Lilia Imbody, 81, lives in a residence for the elderly. For this clumsy old American, “anyone who sat next to her fell into the category of undesirables”. After three marriages and five children having given her in turn 17 grandchildren, she thinks back to her ties with the people around her, such as her last husband or her daughter Lucy, who committed suicide.
This uninterrupted flow of thoughts, where mourning occupies an important place, is nourished by the publication of the posthumous diary of a former lover – and secret father of his daughter Lucy -, Roland Bouley, an unrepentant seducer “who had mainly loved than himself”. Lilia met him in 1945 when she was sixteen and was then ready to do anything to emancipate herself.
In Leave anyway, the fourth novel by American Yiyun Li, Lilia travels back and forth between the present and the past, confronting the inevitability of death and her own demise. In thought, she relives her mistakes and ruminates on many regrets, especially regarding her relationship with Lucy, more than ever aware of her own limits as a human being. “The days after love are long and empty,” she will say.
The protagonist reflects on the stories of the people around her and the influences they have had on her own life. What makes this book – which sometimes lacks a bit of rhythm – a conversation with the dead, as well as a meditation on the nature of memory and narration.
Born in Beijing, China, in 1972, the one Salman Rushdie considers “one of the greatest authors of our time”, the daughter of a teacher and a nuclear physicist, moved to the United States in 1996 to to pursue medical studies there, before literature turned his life around.
One of the central themes here is the idea of connection: how it can be both vital and elusive. Thinking of the bonds she has forged over the years with people she has loved and lost, the old woman admits having had difficulty connecting with her eldest daughter, just like with other people in her life.
This deeply introspective novel explores the complex nature of human relationships and how they shape our lives; a moving questioning, as is often the case with this writer, on the human condition, as well as a testimony to the powers of storytelling to help us give, why not, meaning to our lives.
Combining philosophy and literature, Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life (Belfond, 2018) spoke of psychic and artistic reconstruction after a serious depression experienced by the writer. A few months after its publication, his 16-year-old son committed suicide. It’s with The sweetness of our battlefields (Belfond, 2019) that she had paid him a modest and poetic tribute. Tragic events of which the reader will be able to find traces in Leave anyway.