tortuous doses of Lilia's self-reflection and too-clever bon mots. Lucy's suicide and the toll it takes on Lilia's first marriage and Bouley's lifelong romance with the enigmatic poet Sidelle Ogden provide the story's emotional anchors, but more often than not, with Lilia and Bouley's stories confined to remembrances of the past, the love, longing, and loss that they recount fails to materialize for the reader. Li adeptly captures the dreamlike, bittersweet qualities of memory, but misses the color and substance that makes that remembrance worthwhile.
