Welcome to Litsy!

If my classmate and his wife decided to leave China, they would have to face the unavoidable hardships of emigration, like solitude, humiliation, and monotony, like repetitiveness, directionlessness, and helplessness. These were problems that could not be solved by money, difficulties that no frame of mind could counteract.

This novel‘s emotional restraint suits the cold Montreal winter setting of this story about an immigrant‘s loneliness after his wife dies & his daughter moves out. Two different women help him come to terms with his situation, while both withhold secrets connected to his birth country, China. I am giving it a pick for its ideas & bookishness, but the jealousy & romance passages… not so much. #Translation by Stephen Nashef. #shadowgiller2022

I was disappointed by the outdated portrayal of a young disabled woman in this contemporary novel:

“I love cooking,” she said shyly. “Were it not for my accident I would have made an excellent housewife.”

Celia thought that reading was a sign of someone‘s worth, that a life without reading was not worth living. My wife, on the other hand, thought my interest in reading was a sign of my irresponsible attitude.

You can only understand the meaning of life if you can see the bigger picture, and without understanding the meaning of life you cannot live a meaningful life.
🧐

I would sometimes feel lonely so I decided to reread Animal Farm. From the very beginning I discovered there was more to the text than I had gotten the first time, to the extent that I almost felt as if I were reading a different book. I knew it wasn‘t simply a question of my language capability having improved or my surroundings having changed. It was a testament to the mysterious power of rereading.

Strange ideas would occur to me, such as the notion that the Old Summer Palace had always been destined to be sacked & burned by foreign powers, that it was this act that had allowed it to become the true Old Summer Palace. But such thoughts quickly made me uncomfortable. So much of what was “true” in history was built on a foundation of destruction—this was its tragedy.