#366escritoras

Yiyun Li China 1972-   "One never makes up things in fiction, I said. One has to live there as one has to live here."

Hoy quiero hablarles de la autora de dos de los libros más hermosos (y tristes) que he leído. Me refiero a Yiyun Li (China, 1972) y su libro de memorias Dear Friend, From My Life I Write To You in Your Life y su novela Where reasons end.
Yiyun Li llegó a vivir a Estados Unidos el año 1996 y ha hecho su carrera literaria en ese país (sus libros los escribe en inglés). Ha recibido becas muy prestigiosas como la MacArthur y premios como el PEN/Hemingway y el PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.
Ha escrito tres novelas: The Vagrants, Kinder than solitude y Where reasons end (con la que ganó el PEN/Jean Stein Book Award este año).
También ha publicado las colecciones de cuentos A Thousand Years of Good Prayers y Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, además de su tremendo libro de memorias (mi favorito): Dear Friend, from My Life I Write To You in Your Life
Algunos de sus libros ya han sido traducidos al español: Muchacha de oro, muchacha esmeralda, Los buenos deseos y Más generoso que la soledad.
Mis libros favoritos de ella son sus memorias y su última novela. Dos libros bellos, inmensos y, a ratos, bastante desoladores. En el primero, la autora repasa su vida, sin ocultar los dos intentos de suicidio que la llevaron a pasar un tiempo internada.
El título viene de una entrada de los cuadernos de Katherine Mansfield. Dice Yiyun Li: “For a while I read Katherine Mansfield’s notebooks to distract myself. ‘Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life’, she wrote in an entry. I cried when I read the line.”
Y sigue: “The books one writes — past and present and future — are they not trying to say the same thing: Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life?What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance...”
En sus memorias, Yiyun Li repasa distintos momentos de su vida (su infancia en China, su tiempo en el ejército, su decisión de dejar la Ciencia para dedicarse a la Literatura, su temporada en la clínica)siempre refiriéndose a los libros que la acompañaban y siguen acompañándola.
Y así la autora se rodea, sobre todo, de cuadernos, diarios y cartas de escritores. Las de Turgenev, las de Stefan Zweig, Katherine Mansfield, Marianne Moore. Y así también, al recordar, relee.
“What do we gain from wanting to know a stranger’s life? But when we read someone’s private words, when we experience her most vulnerable moments with her, and when her words speak more eloquently of our feelings than we are able to, can we still call her a stranger?”
“One writes about what haunts one.Thus looked at, no one is exempt from being autobiographical.”
Pero en sus memorias también hay momentos sin libros, en los que nada interfiere para que lleguen estas palabras a la página: “There is this emptiness in me. All the things in the world are not enough to drown out the voice of this emptiness that says: you are nothing.”
Y el dolor continúa en la obra de Yiyun Li. Siete meses después de publicar Dear Friend... su hijo de dieciséis años se quitó la vida.El año pasado, la autora publicó una novela en la que una escritora conversa con su hijo muerto:Where reasons end.  Una novela breve y fulminante.
En la novela, Yiyun Li habla sobre el duelo como una lengua extranjera a la que se le presta atención: “Love was the word we had used at his leave-taking, he knowing it was final, I sensing it was the case. But between sensing and knowing there were seven hours and four states.”
“Only in an O. Henry story does the last leaf take on an existential significance. Only in an O. Henry story does everything come with a poetic and tragic twist. The truth is, leaves are always falling.”
“A parent has to be quixotic. The word reminded me what I had forgotten all these weeks, that on the day Nikolai had died, when I had not known it would happen, I had been listening to Don Quixote on a long drive. I had been laughing to myself in the car.” (1/2)
(2/2)”I had laughed at times since then, but that laughter in the car — quixotic — would never be mine again.”
“People talk about grief coming and going like waves, but I am not a breakwater, I am not a boat, I am not a statue left on a rocky shore, tested for its endurance.”
“You’ll settle in sooner or later (...)
It occurred to me that I had never looked up the etymology of the word settle, so I did. I read it to him: from Old English, setlan, from setl—to seat, bring to rest,come to rest. Can parents’ hearts find repose after the death of a child?”
“Perfection is like a single snowflake, I said. It melts.
A perfectionist melts too, Mommy.”
Y mi cita favorita de ese libro:
“One never makes up things in fiction, I said. One has to live there as one has to live here.”
 

©️ Foto encontrada en: https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Yiyun-Li/e/B001HPTMQK