Kinder Than Solitude读后感精选

《Kinder Than Solitude》是一本由Yiyun Li著作，Random House出版的Hardcover图书，本书定价：USD 26.00，页数：336，特精心收集的读后感，希望对大家能有帮助。

《Kinder Than Solitude》读后感(一)：Cold

This book is such a contrast with Memoirs of Hadrian. the latter was profuse with profound thoughts without even trying. The former is filled with trivial thoughts and actions that don't seem to go anywhere. The only difference i could decipher is that Yourcenar is passionate while Li Yiyun is cold.

Li or her characters don't care much for anything, they are detached from the world or its inhabitants. Which makes her a great observer. That's what makes her short stories tolerable. it is filled with first rate observation and she could write. In short stories, she also doesn't have to dispense judgement as she felt obliged to do in longer pieces.

If the writer herself doesn't care much for the characters, then she couldn't blame her readers feel the same way.

What irked me the most is her attempt at saying something profound based on banality. Since there is really no substance behind banality, a more skilled hand usually makes fun of it. Maughm is a master at this. But humor is not Li's strong suit, she tried to be clever and play word games instead. The result is convoluted and nonsensical. But maybe some would love its opaqueness or the cleverness it professed. I'm just annoyed and really want to urge her to read Orwell's "Politics and English Language“ instead.

《Kinder Than Solitude》读后感(二)：灵魂的独处

Kinder than solitude

李翊云，七零后生人，生物系毕业，赴美攻读研究生，拿到硕士学位后参加了爱荷华写作班（Iowa Writer's workshop), 从此致力写作，被纽约客评为二十名四十岁以下优秀作家(20 under 40) 之一，受媒体和文学评论界追捧，各种奖项拿了很多。以前断断续续读过她在纽约客上的一些短篇，文字很好，作品多写华人的故事，但是早期的作品有很重的伤痕文学的味道。对伤痕文学，尤其是移民作家的作品，以自己之前的故土为背景，写些非常苦难和极端的故事，难免有赚取眼球之嫌，比如《追风筝的人》，个人对这类作品大都敬而远之 （最近这个观点有所动摇，这是后话，暂且不提），她的书以前也没有读过。前些日子无意中看到她的新书kinder than solitude, 大致读了一下简介，朱令这个名字一下子浮上心头，不由起了好奇心，从图书馆借了来读。

故事发生在九十年代初北京的四合院，主人公是三个同龄人（伯阳，默然，如玉），在十五六岁的花季，因为同院的大学生少艾（这些中文名字都是音译，不一定完全符合作者的本意）被投毒导致终身残障（智力水平相当于三岁的小孩儿），三个人的人生从此受到深入骨髓的影响。“Perhaps there is a line in everyone’s life that, once crossed, imparts a certain truth that one has not been able to see before, transforming solitude from a choice into the only possible line of existence.”

故事以二十年后少艾去世开篇，以如玉回国见到伯阳结尾，中间穿插了二十年前的故事和几个人二十年来的生活。总的感觉是七零后的作者，用很耐看的英文写了一本书，探索灵魂的独处，同时也纪念那个时代的北京，和整整那一代人，非常的怀旧。这本书并不胜在故事情节(plot）（事实上我并不是非常喜欢情节的处理，有些细节不太说得通，也不很合情理，但是喜欢她对于最后真相的处理，用了留白的手法），但是读过会让人回味。喜欢的是书中对人物灵魂的探索，那个时代北京的描写，以及隽永的文字。

书中对人物刻画的比较鲜明，作者并不是很在意主人公们做了些什么，而是很深入细致地去探讨他们的灵魂，他们的认知，对世界众生的态度，以及这种态度形成的原因。少艾事件让这三个人都变成了从某种意义上无所依托的人，他们的灵魂的一部分随着少艾的中毒过早地死去了，而之后的生命，充满了逃避（比如默然的不肯回国，比如伯阳的玩世不恭，比如如玉的冷漠出世），不知所措(默然尤甚），还有怀疑（谁下的毒？为什么？）。

