Paradise Garden of First Love
9 hrs. 15 min.
Language
Russian
Author
Lin Yihan
Author
Lin Yihan
Narrator
Nadezhda Vinokurova
Narrator
Nadezhda Vinokurova
Description
“The Paradise Garden of First Love” by Lin Yihang is a confession-style novel about violence that has topped China’s most-read books rating for five years.
Fan Siyi is twelve years old. She looks like a porcelain doll, and her favorite subject at school is literature. On one fateful day, a fifty-year-old teacher and poet, Li Guohua, moves into the neighboring apartment. Fascinated by Fan Siyi’s reading, he offers free extra literature lessons for the girl. For a long time, only her best friend, Liu Yiting—who read Dostoevsky and Baudelaire with her and together adored Teacher Li—knows what’s really going on in those lessons, and hears how Fan Siyi screams into her pillow in the evenings, counting in a childish way the nasty things done to her. This goes on for several years, until Fan Siyi ends up in a psychiatric hospital, and Liu Yiting finds her diary and learns the story from the very beginning.
“The Paradise Garden of First Love” is a deep, complex, incredibly poetic novel about how a young personality is broken by trying to fit into violence from a significant adult—about the burden of forced silence and the monstrous evil that pretends to be love. The novel is based on real events from the life of the author, the Taiwanese writer Lin Yihang. Soon after the book was released, the writer took her own life.
Fan Siyi is twelve years old. She looks like a porcelain doll, and her favorite subject at school is literature. On one fateful day, a fifty-year-old teacher and poet, Li Guohua, moves into the neighboring apartment. Fascinated by Fan Siyi’s reading, he offers free extra literature lessons for the girl. For a long time, only her best friend, Liu Yiting—who read Dostoevsky and Baudelaire with her and together adored Teacher Li—knows what’s really going on in those lessons, and hears how Fan Siyi screams into her pillow in the evenings, counting in a childish way the nasty things done to her. This goes on for several years, until Fan Siyi ends up in a psychiatric hospital, and Liu Yiting finds her diary and learns the story from the very beginning.
“The Paradise Garden of First Love” is a deep, complex, incredibly poetic novel about how a young personality is broken by trying to fit into violence from a significant adult—about the burden of forced silence and the monstrous evil that pretends to be love. The novel is based on real events from the life of the author, the Taiwanese writer Lin Yihang. Soon after the book was released, the writer took her own life.
