译者：在2022年收到的圣诞节礼物中，有一本书（纸质）。因为作者的名字是Yiyun Li，我立马搜了一下。然后，借了她的两部小说（电子版）；可惜，都没有看完，虽然她的文笔很棒。为什么？我感觉太压抑了。

一位悲伤的母亲与在天堂的儿子的对话

作者：劳伦·奥勒

• 2019 年 2 月 1 日

在李翊云的小说《原因终结之处》的开场白中，一位不愿透露姓名的叙述者描述了她为自己设定的艰巨任务，即这本书的形式是一位母亲和她已故的儿子之间的想象的对话。 “我是一个普通的家长，为在一场无法解释的悲剧中丧生的普通孩子感到悲痛。 这里，我已经用了三个陈词滥调。” 第一个是“悲伤”这个词：考虑到它的词源——叙述者在书里经常做的事情（即考虑词源）——她注意到这个词来自拉丁语，意思是“负担”和“严重、沉重”；她在书中清晰地多次问自己：“什么样的母亲会认为在孩子去世后，这种生活会成为一种负担？” 第二个陈词滥调是“莫名其妙的”：“对我来说没有什么是莫名其妙的——只是我不想解释：母亲的义务是包容，而不是展示。” 第三个陈词滥调是“悲剧”，她和她的儿子都不愿意“面对”，视其为对所发生事件的描述；只是说这个词（悲剧）最初的意思是“山羊之歌”；可是，哪是什么（意思）？

这本书的幽默非常微妙但也非常有力，并且总是伴随着栩栩如生的荒谬回声。 双关语——母语非英语的李翊云已经用英语出了六本书，她非常喜欢双关语——从一个点跳到下一个，直到他们回到（原来）谈话的场合：不是莫名其妙的、不是悲剧的、叙述者并不感到悲伤的事件，是她 16 岁儿子的自杀；她给儿子起名叫尼古拉，尽管那不是他的真名。

李翊云在（大）儿子自杀后的几个月里完成了《原因终结之处》；小说作家在这里承担的责任模仿了母亲的责任，这是她始终关心的问题。 这部小说的背景是极度的悲伤，推动了书中关于（女性）同时作为作家和母亲之间紧张关系的争论——一系列关于母性的新书引发了这一争论——过去的那些“日常琐事”和政治问题进入了“存在危机”的领域。 在虚构这次对话时——正如她“一直在做的那样：叙述故事”——叙述者让她和已故的儿子“会面”，尽管他们交谈的世界是“由文字组成的”，不再受时间或空间的限制。

尽管她试图证明这位家长不再需要“遵守约束孩子和家长的规则”，但围绕这种关系的“无罪的希望”或“无望的内疚”牵引着他们； 母亲和儿子很快陷入需求和义务的斗争中，尽管尼古拉在世时和母亲似乎相处得很好。 （他是那种好孩子，在中学时写过一篇关于俄国革命的短篇小说。）如果这不是又一个陈词滥调，我可能会称尼古拉是一个完“美”的小说角色；他既早熟，又会阐明许多同时带着琐碎和富有哲理的严酷事实。 “我无意冒犯你，”他有一次对母亲说，“但你的词汇量不够。” 这种情况下，谁的词汇量会够用呢？

当尼古拉偶尔称呼叙述者为“妈妈”（Mommy；译者：儿语）时，或者当母亲讲述他生前在浴缸中（玩耍）和参加科学博览会时，他的死亡暂时可以被解读为一场明显的“悲剧”，但尼古拉和他的母亲都不会让他们的对话就此结束。 当叙述者间接提到她自己的自杀企图时，这本书的利害关系就更加清晰了。 尼古拉指出，他的自欺欺人和意志力都有可能是从母亲那里继承的。 “如果你知道这可能会发生的话，你为什么要生孩子呢？”他问道；这一问话既有针对性又可泛指。

他们的对话的目的不是回答这个问题。；也不是让母亲问她的孩子为什么要自杀——“你答应过你会理解的，”他说；她知道她会理解——也不是让母亲讲她已故（大）儿子的人生故事。 与李翊云的前一本书《亲爱的朋友，生活中的我写给生活中的你》一样，她在书中讨论了自己的自杀企图；《原因终结之处》是对（小说）形式的审问——对小说能做什么的一种探索； 小说可以做什么和不可能做什么——以及尝试理解如何经历苦难并、如何记录下这些苦难。 这位充满希望、内疚的母亲和作家，知道这部小说实际上不是与她在天堂中的（大）儿子的对话，而是与她自己的对话。

