~~~~~~~~ THERE ARE NO WORDS ~~~~~~~~~
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February 23, 2019 5:00 am
There exist no great books about grief and mourning. Good books, yes, but even that class is small. Something about the loss of a loved one resists language, resists narration, resists plot. Something about death resists writing.
Still we keep trying. It's there in the oldest texts, when Gilgamesh tears his clothes and demands that the entire world—mountains, forests, wild animals—weep for his lost friend Enkidu. It's there in Book IV of the Confessions, when Augustine cries that he hates all the places in Carthage he used to go, because they no longer contain his dead companion. It's there in Tennyson's 1849 In Memoriam, and it's there in any number of Emily Dickinson's poems, from "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" to "I measure every Grief I meet." For that matter, it's there in Yiyun Li's new novel, Where Reasons End.
As a book about grieving, Where Reasons End belongs among the best ones, resting beside, say, Peter De Vries's 1961 The Blood of the Lamb, an unbearable novel that recounts the death of his 10-year-old daughter from leukemia. Or C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, also from 1961, a small and painful collection of essays written after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman.
Make no mistake: Where Reasons End is a very good book about grief, lightly fictionalizing Li's actual experiences after the suicide of her 16-year-old son. If you're going to read just one piece of serious new literature this winter, Where Reasons End should be that book.
THERE IS MORE AT THE LINK, IN ADDITION TO A VERY EMOTIONAL PICTURE, IMO.
http://freebeacon.com/culture/words-fall-short-of-grief/?utm_source=Freedom+Mail&;utm_campaign=a641c2ab46-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_02_22_08_45_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b5e6e0e9ea-a641c2ab46-46526853
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