The writing is absolutely beautiful, but this book was a little long for me - I feel like it could have been wonderful had it been cut back a bit. I've heard great things about this author, so I'm definitely going to seek out some of her other books, because I think maybe this one just wasn't for me!

It took me an extremely long time, and many stops and starts, to get through Must I Go. The description seemed like my kind of book but it was so dense and tedious in a way that never really pulled me in that I found myself skimming large sections and putting it down often in favor of other books. I’m grateful to NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for this review and regret that I didn’t enjoy it more.

Consummate artistry marks this finely observed and imagined novel. Yet it is far too long, more of a philosophical treatise at times, on human conduct and relationships, than a story. Tragedy and interiority combine, in the curious form of a diary commented on by a minor character in another’s story. Best was the dyspeptic voice of the narrator, Lilia. Less gripping was the repetitive involvement of her lover Roland with the two important women in his life. But the female characters are strong and compelling. Curious book from a gifted writer.

3 stars. *

Must I Go is the first book by Yiyun Li I have read.  I was not sure what to expect and even as I was reading I wasn't always certain where the story was going.

It is primarily the story of Lilia Liska, an elderly woman who has outlived 3 husbands and one of her children, raised 5 children and 1 grandchild.  She is cantankerous in the way that old people can be that is somewhat charming and somewhat shocking.  She is difficult and mean to her fellow nursing home residents.   The story is hers as she embarks upon a memoir class and revisits the memoir of a former lover, Roland Boulay, the father of her firstborn child.  She reads his accounting of his life and then replies with her own opinion of the events or of him telling all the while her own story.

It is an interesting idea, but I felt myself losing interest along the way.

*with thanks to NetGalley for the digital ARC in exchange for this honest review.

This book is atypical in so many ways — it doesn't begin with a clear desire, just death. But as Yiyun Li has said in interviews, death is not always the end, as typically thought of, but could be a beginning. It's also such a hodgepodge of ideas — a woman coming across a diary, the man's multiple wives. It starts to sound a bit like Sigrid Nunez's The Friend, but more drawn out. It's hard to see the through-line of the story, exactly what the plot is, and how to talk about it coherently. But alas, maybe that's how grief works.

I did not enjoy this tedious book. I usually don’t finish a book that doesn’t seem promising. I kept on, thinking it out get better. It did not.

I hate to admit it, but I struggled to get through this one. While it was an interesting idea the novel just dragged for me. I abandoned this more times than I can even count because it felt a bit like a chore.

I struggled through this book. I SO wanted to like it but, could not. I loved-loved-LOVED 2 of her books, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Dear Freind From My Life I Write to You in Your Life.
YiYun Li is a wonderful writer and I am always on the lookout for her next great book, and unfortunately this wasn't.
It was a s-l-o-o-o-w tedious process -a journey through the life and obsession the main character Lilia had with Roland Bouley-who she had a brief affair with.Actually, I think her life sounded more interesting. She was 81, cantankerous, outlived 3 husbands, 5 childrem and 17 grandchildren.
I just didn't get it! She had a fleeting affair with this gentleman and he ends up fathering one of her children but, why critique his life? I struggled with this book and I did finish it, hoping there would be some intriguing revelations at the end, unfortunately there were not.

Thank you NetGalley and Random House for the opportunity to read and review this book.

jb
https://seniorbooklounge.blogspot.com/

Great read! The author draws you in with detail that makes you want to read on. I love when books making you feel like you are part of the story.

With old age firmly cloaked around her neck, Lilia is not bothered by her forward march towards death, instead she spends most of her time pouring over the journals of a man who was once her lover. When Lilia knew Roland they had a brief but lasting affair that altered the trajectory of Lilia’s life. However it’s not the few dalliances with him that she spends her time thinking about, but how Roland somehow had an influence on the daughter he never knew they shared from afar. As Lilia goes back and begins to annotate Roland’s journal with snippets about her own thoughts and life, she can’t seem to stop ruminating on the death of her daughter Lucy, and how Lucy’s life is what gave Roland any significance to Lilia. As she annotates the journal for her grandaughter Katherine, Lucy’s daughter, she reveals herself to be more than the tough woman she has shown her family.

