Where Reasons End
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'Profoundly moving. An astonishing book, a true work of art' Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers
From the critically acclaimed author of The Vagrants, a devastating and utterly original novel on grief and motherhood
'Days: the easiest possession. The days he had refused would come, one at a time. They would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into an ally or an enemy to myself.'
A woman's teenage son takes his own life. It is incomprehensible. The woman is a writer, and so she attempts to comprehend her grief in the space she knows best: on the page, as an imagined conversation with the child she has lost. He is as sharp and funny and serious in death as he was in life itself, and he will speak back to her, unable to offer explanation or solace, but not yet, not quite, gone.
Where Reasons End is an extraordinary portrait of parenthood, in all its painful contradictions of joy, humour and sorrow, and of what it is to lose a child.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This heart-wrenching experimental novel from Li (The Vagrants) is framed as a dialogue between a writer and Nikolai, the teenage son she lost to suicide. The novel's title comes from a poem by Elizabeth Bishop, and poetry is very much on the narrator's mind, along with Alice in Wonderland and Wallace Stevens, as the freewheeling conversation turns toward such subjects as semantics, memory, the mechanics of grief, and a love that is "made not to last." Notably absent is a full reconstruction of her son's suicide (this isn't that kind of book), though readers do get to hear the voice of Nikolai a precocious poet, painter, and oboist. During a conversation with her son, the mother wonders, "What if we accept suffering as we do our hair or eye colors?" Like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking or Peter Handke's A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Li's novel tries to find a language to reckon with the unspeakable reality of death. The novel succeeds in Li's approach of skirting the subject in favor of something between the dead's nostalgia for life and regular small talk. This is a unique, poignant, and tender evocation of life as touched irrevocably by death.
