ReviewIn Yiyun Li’s Must I Go, an old woman tries to solve the unsolvable puzzle that is life
- The narrator reckons with a former fling’s perception of her through the pages of his diary
- In asking questions of human existence, she discovers that life ‘misses pieces and has useless extras’
Must I Go
by Yiyun Li
Hamish Hamilton
4/5 stars
“Posterity, take notice!” So begins Must I Go, the fourth novel by acclaimed Beijing-born novelist Yiyun Li. The opening is a surprise, partly because Li has never seemed the sort to make bold proclamations about the lasting value of her art. If I had to choose a single word to encapsulate her corpus it would be “modest” – and I mean that in the best way.
From her first story collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005), Li’s writing has generated its quiet force from society’s forgotten people, by recounting their fleeting joys and (more frequently) pains. This could be the execution of a counter-revolutionary in post-Maoist China (The Vagrants, 2009) or the suicide of Li’s own son, Vincent, in Where Reasons End (2019). While Li’s prose is exquisite after a precise fashion, it never blows its own unflashy horn.
All this is enough to put you en garde over that relatively brazen appeal to posterity. This is immediately confirmed when our narrator, Lilia Imbody, smartly wonders whether the phrase is an “exhortation” or a “plea”.
The story doesn’t want to be remembered any more than it wants to be seen