“Must I Go” by Yiyun Li is an unflinching examination of grief and the questions we ask ourselves about life and how we live it. Through Lilia’s practical eyes readers might find it surprising to see how the no-nonsense narrator has had a rich interior life of thinking about a former flame’s life while busily raising her children and grandchild and caring for her rotation of husbands. While Lilia presents herself as an unsentimental figure, the time she takes to annotate a dead man’s story reveals more about her grief over Lucy than her words could ever convey. Li’s novel jumps from Lilia’s life in the retirement home to her past and back to Roland’s journals with an effortless ease that lulls readers into the translucent bond that tethers Lilia to Roland after decades of silence.

Must I Go is a rare book. 

With a strong narrative voice Lilia, the main character, drives us through an exploration of love, grief, marriage, loneliness.

I enjoyed very much the first part of the book, told from the perspective of Lilia. The second part is mostly excerpts from Roland's diary and the had so many details that I became overwhelmed and lost interest. (Maybe because I didn't like his character from the very beginning?  😅)

The main highlight of this book was it's prose. Even though I didn't like the story a lot, I appreciate that the author created such a real, flawed, complex character.  

SYNOPSIS: Lilia Liska has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair.

Increasingly obsessed with Roland's intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events, revealing the surprising, long-held secrets of her past.

Lilia Liska is quite the woman. She’s been widowed three times, and had a fling or two, but now the 81-year old is living in a nursing home where she’s pondering, not her live with husbands but instead a man with whom she had an occasional affair and left a published memoir in which she is referred to as “L”. Roland has no idea he’s the father of Lilia’s first daughter, Lucy, who ended her life in suicide. Moving between the illicit romance and the sadness of losing a daughter, there is no resolution, nor does Lilia ever think badly of what she had done.

Yiyun Li is one of those novelists whose books I like not love while reading, and within a few days of reading them I can’t recall a single thing about them. I felt this way about 'Kinder than Solitude', I felt this about 'Where Reasons End'. At least with this one, there’s a thoroughly uncompromising heroine, who I might remember. Might being the key word. It’s also a more experimental novel than the other two where 2/3s of the book is actually a memoir/diary of Lilia’s dead one time lover, whom she met for a total of 4 times, and with whom she conceived a baby from the second meeting. The daughter, now dead, never knew about her biological father, Lilia having married another man soon after conception, but Lilia decides to annotate the man’s vanity project with some peppered comments of her own for her granddaughter and her daughter to consume.

This is the gist. The sum total of Lilia’s life and that of her daughter’s is in the middle of some man’s diaries, and an argument can be made that Lilia is a known quantity to her granddaughter while this man comes from out of the left field, and so it is important for his life to be included to a greater extent. However, as much as I can understand Roland Bouley might well have been compelling to a sixteen year old Lilia, the man comes across as a self absorbed and whiny, whose one claim to fame was to have carried on a decades long affair with an older, minor poetess. He has no personality to speak of, and however much Lilia wants it to be so, it doesn’t appear on paper. To be fair, in her annotations Lilia seems aggressive enough. But really, four encounters aren’t a grand romance, and this whole searching for his manuscript and presuming to know everything about his wife (he had one), and his lovers and his life smacks of a delusion to a grand romance. However much you deny it. I just wish it was wasted on a better class of man than Roland Bouley.

All the time I was reading this book, and it took a me a long while to finish it, I felt pity for Lilia. Lilia, maybe if you had concentrated less on Roland and more on the child you made with him, or her child who seems to shy away from conflict of all sorts, or any of your other children you seem to hate... but then I don’t know what. Lilia is unchangeable, she seems to have sprung up as she is when she is prepared to die. Hard, not unfeeling, but uncompromising enough to make her story oddly flat. 


Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Yiyun Li knows how to breathe life into a character—to convince readers that a fictional being is a flesh and blood person they know.  Must I Go’s Lilia Liska is such a woman.

Perhaps my experience dealing with an opinionated elderly mother in an assisted-living facility helped me, but I almost instantly felt I knew Lilia, who moved to assisted living despite her adult children’s feeling that she should remain in her own home until the end.  Lilia wanted to be alone, but she wanted to be alone around others. Although she selected a home that advertised its high percentage of residents with advanced degrees, Lilia, with her inferior education, could outshine anyone with her sharp mind and vivid memories.

Small events or comments could set Lilia’s mind into overdrive, causing her to recall events from a past filled with three deceased husbands, five children, seventeen grandchildren, more than her share of tragedies, and a brief affair as a teenager with a much older man, Roland Bouley, whose published diary reduced Lilia to the letter L.  Occasionally quoting from and commenting on the diary, Lilia eventually begins annotating it with her own version of events.  As she well knows, stories are never simple; they have multiple sides. We all see life through different eyes, and Lilia's perceptions outshine Roland's.