Solitude, “a state or situation in which you are alone usually because you want to be", "the quality or state of being alone or remote from society : seclusion",中文译成独处比较贴切，是一种远离人群的状态，往往是自己的选择。Loneliness, 是孤独，多少含有一些悲伤和落寞的心情，跟是否独处无关，热闹的人群中依然可以感到孤独。下面这段话非常到位：“Our language has widely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.” ~ Paul Tillich, ‘The Eternal Now'. 所以在英文里solitude是一个中性甚至有些积极意义的词。想起中文里的独字，也可以是双性的，但更多地是跟悲怆，伤感相联，"念天地之悠悠，独怆然而涕下”，“独在异乡为异客”，“花间一壶酒，独酌无相亲”，“昨夜西风雕碧树，独上高楼，望尽天涯路”......这样的句子，不胜枚举。或许从骨子里中国人是排斥“独”的。

书中三个主人公，如玉应该是真正自己选择灵魂独处的人。“If she had ever felt anything close to passion, it was a passion of the obliterating kind: any connection made by another human being, by accident or by intention, had to be erased; the void she maintained around herself was her only meaningful possession.” 但是即使是如玉，也会有偶尔的质疑和希望遇到相似的灵魂的期冀：“She was afraid of meeting another person like her, but more than that she was afraid of never meeting another person like her, who, however briefly, would look into her eyes so that she knew she was not alone in her loneliness.” 相比之下，默然和伯阳的solitude则多是被迫而为的。默然是因为以前那个美好世界的粉碎，伯阳则更多是因为无法得到答案而无从找到心灵的宁静。在如玉心中，这两个人都是牺牲品，也许正因为如此，两个人都非常的孤独。灵魂的独处，其实是一种soul searching和enrichment极好的方式，而书中人物的独处无一例外地导致的是一种深刻的孤独以及随之而来的悲哀。

一直认为，好的文学作品，应该既有时代性，又有个体性。这本书对当时的时代背景并没有浓笔重彩的渲染，而是隐在这几个人物背后。而对故事发生的地点，北京，则描绘得淋漓尽致。作者在一篇采访中曾说，“这是一封写给北京的情书”。前海后海的垂柳，老北京心目中的秋天，炎炎夏日路边的西瓜摊，老头老太太们的大蒲扇，四合院的众生相，都和记忆中的北京一模一样。在如玉的眼睛里，"A place, any place, was merely a spot for resting during one's migration from beginning to end." 但是对很多人来说，任何一个地方，无论是久居多年的城市，抑或是旅途中经过的客栈，之所以留下回忆，大多跟在这个地方遇到过的人和发生过的事有关。所以读到书里关于北京的句子，不断浮上脑海的就是nostalgia.

“Midsummer in Beijing, its extreme heat and humidity occasionally broken by a relieving thunderstorm, gave the impression that life today would be that of tomorrow, and the day after until forever: the watermelon rinds accumulated at the roadside would go on rotting and attracting swarms of flies; murky puddles in the alleyways from 1overspilled sewers dwindled, but before they entirely disappeared another storm would replenish them; old men and women, sitting next to bamboo perambulators in the shadow of palace walls, cooled down their grandchildren with giant fans woven of sedge leaves, and if one closed one's eyes and opened them again one could almost believe that the fans and the babies and the wrinkle-faced grandparents were the same ones from a hundred years ago, captured by a rare photograph in the traveling album of a foreign missionary, who would eventually be executed for spreading evil in a nearby province.

Life, already old, did not age. It was this Beijing, with its languid mood, that Moran loved the most,....”

这是一本相当ambitious,也相当深刻的书。Henry David Thoreau，美国最著名的隐士，曾经说过，"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." 在他的心目中，“I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude." 而我最喜欢的，莫过于Ralph Waldo Emerson 在‘Self-Reliance’里写的这段话："It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

《Kinder Than Solitude》读后感(三)：Solitude, freedom, and how the past comes back haunting the present

In her second novel Kinder Than Solitude, Li Yiyun explores how solitude plays out in one’s life and how the past shapes a person and constantly comes back to haunt the present.

