Good book, very tender and up-beat. ( )

Written in the form of dictionary entries musing on unfamiliar English words by Zhuang (call her Z), a young Chinese woman who has come to London to study English for a year, this is tells of immigrant alienation, misunderstandings, and the small and large cultural differences that govern relationships between people from very different countries. Z's sadness and longing for human connection echo throughout her early entries as she tries to understand this very different place in which she finds herself living. She can't even communicate with the Cantonese family living on the other floor of the cheap, marginalized house where she finds a flat.

Then a chance conversation with the man seated next to her at a movie theater leads her to move in with the much older man, eventually falling in love with him. Her English improves and her dictionary entry musings become less pidgeon English and more properly colloquial but the disconnect between cultures remains and perhaps even widens as she comes directly up against the gulf that separates a more open and communal China and the privacy-obsessed, individually focused England. She stops relying on her little Concise Chinese-English Dictionary when she discovers that it lacks so much of what she wants to look up. But no dictionary can possibly detail and explain adequately all the freight of so much of what she learns.

Her English lover remains enigmatic to the reader, as he seems to to Z as well although we Western readers understand him at least slightly better than Z, seeing clearly how her year must end long before she does. His absence as a meaningful character makes Z's lonliness and sense of alienation even greater and her melancholic sorrow is oftentimes palpable during the novel. There are comedic instances to offset the pervading air of sadness though, such as when Z is completely baffled by the inappropriateness of buying and displaying pornographic magazines at her lover's home and when she disinterestedly continues feeding coins into the peep show slot in order to watch more and more of a graphic sex show.

Naive or just culturally unaware, Z doesn't come across as a victim, except, perhaps, during the beginning of her European tour, but she is an excellent tour guide to life as an outsider, one who doesn't speak the language well, doesn't understand the cultural context of things, and has no community to fold into for safety, companionship, and happiness. Her excursions outside the English language institute point out not only attitudes that we take for granted but also shine a non-judgmental but accurate light on those parts of our culture that we allow to flourish only in the seedy alleys and back streets.

I really enjoyed the structure of this novel, finding it to be more than a gimmick. And Guo's mastery in presenting the evolution of Z's language and vocabulary was nothing short of impressive. Z was the only character to receive a thorough handling but that helped to highlight her solitariness, even when living with her aimless lover. There was a feeling of emotional distance in this that is generally less marked in books written by Westerners but which seems in keeping with other Chinese authors I've read (Ha Jin comes to mind as a comparison in tone), even in those who spend time in the West as Guo herself does. I found this a thoughtful book, slow moving and serious, so it may not be for everyone. But as a look at cultural misunderstandings and relationship drift, I thought this was a good read. ( )

It is not, in my opinion, up to the standard of her other works but has merit. ( )

Interesting perspective on European culture and love. ( )

This novel was shortlisted for the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction. Zhuang Xiao Qiao is a 23 year old woman from a small Chinese village, who is ordered by her hardworking parents to study English for a year in London, so that she can use these skills to further the family's business. She is completely on her own, and has to negotiate the bustling city using her concise Chinese-English dictionary, as she does not speak Mandarin fluently. Her narrative is in her broken English, and is both humorous and painful:

I worry I getting lost and nobody in China can find me anymore. How I finding important places including Buckingham Palace, or Big Stupid Clock? I looking everywhere but not seeing big posters of David Beckham, Spicy Girls or President Margaret Thatcher. In China we hanging them everywhere. English person not respect their heroes or what?

She finds a cheap flat in north London, and attends an English language school. The writing in her narrative progressively improves as she becomes more fluent in English. However, she continues to be lonely, as she cannot even communicate with the Cantonese family that lives in her building.

She meets an Englishman who sits next to her at a movie theater, and within a week she moves in with him. He is older, and quite different from her, yet she discovers herself through her love of him and her exposure to Western culture mainly by him.

The author deftly uses Zhuang's words to express her conflicted feelings about the freedoms she experiences in London, with its associated loneliness, in contrast to the sense of family and community but associated lack of freedom and individuality in her Chinese village:

But in the evening, you cook a fish for me. Not cod, not seabass, not any typical English fish. It is
a silver carp. It is like my hometown's fish. It smells of the river nearby our house. I remember I
studied a word before, and I remember how to pronounce this word. No-stal-gia. Eating carp causes my nostalgia.

The wording of the last sentence made me think of "nausea" in addition to "nostalgia", and I had a sense of her psychological nausea, as the relationship begins to fray.

