Kinder Than Solitude

Kinder Than Solitude (2014/02/25) Yiyun Li 商品詳細を見る

外国語として学んだ英語で発表しているYiyun Liさんの新作が出たようです。さっそくKindleで購入して読み始めました。



In 'Kinder Than Solitude,' History Always Haunts
by NPR STAFF
February 23, 2014 8:00 AM

On the nature of solitude
I think Moran, one of the women who left China, she always cited solitude as her best companion. But at the end of the book she said she realized she did not have solitude, all she had was a life-long quarantine against love and life. And that's one thing I learned, or I was trying to make clear through the character, is you know, solitude is important, but sometimes solitude also has a deceptive surface. People use solitude as an excuse not to connect to other people. So in the end I actually changed my view of solitude a little bit, and I think that's why the title is Kinder Than Solitude, because solitude can be kind, but there has to be something more than solitude.

ニューヨークタイムズでも彼女のことを取り上げていました。

New Land, New Tongue, New Fame
Yiyun Li’s ‘Kinder Than Solitude’ Echoes a Beijing Childhood
By LARRY ROHTERFEB. 24, 2014

Ms. Li said that when she lived in China, she did not write anything in Chinese, except a journal she kept as a teenager. “Just because you know a language doesn’t mean you can it express it well,” she said. Even now, though most of her characters are Chinese, when she hears them talking in her head, they are speaking English, a mystery she cannot explain.

Writing in English “felt very natural to me very fast,” she said. “I think in English, I dream in English. I came to English as a grown-up, which is probably to my advantage. The disadvantage is that you don’t have that intimacy with the language, there are things you just miss with the language.”

The writer Amy Leach, a classmate at Iowa and still a close friend, said, “We’ve talked about how it can be an advantage not to have all those ready-made clichés springing to your mind and precluding more original thinking and wording.”

Ms. Li said, “You miss a lot of idioms, cultural things,” if you don’t go to middle school or high school in the language. “On the other hand, I think if you do approach a language as a grown-up and then use it to write, you also bypass a lot of silliness.”

先ほどの記事で外国語として学ぶと文化的な事柄を学べない点を指摘しました。リーさんもYou miss a lot of idioms, cultural thingsとその事は自覚していますが、それと同時にyou also bypass a lot of sillinessと若さ＝バカさを回避することができるとも語っています。物事の二面性をしっかりと捉えているところはさすが作家ですね。