Setting aside the key protagonist Ruyu (whose state of mind remains largely incomprehensible to me throughout the novel), Moran’s and Boyang’s lives have veered off to another course following the poisoning of Shaoai. Moran, who used to be a simple, loving, and carefree person, ends up living in perpetual solitude. Boyang, who easily falls in love with Ruyu in his boyhood, turns out almost incapable of love when he grows up. And most excruciating of all, the intelligent and sharp-tongued Shaoai becomes a prisoner of her own body and does not find release until her death 21 years later.

The poisoning reminds one of the high-profile case of Zhu Ling, which has been widely circulating on the Chinese online community for years. In an interview, Li Yiyun acknowledged that she was “inspired” by the case (https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/05/interview-with-yiyun-li/), but what makes the novel more than a whodunit fiction is the poignant complexity Li lends to her characters who are flawed in one way or another. Instead of inspiring widespread sympathy as Zhu Ling has done, Shaoai does not always seem a likable character (at least to me). Her political activism, though justified technically, makes people around her ill at ease most of the time. And that activism, when turning bossy and oppressive, is not unlike the regime she is up against. Falling victim to Shaoai’s intrusion -- both verbally and physically -- Ruyu puts toxins in a glass of juice and Shaoai is poisoned. Though Ruyu argues that it serves Shaoai right when she drinks the juice without even asking (sort of a punishment for her taking everything for granted), the poisoning and the ensuing pain inflicted on Shaoai is not justified. With her constant justification that the only thing she wants in life is “being on her own” (P274), Ruyu seems to claim that what she really wants is ideal, absolute personal freedom, but whether absolute freedom is inherently legitimate and attainable and whether freedom has its boundaries (say when one’s claim to freedom trespasses on others’ rights) is profoundly at issue. The same is true of Shaoai, whose relentless claim to protests and democracy is not inherently justified. Where the boundaries, if at all, of freedom and democracy lie -- is a question that I believe Li Yiyun purposefully poses to her readers in this politically-charged novel.

Another question the writer raises in the novel is the relations between the past and the present (and future). Though their lives are changed by the poisoning case, Moran and Boyang theoretically have a say in how to look at this experience and to what extent allows the past experience to dictate their present and future. They have, as it turns out agonizingly, chosen to let the past live into their present and possibly their future.

Another motif of the novel is, of course, solitude, which constitutes the title. Solitude comes in two categories in the story. One is the solitude of Ruyu, which she feels most at ease and is often synonymous with freedom; the other is the solitary life led by Moran (as well as Boyang), which is “chosen by her” (P228) after the life-changing poisoning case of Shaoai. For her, that choice comes at a dear price. There is a heart-rending paragraph that best reveals what Moran really craves in her life. “To this day, Moran still sometimes woke from dreams in which she had laughed jovially. Often Boyang was in those dreams, and sometimes Ruyu, too, and the backdrop, however vague, was unmistakably one of her favorite corners of Beijing; in the first moment of wakefulness, the unconstrained happiness, like the lingering aftertaste of the locust blossoms they ate as children, was intensely real, until she remembered that she was no longer a person who had things to laugh about, or people to laugh with.”（P222）When the novel proceeds to this paragraph, it occurs to me that despite her chosen isolation (which in the early pages of the novel makes her quite indistinguishable from Ruyu), Moran is still the simple and lovable person that she is born and sets out to be. Her eventual redemption, if at all, is through loving and caring for others, for instance, Josef.

A final word on the setting of the novel and its parallel to the case of Zhu Ling. One reason that Zhu Ling’s case never loses appeal in the Chinese online community is, I guess, due to the political connections and tension that some have been theorizing about for years, but that tension is more palpable in the novel as the story is set in the eventful year of 1989. With its strong thematic and symbolic presence in the novel, that year becomes an unrelenting reminder of how the past, though willfully neglected, will not remain settled but will come back haunting the present unless a formal acknowledgment is made.