Yiyun Li’s The Vagrants demands attention without offering comfort. It moves through a provincial Chinese city, drawn with precision and spareness. “The light from the streetlamps was weak, but the eastern sky had taken on a hue of bluish white like that of an upturned fish belly.” Li at her most effusive; elsewhere the prose remains subdued, watchful.
The narrative circles an execution’s aftermath; ripples moving outward through families, lovers, loners. It recalls Solzhenitsyn’s moral disintegration: fear turning neighbours against each other. Li’s voice is colder, less didactic, more modern in its restraint. Sympathy becomes suspect; compassion fails to matter.
The novel’s images enact this suppression. A man hisses at a child not to wake his hedgehog. “He’s hibernating,” the child answers. “Spring’s already here,” the man says. “But it’s not warm enough for the hedgehog yet.” The hedgehog, unmoving; a stand-in for voiceless protestors, for a thaw that cannot yet arrive. Humour, when it appears, is dry and bruised. The dialogues between Bashi and Nini vibrate with awkward energy, but Li permits no sentimentality. Even empathy feels like something learned too late.
Li’s work invites return, but not quickly.
>I really enjoyed this work. I thought it was quite powerful and, as you say, indicates that Yiyun Li has great promise. I would join in recommending this one and look forward to her future work.