THE FIVE NOTEBOOKS OF ZHAO LI

Solonche’s novel in verse offers a glimpse into the most personal thoughts of a creative thinker.

Zhao Li is a 75-year-old poet/philosopher who fills the pages of five notebooks with musings in verse form. He seems unable to commit fully to his ideas, so the content on the page varies from quasi-deep insights (such as, “Today I learned that some things cannot be learned, / including learning”) to clever semicontradictions (such as, “inscribed on his head stone: / He cast a cold eye but with a twinkle in it”). In his poetry, phrased as a dialogue between him and a companion, he relates what he’s learned each day in lyrical ways (“Today I learned the language of the moon. / It was easy. All the words are sighs”). The book is broken into five “books”; however, each is cohesive and contains very similar content. In the first book, Zhao Li creates poetry as he answers what he’s learned in a day; in the last, he creates poetry by speaking to the animals and trees around him. The main difference is the lengths of the poems, which start off very short (two or three lines) in the first book and end with long paragraphs in the fifth. The overall fast pace makes for an easy read, and the content is aloof yet thoughtful. Although the loose structure makes the work feel somewhat randomly strewn together at times, most of the book flows quite well. Even the odd parts of the story that some readers may think feel out of place, as when Zhao Li tells of kissing a widow named Ka Lin as he walks home, contain life lessons that are clearly conveyed.

A somewhat scattered but often intriguing set of philosophical poems.