劳伦·奥勒 (Lauren Oyler) 曾为《纽约时报杂志》、《伦敦书评》、《迷惑者》和《新共和》撰稿。

A Grieving Mother Converses With Her Dead Son

in Yiyun Li’s New Novel

By Lauren Oyler

 Feb. 1, 2019

WHERE REASONS END 

By Yiyun Li

Near the beginning of Yiyun Li’s elliptical new novel, “Where Reasons End,” the unnamed narrator describes the difficult task she has set for herself in writing this particular book, which takes the form of an imagined conversation between a mother and her dead son. “I was a generic parent grieving a generic child lost to an inexplicable tragedy. Already there were three clichés.” The first is the word “grieve”: Considering the word’s etymology — something the narrator often does with words here — she notes it’s from the Latin for “to burden” and “grave, heavy” and wonders, in a feat of clarity she repeats many times in the book, “What kind of mother would consider it a burden to live in the vacancy left behind by a child?” The second cliché is “inexplicable”: “Nothing inexplicable for me — only I didn’t want to explain: A mother’s job is to enfold, not to unfold.” The third cliché is “tragedy,” which neither she nor her son is willing to assess as a description of what happened, except to say that the word originally meant “goat song,” and what, even, is that?

The humor in this book is subtle yet potent, always followed by a lifelike echo of absurdity. Puns — of which Li, a nonnative English speaker who has now written six books in the language, is delightfully fond — skip from one point to the next until they circle back to the occasion for the conversation: The not-inexplicable not-tragedy the narrator is not-grieving is the suicide of her 16-year-old son, whom she calls Nikolai, though that’s not his name.

Li wrote “Where Reasons End” in the months after losing her own son to suicide, and the responsibility the fiction writer takes on here mimics that of motherhood, a recurring concern for her. The abject sadness that backgrounds this novel pushes the current debate about the tension between writing and mothering — ushered in by a series of new books on motherhood — past logistical and political concerns into the realm of existential crisis. In fictionalizing this conversation — in doing as she has “always been doing: writing stories” — the narrator has made the meeting between her and her son “take place,” though the world in which they talk is not one limited by time or space but rather one “made up by words.”

Though she tries to establish that the pair no longer have to “abide by the rules that bind a child and a parent,” the “guiltless hope” or “hopeless guilt” that surrounds that relationship tugs at them; mother and soon are still locked in a struggle of need and obligation, even as they seem to have gotten along well when Nikolai was alive. (It surely helped that he was the kind of kid who, in middle school, wrote a short story about the Russian Revolution.) Were it not another cliché, I might call Nikolai a fully realized character; he’s precociously wise as well as a bitter deliverer of harsh truths both petty and philosophical, often at the same time. “No offense,” he tells his mother at one point, “but you don’t have an expansive vocabulary.” In this situation, who would?

When Nikolai occasionally refers to the narrator as “Mommy,” or when the mother recounts bathtub and science-fair memories from his life, his death can momentarily be read as a straightforward “tragedy,” but both Nikolai and his mother are too “precise” to allow their dialogue to stop there. When the narrator makes oblique reference to her own suicide attempts, the book’s stakes are clearer. It’s possible, Nikolai notes, that he inherited his self-deception and his willpower from her. “Why did you have children,” he asks, again simultaneously specific and general, “if you knew this might happen?”

The point of their conversation is not to answer that question. Nor is it to allow the mother to ask her child why he killed himself — “You promised that you would understand,” he says, and she knows she does — or to tell the story of his life. Like Li’s previous book, a memoir called “Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life,” in which she discusses her own suicide attempts, “Where Reasons End” is an interrogation of form — an exploration of what fiction can do and what it can’t — as well as an attempt to understand how both to live through suffering and to write about it. The hopeful/guilty mother/writer knows the novel is not actually a conversation with her son, but with herself.

Lauren Oyler has written for The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books, The Baffler and The New Republic.