Word fall short, yes, but sometimes their shadows can reach the unspeakable.
Yiyun Li's most personal work yet, was birthed after the suicide of her 16 year old son. The narrative structure of a precarious conversation between a grieving mother in the present and a son in a sort of purgatory, allows for the exploration of questions, with and without answers. It quickly becomes irrelevant whether the conversation parallels or obliquely touches on the author's actual experience--the work is as raw as it is essentially crafted.
Baking, a great joy of the son's, serves as an extended metaphor throughout the book. “Just as none of us could go back, re-measuring the ingredients that made up days and years, repeating the steps with more care, hoping to eliminate the errors, hoping not to make new mistakes, so that this story would have turned out differently. And Nikolai would still be alive."
The conversations unfold with occasional epiphanies, but never any firm answers to the "why".
The world never tires of dimming the bright and blunting the sharp, I said. It’s good to avoid suffering when one can.
Finally, the book concludes where it began...in the never ending quest for understanding the impossible.
Time points only in one direction. A mind goes in many directions. How far digressed are we allowed to be on a one-way road before we are called lost? And if one is not lost, can one be found again?
More here from NPR's review.