by Leyee Dai

TO GOD presents a collection of stories that are better understood as worship, sung by the unnamed narrator with the staccato of everyday life. With precise movements, Esther Yi ambiguates, invokes, and spurns the specificity of one’s identity, confronting the reader with the instantaneous practice of devotion: iterated upon iterations, desire collapses into grief in the narrator’s search for total, obliterative love. “An unemployed puppet,” as Yi calls herself, presents the writings of one, or perhaps multiple, narrator(s), whose unknown identity bears narrative significance. A work of various fictions, TO GOD challenges the critic on the singularity of and the criteria for the auto-fiction genre. Before writing this review, I merely thought of TO GOD as Yi’s second book instead of a part of an emerging corpus. Apparent from an isolated read, such autofictive, genre-resisting resonances are further strengthened by Yi’s 2023 debut Y/N (Your/Name), in which Yi expressly engages questions of autofiction and the lived reality of fiction in the author’s mind. First coined by Serge Doubrovsky in Fils (1977), autofiction emerged in the past half-century as a centrally compelling mode for authors to understand the self, interrogate social life, and destabilize the perennial self-other relation. Pioneered by genre-bending works like Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights (1979), autofiction is somewhat of an emblem for the literary debates on the question: How do we define a text––better yet, how do we define similitude across texts and the boundaries of a genre? 

In the array of memories narrated, loss is ever-present: the complaints about one’s love life (or lack thereof); the ghost-phantasmic-sister, a conjured receptacle of blame and guilt-investment; and, the knowledge of being born into loneliness, which is howYi opens her biography and ends this collection of fiction. With the stories following the typical life of a writer in a city, the settings are often familiar to a contemporary reader. The narrator guides readers through ordinary, occasionally awkward, almost familiar experiences with stark honesty—little (only God) is out-of-reach to the narrator who, compulsively and unsparingly, cuts apart petty politeness, little lies, and unspoken songs-and-dances. 

What does it mean to live in a post-traumatic, apocalyptic world? What does it mean to live in a world where love is narcissism, and nothing more? In a cafeteria, a bunker, a hospital corridor, a construction site, everything is reduced to devastation. Violence disguises itself as company, and pleasure and loss go hand in hand. Characters often express aimless desire with a touch of nihilism, or mask such lack with a performance of social know-hows, false happinesses, and satisfaction with their choice of sexual partners. Love is always delayed––or so the narrator believes. In the title, the opening fiction of Anton’s fantasy, the haunting void, and the ending, true desire lies beyond the realm of humanly delights, relegated to the phantasmagoric territory. Evidencing the narrator’s self-awareness as an author, she every so often questions the authority of the self in its engagements with the world: sometimes, she notes the performativity of gender and lust by likening flirting to the mating dance of birds; other times, she references her cynicism with a sardonic, rather self-deprecating tone. Though the stories contain an element of absurd, sporadic events, the author still retains control over the text, acting much like a demiurge that might want to seem godless. Everything is resolutely intentional in its representation. Just as each instance of trauma is designed (No Right Hand), each encounter is poignant, heavily rich while being neither obtuse nor opaque: “I used to gorge on men because I couldn’t have God. Now I gorge on God because I still can’t have him,” a nun confesses in a cafeteria lounge. Though numerous, the whereabouts of each encounter fall away by the undercurrent of confession that breathes in the text: “His body was a wall keeping me away from his soul.” Attempting to represent perhaps the most abstract of desires, the text treads a balancing act between the familiar automatism of narration and uncannily estranged abstractions. In the prose and in the events, Yi’s fiction frequently gestures at superfluous abstractions it cannot contain, evidencing the double-edged sword of abstract meaning and of being elusive. Devotional literature for the contemporary reader, TO GOD is, in essence, something akin to a body, a soul, a lover, a text, and a liturgy.