Yiyun Li’s Must I Go is not a fast or an easy read.  The sentence structure is frequently complex to reflect Lilia’s thinking.  Readers willing to take the time to immerse themselves in Lilia’s mind and follow her thinking will get to know one of the deeper more unusual characters in contemporary literary fiction. If required to compare Lilia Liska to any other literary character I know, it would have to choose Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, yet Lilia is not Olive; she is a convincingly flesh and blood original.

My thanks to NetGalley, Random House, and Yiyun Li for the opportunity get to know Lilia Liska.  I will definitely read more books by Yiyun Li.

This is a challenging and ultimately rewarding read that turns in and out on itself more than once.  Written as commentary by Lilia on the autobiography of Ronald, her deceased lover (and father of her daughter, it gives you two stories- and two perspectives on the same events.  Both Lilia and Roland live big lives after they meed when she is 16.  She marries  three times; he travels the world.  The largest part of this focuses on Lilia and her life, and on Lucy who commits suicide.  I found this more interesting than Roland but that, to be fair, is because we are getting Lilia's point of view.  Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.  Li's writing always attracts positive reviews- she's got a way with words and  brings a different, often detached perspective to deeply emotional issues.  This one's for fans of Li and those who enjoy literary fiction.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the eARC of this touching novel. 

Lilia Liska is 81 and in an assisted living facility. We learn that she has three dead husbands, and a meaningful though short affair with Roland Bouley, which resulted in a daughter who eventually killed herself. 

The bulk of the novel is taken up with Roland's diaries (focused on his lifelong affair with Sidelle, a poet), and Lilia's commentary thereon, which is addressed to her granddaughter and great-granddaughter. While I was moved by the end of the book, Roland stays a flat character - he remains defined by his relationships to the women in his life even in death - his diaries, and Lilia's motivation for commentary on them, are a flimsy hook to hang 3/4 of the novel on. 

Lilia is quite a character, and it's too bad that we don't get more of her story told in a different way. A hardened third-generation pioneer, further hardened by the suicide of her daughter, she gives sardonic observations of her retirement home neighbors, and all others in her life. Unfortunately, her commentary on Roland's diaries don't pick up much more dimension than the diaries themselves until near the very end, by which time, the insight and emotion don't feel honestly earned.

Lilia has lived a full life, outliving three husbands and welcoming seventeen grandchildren to the world. But in the recently published diaries of an old lover, she’s merely a footnote. From her nursing home, she annotates the diary to put herself back in the story, revealing a lifetime of secrets along the way.

I loooove the way this book experiments with form, memory, and perspective. The contrast of Roland and Lilia in the form of his annotated diaries is brilliant. I do kind of wish the book didn't have the first part and simply jumped into the diaries, letting us figure out their relationship along the way. But overall, a really unique and introspective look at legacy.

Yiyun Li's <i>Must I Go</i> was very well written and had an super intriguing concept: an 81-year-old woman reflects on her life by critiquing the obscure published diaries of a former lover and the semi-secret father of her first born daughter. I enjoyed Lilia, the main character, throughout the novel. Her wry outlook on life reminded me of <i>A Man Called Ove</i> but with more tact; LIlia is obviously a woman and a mother so knows a lot more than Ove does anyhow ;). Despite the interesting concept and engaging voice, I found the book lagged throughout and despite some beautiful moments, was mostly boring. 

After an interaction with her granddaughter and great-granddaguhter, Lilia decides to start annotating her former lover's, Roland's, diaries. This was mostly to give context to Katherine, who's mother Lucy (Lilia's first born) died by suicide at 27. Roland was Lucy's father and Katherine's grandfather, a fact that only Lilia's husband Gilbert knew. Through the annotations and diary entries, we learn that Roland, an outsider in his own once-wealthy family, travelled the world and had numerous affairs. He focuses a lot on Sidelle Ogden, an older married woman who was his lifelong fascination and love of his life. Roland's diary entries are numerous and often boring. He was a self-centered man who often thought he would become the next big literary success. Lilia's interjections were a lot more interesting than anything Roland had to say but as the diary continued, also became repetitive. 

