This book is the first person musings of Z (short for Zhuang), a young Chinese woman studying English in London for a year. Guo writes her novel like a Chinese speaker trying to learn English - with all the mistakes a new student would make. This writing style reminded me of Everything is Illuminated, and I worried I would get too irritated to finish much of it. It also made me wonder how these types of books get translated into other languages. Is it possible to convey "broken English" is another language? Anyway...shortly into her stay abroad, Z meets an older man and quickly moves in with him. This new man is a bi-sexual anarchist who shuns material wealth and embraces freedom. Z, on the other hand, assumes that they are in love and must therefore want to spend all their time together and with no one else. Their relationship is filled with misunderstandings stemming from language, culture, and age. Because everything is written from Z's perspective, I often found the narrative frustrating - she is naive in many ways and I often wanted to shake her and tell her to move on from her loser boyfriend. There are a couple really funny vignettes that highlight the difference in cultures - one with the boyfriend expecting Z to pay her half of the dinner bill and Z's response being something along the lines of, "I thought we were in love. When in love man pay. Otherwise, why have man around?" As the book progresses and Z's English improves, the writing becomes much more easy to follow. Z also begins to find her own self, which gave me some hope for her future. I was thinking that this would be a great book for a book club - there are so many scenes that I found myself wanting to talk to someone about - and so many ideas about independence, family, the search for happiness, relationships, and even food (Z misses her food from home, her boyfriend is a vegetarian which she can't understand). Something about this book felt incomplete to me, but for the first time in awhile, I found myself wishing I had a highlighter so I could keep track of certain images and conversations - of course since I borrowed the book from the library, they probably wouldn't have been to happy about it. But, all that to say that this is a strange little book filled with wonderful gems.
Friday, June 6, 2008
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers - Xiaolu Guo
This book is the first person musings of Z (short for Zhuang), a young Chinese woman studying English in London for a year. Guo writes her novel like a Chinese speaker trying to learn English - with all the mistakes a new student would make. This writing style reminded me of Everything is Illuminated, and I worried I would get too irritated to finish much of it. It also made me wonder how these types of books get translated into other languages. Is it possible to convey "broken English" is another language? Anyway...shortly into her stay abroad, Z meets an older man and quickly moves in with him. This new man is a bi-sexual anarchist who shuns material wealth and embraces freedom. Z, on the other hand, assumes that they are in love and must therefore want to spend all their time together and with no one else. Their relationship is filled with misunderstandings stemming from language, culture, and age. Because everything is written from Z's perspective, I often found the narrative frustrating - she is naive in many ways and I often wanted to shake her and tell her to move on from her loser boyfriend. There are a couple really funny vignettes that highlight the difference in cultures - one with the boyfriend expecting Z to pay her half of the dinner bill and Z's response being something along the lines of, "I thought we were in love. When in love man pay. Otherwise, why have man around?" As the book progresses and Z's English improves, the writing becomes much more easy to follow. Z also begins to find her own self, which gave me some hope for her future. I was thinking that this would be a great book for a book club - there are so many scenes that I found myself wanting to talk to someone about - and so many ideas about independence, family, the search for happiness, relationships, and even food (Z misses her food from home, her boyfriend is a vegetarian which she can't understand). Something about this book felt incomplete to me, but for the first time in awhile, I found myself wishing I had a highlighter so I could keep track of certain images and conversations - of course since I borrowed the book from the library, they probably wouldn't have been to happy about it. But, all that to say that this is a strange little book filled with wonderful gems.
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1 comment:
sorry, I skipped the middle part of this post..read the first few lines and the end...I'm worried that it will give me a spoiler..
I'm so going to read this book!
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