Every afternoon I waited in the middle of a block, where I used to wait for Nikolai and his brother to come from two directions. On some rare days I was disciplined enough to face only one direction. Other days I turned around. Turning around was not a mistake, because no lesson could be learned. Turning around always brought a moment of haziness to my thought: There was no reason that the tree-lined street would not bring Nikolai back again, unhurried as a gray heron.
See, now you think like everyone else: How can anyone…
How can anyone—I said—what?
How can anyone believe that one day he was here and the next day he was gone?
Yet how can one, I thought. How can one know a fact without accepting it? How can one accept a person’s choice without questioning it? How can one question without reaching a dead end? How much reaching does one have to do before one finds another end beyond the dead end? And if there is another end beyond the dead end, it cannot be called dead, can it?
Where reasons end è un romanzo in cui l’autrice Yiyun Li immagina di conversare con il figlio sedicenne morto suicida. Nella realtà, il suicidio c’è stato davvero e il libro vuole essere per la scrittrice un modo di elaborare il lutto. Un libro sul significato profondo delle parole, sul lutto e sul fare i conti con una tragedia. Un libro non facile da leggere, ma utile forse a chi ha perso un proprio caro.
