The Vagrants
The Vagrants is the kind of book that will break your heart. It will break your heart because you will read it in March, picked up from on an unnecessarily long airport layover. March is not a great month. You work too much, you feel like there is too much going on to enjoy the good things, and it will rain a lot. Getting up for work will be a struggle, especially those days when it's raining and you're tired and frustrated because your own writing isn't going well (you'll never, you think, write anything as haunting as this book, or anything as beautifully crafted). You will turn in work to your workshop that you want to take back the moment it leaves your hands, and as you pull on your rain boots and struggle with your broken umbrella and coffee leaks out over your hands from your "spill proof" but perpetually leaking travel coffee mug you are going to wish, quite fiercely, that the universe was not such a wet demanding place and that you could just stay in bed and read Yiyun Li all day. In this way The Vagrants will break your heart.
But also. The book will break your heart because it's just that good. If I had read this book on vacation in July, sitting in a hammock with nothing else to do it still would have made my chest ache, would have made me look up and blink into the hot sun, dazed. The novel is set in the late 1970's in a fictional Chinese town called Muddy River. The Vagrants begins with the execution of a woman and for the rest of the novel the characters in the town struggle beneath the twin consequences of the event and the Communist government that carried it out. For the most part the novel centers around a few key characters who are affected by the execution, both in direct and indirect ways. The parents of the executed women react in different and conflicting ways, while elsewhere another young woman struggles with her loyalty to the Communist government and another tries to escape the family that mistreats her. Yiyun Li's prose brings the reader deep and close to each character, sketching a portrait of each individual against a nuanced background. This is at once a work that gives us the singular experience of 1970's era China and the broader experience of human beings working against grief, confusion and love, moving into the cracks between everything else.
This is one of those rare books that I think lives up to every gushing review excerpted in the front of the book. It is gorgeous and deeply felt. I think you should read it, too. Any month of the year.
Saturday, April 3, 2010 at 1:02PM
Reader Comments (4)
Nice review. I have Yiyun Li's book of stories on my nightstand, and it's been there for a long, long time. I really want to read it, and I know it's going to be like this -- heartbreaking. Somehow, I can't seem to get in the mood for it. Maybe April will provide a better reading environment?
Hope April is a nicer month for you!
i really like how you tie the review to your own experience. How did I miss how hearing about this book?
The first paragraph in this post had my mouth hanging open. That is beautiful writing!! For reals. I'm embarrassed of my own blog now. You put me to shame. Amazing.
I love Yiyun and her writing. I have especially loved her recent stories in the New Yorker--they are amazing. But this year has been hard on my mood, and it's been hard to pick up a book that is so very bleak and heartbreaking in content. It's been on my bedside table for quite some time now (I bought the hardcover when it first came out--that's how long it's been on my bedside table!)...and I'm waiting for a day that is bright enough for me submerge myself into the world of the Vagrants.