Book Review : THE PAPER MENAGERIE by Ken Liu

It’s usually difficult to review a collection of short stories like Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. More so because there’s usually a lot of variability between each story – in tone, theme and even quality. Thankfully, each one in this book is of a comparable, high standard.

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“We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives.”

In Tamil, we have a saying. It amounts to this. To check if a pot of rice is well boiled, it’s enough to sample a grain.

So I’ve chosen to model the proverb – and focus on one representative tale from the anthology that’s Ken Liu’s “The Paper Menagerie“.

Mono No Aware.

“Nothing in the cry
Of cicadas suggests they
Are about to die.”

This is a lovely story. One of my favorites in the collection that makes up ‘The Paper Menagerie‘.

“Everything passes, Hiroto,” Dad said. “That feeling in your heart: it’s called mono no aware. It is a sense of the transience of all things in life.”

This is the kind of story that qualifies as ‘sci fi’, because it has a component in outer space. But it’s also the kind of story my grandma might tell me, to teach valuable lessons in empathy, sacrifice, social awareness, civic responsibility, love and passion.

As Hiroto’s father says:

“Mono No Aware, my son, is an empathy with the universe.”

The story begins with The Hammer, an asteroid hurtling right at Earth, forcing inhabitants to evacuate promptly.

In a surreal setting of humanity preparing to leave the planet it calls home, Liu narrates a gripping tale that had me pumping my fist in excitement, and crying my heart out in grief – in the space of just around 15 pages!

“It’s in the face of disasters that we show our strength as a people. Understand that we are not defined by our individual loneliness, but by the web of relationships in which we’re enmeshed.”

The multiple open loops set up along the way which are closed subtly towards the end, with a tiny frisson. The drama and emotion that’s searingly powerful, even if only narrated in a downplayed, sober style. The flicking between present and past to bring out elements of the story that pack a punch.

Everything combines into a delightful read… just as all the other stories in The Paper Menagerie.

So I’m breaking my rule of writing a review only after reading the entire book.

I hope you pick it up and enjoy reading it soon.

“Yet is is this awareness of the closeness of death, of all the beauty inherent in each moment, that allows us to endure. Mono no aware, my son, is an empathy with the universe.”


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