Ingratitude by
Ying Chen,
translated from the French by Carol Volk

Nominated by:

All her life, Yan-Zi has been dominated by her mother, who scolds her, corrects her behavior and manners, urges her to adopt bourgeois mores, and ceaselessly reminds her that her very life is a debt she owes to others, especially her mother. So Yan-Zi decides to commit suicide in order to shake off the yoke of her mother's love. In this novel she tells the story of her last days with a cool, cruel detachment that recalls Camus's The Stranger. Ying Chen has unearthed some of the violence buried within our family lives. In strong, direct, transparent prose, Ingratitude gives voice to universal truths about the relationships between children and their parents. Ying Chen was born in Shanghai in 1961. After emigrating to Montreal in 1989, she began her career as a writer in the French language. Ingratitude, her third novel, was nominated for the Governor General's Award and the Femina Prize when it was originally published in French in 1995.

Here's what the members of the Reading Group based at our Raheny branch library think of Ingratitude:

At page one you are drawn into the angst-ridden, tortured world of Yan-Zi, a young woman who hates her life, hates her mother, resents the filial burdens imposed by the tradition of her culture and feels trapped. As she sees it her only real choice in life is to end it. The principal focus of her resentment is her mother who has given her life and who embodies the constraints and pressures, which circumscribe her freedom. For instance, she is expected to marry to ensure continuation of life and tradition. Approval of the marriage partner by the mother is a cultural must; one of the possible suitors does not accept this while another overdoes the wooing of the mother. For Yan-Zi life is a prison and she frantically seeks freedom through death. The novel graphically portrays the alienation and despair of the young protagonist. The style is urgent and intense and totally engages the reader. There is a dreamlike filmic quality about the book in which one gets the sense of watching in horror what cannot be stopped. This must be a serious contender for the IMPAC Award.
(Member of Raheny Reading Group)