All Will Be Well by Yiyun Li, 2019
The magic trick:
Making the narrator a storyteller, but also keeping the narrator’s own story in the reader’s mind throughout
Oh, this one is sad.
Maybe it’s that I read it right after my daughter was born.
Maybe it draws on the author’s real-life loss of her teenaged son.
Maybe it’s just beautifully written.
All of the above, probably. This one really got to me.
In many ways, it’s not the narrator’s story. She is relaying a story she was told by a woman at her salon. In a very elegant form, the narrator shares just enough of herself early in the text to keep the reader aware of her. It’s not too much so that it overshadows the story within the story, but it keeps her character present in our mind.
Then, as we get deeper into the story, the narrator becomes more prominent. We get more and more information about her life, her philosophies, and her loss.
So that by the end of Lily’s story – the woman from the salon – we can seamlessly transition into the narrator’s interpretation of the story and then finally fully into her own life story.
It’s very, very well done.
And that’s quite a trick on Li’s part.
The selection:
More people came into the story, marching in and out like a platoon of extras. Her schoolmates were remembered. Some of them had also had crushes on Tuan. The friendships between the fathers and between the eldest sons of the two families were recollected, but friendships severed by war were hardly worth a movie. Lily’s parents had sympathized with their daughter when they first left Vietnam, but soon afterward they had shown impatience when she pined.
“Well, I can’t blame them,” Lily said. “Love doesn’t put rice in the cooker or a roof over our heads.”
“What does love do?” I asked.
“Oh, love makes a good movie,” she said. “Without movies, what would we do with ourselves?”
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