Li definitely has a unique voice and if you are the type to enjoy good writing with a super strong and unapologetic lead, Lilia Liska and <i>Must I Go</i> is for you. Despite the lag and occasional boredom, I did want to continue on and find out how everything would wrap up.

Thank you NetGalley.com and Random House Publishing Group for the ARC.

Lilia knew about children:
     “They start out warm and pure like a bucket of fresh milk, but sooner or later they turned sour”. 

Lilia was 81 years old age.....the oldest of six children, five of whom she raised herself. 
She had seventeen grandchildren. 

Lilia also outlived 3 husbands:
     “Some women specialized in marrying the wrong people. Lilia had not been one of them.  But all of these husbands were gone, the memory of their large hearts and small vices no more than the vanilla pudding at dinner: low-calorie, no sugar, with barely enough flavor”. 

Lilia had an affair with an older man, Roland Bouley, starting when she was only 16 years old.  
       “Lilia remembered sitting in a hotel room in San Francisco with Roland. 
“The fog from the Pacific was coming in. The Golden Gate Bridge, framed by the west- facing window, half suspended in the mist, and it would soon become invisible when the night fell. 
Roland was smoking — said it was to be his last cigarette. 
Lilia was incredulous that they were alone. It was a perfect movie set for a perfect love affair. He was worldly and handsome, she was young and seductive”.

I really love Yiyun Li’s books.  
I enjoyed: “Kinder Than Solitude” and “Where Reason’s End” 
She has other books I want to read too.

“Must I Go” takes us inside a diary - written by Roland.  ( loved the unique crafting). Lilia shared what Roland left out with her commentaries. We get to see how both Lilia and Roland viewed their life and time together. Roland - former lover - was also the (unaware), biological father of Lilia’s doomed daughter.
The diary opens other flood gates: more memories and secrets.

There is some intricate reflection....”looking back” at Lilia’s life.
Lilia’s daughter, Lucy committed suicide.  The grief is obvious....but 
Lilia has a tough shell ....not easy to crack.  Rambunctious, stubborn, cynical, strong, and mostly unemotional....Lilia is a fascinating character.  
      “People say all sorts of things about those who have committed suicide. Lucy had been ill. She understood that no doctor could help her so she took care of the matter herself. Lucy knew that she could trust Lilia, and the rest of the family to take good care of Katherine—who was only six years old when her mother died”.  

More characters to meet: Sidelle Ogden, Hetty, Peter and Anne Wilson, etc. 

“A woman’s value, in Lilia’s opinion, “was not measured by the quality of the men in her life, but by the quality of the women in the lives of those men”. 

     “The world was full of people like the Wilson’s who understood nothing. They thought that they were humoring Roland by putting some pages of his diaries into print. They felt no qualms about forgetting Roland. Typical of him to trust his posterity to people who dedicated so little of their lives to remembering him”. 

Luminous- insightful - elegantly constructed- the characters are rueful, smart, and sometimes unbearably poignant. 

Another book that confirms the depth and breadth of Yiyun Li 
I’m ready to dive into another that she’s written! 
       

Thank you Netgalley, Random House Publishing, and Yiyun Li

Wowww...this book felt like a chunkster although physically it isn't. Took quite some effort to finish it. I truly enjoyed Where Reasons End, but this, unfortunately, not so much.

Lilia is quite a character. Hard, stubborn, strong, unemotional, cold, yet it felt like she created this barrier to shield herself from sadness and disappointment. That said, she loved Gilbert unconditionally and gave him a safe home and 5 healthy children. She also showed some tough love towards Katherine. I could feel that she was one who could love deeply but chose not to show it.

I can tell that Lucy was a great loss to Lilia although she didn't show it. She felt guilty for her death. I felt that she looked into Roland's diary not exactly to get to know him and his love affairs and how he fared in life withou her, but rather to find fault and blame for Lucy's death, or find a trace of Lucy in him.

It's so hard to connect to any of the chatacters, especially Lilia, despite her wise observations on love, life and loss. I had a lot of her thoughts and wisdom, highlighted. Those kept me going.

Besides Lilia, I did love reading about Sidelle and Hetty too and how they were so different yet alike in so many ways. One thing was for sure - they made their own rules, and made men (Roland) play by their rules in their own way. 

And adding her own notes to Roland's memoir was quite an interesting concept.

Overall, a little disappointed as I had high expectations after reading 'Where Reasons End'. This book is probably just not for me. Another reader might appreciate it.