Sunbirth
Enthralling and surreal, An Yu’s dystopian novel Sunbirth reconsiders approaches to the end of the world.
Though the citizens of Five Poems Lake have had twelve years to adjust to the incremental loss of the sun, they still feel unprepared for its final disappearance. As society breaks down, an unlucky number turn into Beacons, their heads consumed by orbs that light and warm the darkened streets. Dong Ji and her sister, the novel’s narrator, are spared from this fate: Before their father died, he warned Dong Ji not to attempt to become a sun unto herself.
The novel shifts between a select period of befores and afters with mournful clarity, though it is tender and sparing with its details from the time when the sun’s presence was taken for granted. The narrator, who runs her family’s pharmacy until daily social functions break down, remembers the cool of lake water on her skin on hot days back then, though the lake has been frozen for years. She remembers the pride of being an honest policeman’s daughter, too, though this inheritance is challenged by the photograph that she and Dong Ji find among their father’s ashes—of a Beacon, years before Beacons were known to exist.
The novel’s shift from covering the daily habits of troubled subsistence living toward chaos is abrupt, imparting the inherent fears of apocalyptic disarray. Though the Beacons come to represent humanity-consuming despair, their extinguishable light not reaching the corners that it needs to, stronger flares are lit: In the form of love between sisters, the protection offered by a childhood friend, and the comfort of maintaining a family altar, making bird’s nest soup, or consoling a lonely neighbor.
Sunbirth is an illuminating novel about what people choose to preserve at the end of the world.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
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