Book Specs 📖

• Author: Yiyun Li
• Genre: Literary Fiction/ Bildungsroman
• Pages: 348 (Paperback)

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

Think My Brilliant Friend en France OR if you haven’t read it…this is the story of girlhood, growing pains, and the importance of fictions in a cold, hard world.

Notes/Thoughts📝

• The mood of The Book of Goose is philosophical, melancholic and poetic. Quite a bold decision from the author to assume a more languorous pace and trust the reader to keep reading.
• Pertaining to books/writing, the faint line between what is imagined and what really happened is an interesting intersection…or is it a spectrum? Are dreams not fictions before they become reality. Is religion not just a leap of faith, isn’t that the basis of love before it becomes marriage?
• There is mortality and then there is the death of a friendship or the death of youthful thinking/imagination. There is no handbook for how we grieve or how we hold onto what once was but Li is able to grasp this ineffable feeling of loss between Agnes and Fabienne.
• I loved the dialogue between Fabienne, Agnes, and Jacques through letter writing. The use of a fictional character to circumvent difficult conversations was a creative way to exhibit how children use these devices often to communicate. It is also a reminder to lean into the childish part of ourselves that readily plays with multiple realities/different truths. We are too obsessed with an ‘objective truth’ when this is farthest from “reality’
• For non-experienced readers, I would recommend My Brilliant Friend. If you are in a pensive mind-wandering mood, this is a good book to pick up.

“Quotes”🗣

The world has no use for who we are and what we know. A story has to be written out. How else do we get our revenge?

Yet what is myth but a veil arranged to cover what is hideous or tedious?

Happiness, I would tell her, is to spend every day without craning one’s neck to look forward to tomorrow, next month, next year, and without holding out one’s hands to stop every day from becoming yesterday.

Morning and evening make a day. Days and nights make a week, a month, a life. Drop me into any moment, point me in any direction, and I could retrace my life. Details beget details. With all those details one might hope for the full picture. A full picture of what, though? The more we remember, the less we understand.

“A hard life, unlike what we were taught at school, did not make us virtuous; the hardest life was the most boring, the most unrewarding. How else could we overcome this boredom but to bring ourselves up in our own make-believe, which, as we grew older, had become more elaborate, more exhilarating, and, most of all, closer to the truth…Our make-beliefs were out allies. How else could we thrive, if not for them: unseen, nameless, patient, always on our side?

What we wrote was about many things, but not about us. When the books were read by others, we were nowhere to be found. The real story was beyond our ability to tell: our girlhood, our friendship, our love–all monumental, all inconsequential.