At the end of the year, she is faced with a dilemma: should she stay in London with this man who loves her but cannot guarantee that he will be there for her in the future, or should she return to the mundane security of her home village?

I thought that I would enjoy this novel, but I liked it even more than I had expected. Through Zhuang's narrative we are provided with a somewhat skewed view of her lover's thoughts and desires, which makes it somewhat difficult to sympathize with him. However, this is a minor criticism, and I definitely recommend this novel. ( )

Zhuang doesn't want to go abroad to study English, but her newly wealthy parents are determined to send her. Her first months in London are achingly lonely, but her life changes when she meets a stranger in a movie theater. Thanks to a linguistic misunderstanding, she's soon living in his small East London flat.

This set-up sounds like a lot of cliched chick lit and a lot of cliched East-meets-West stories, but luckily, the novel transcends both genres. Unlike a lot of Chinese heroines, Zhuang isn't instantly enlightened or liberated by Western culture; in fact, she is baffled by Westerners' seemingly endless appetite for individuality and privacy. Reading her meditations on the English language, and how it reveals the differences between English and Chinese culture, is one of the most fascinating parts of the book. We see how linguistic barriers complicate romantic relationships, like when she fails to comprehend that her boyfriend's previous "love of men" refers to a series of homosexual relationships.

As Zhuang's English improves, her first-person narration matures from stilted, childish prose to eloquent exploration of sex, freedoms and relationships. She emerges as a unique, quirky character who quietly imbibes a few English values while holding onto her Chinese culture. I found this book eloquent and insightful, and would recommend it particularly to people curious about Chinese culture. ( )

A breathe of fresh air from the usual oriental themed books. The story is humorous, the main character is fun-loving. It is not packed with heavy chinese traditions / beliefs / rituals but instead the author dotted the book with examples the "chinese" mindset, keeping it light and funny.

Refreshingly different, a great book I picked up for a read on a long flight. Couldn't put it down once I started reading it. Highly, highly recommended. It follows a young woman's journey into a strange land (England) where she goes to learn English and all the things that happen to her. What makes it a really interesting read is she is telling the story in English which improves as we progress through the book and the main character improves her grasp of the language. ( )

A young woman from China comes to England for a year to learn the language, and falls in love. The whole book is in the first person and so in slightly broken English, more so at the beginning, but it's always understandable and I think it works well. The sense of homesickness came across really well, and the parts where you could clearly see that the things that were happening weren't as she interpreted them were well done, in my opinion. ( )

Zhang, a young woman from mainland China, is living in London for a year to improve her English. Whilst there, she meets a stranger, and they become lovers. It's a simple idea, and is mirrored and reinforced in the way the content follows the form of the novel: Zhang's English, as seen in the first-person narrative, goes from stilted and monosyllabic to nearly perfect, descriptive and distinctive, through the course of the year.

But that is undoubtedly the best feature of the novel. It's clear from the outset what its aims are: to explore the concept of distance, both physical and cultural, and the loneliness that accompanies it. And this, it accomplishes; Zhang's loneliness is palpable, and the evocation of grey London weather, her quiet misery, the all-pervasive chill, these are done masterfully. It makes you want to pause and hug your human.

But in the end, that's all there is to it: a slight slice of theme, without a centre to hold it together. The two characters, Zhang and her unnamed lover, are well-drawn but very rarely likeable. Her lover in particular is cold, distant, thoughtlessly racist: well-characterised, but it's difficult to see why Zhang loves him. And in her turn, she is the ever-present narrator, but her motives are difficult to understand and her choices hard to empathise with. Occasionally, the turns of what there is of the plot are too pat, too convenient (it is never clear, for example, why her drifter boyfriend consents to her living with him in the first place).

The novel has insight. It says things about British society that ring true, it conveys wonderfully how hard communication is across language and cultural barriers. But it doesn't leave you happy, or with a particular sense of profundity - just echoes of its chill. ( )

Z (no one can pronounce Zhuang, just call her Z) is sent to London to study English. There she meets a man, older and a drifter, and falls in love with him.

She talks to him as she learns English. Each chapter is short vignette, starting with a word and definition. As the novel, and time, wear on, Z's English improves, but never reaches fluency.

It's a doomed affair, you can tell from the beginning, the way he has a conception of China and expects her to be a good communist and Buddhist because she is Chinese and those are aspects that fit in with his aging-hippie drifter persona, never realizing that China has changed drastically. You can tell by the way she doesn't understand privacy.

More than a chronicle of a doomed love affair, it is a story of subtle and wry cultural misunderstanding. It is a coming-of-age story, both emotionally and sexually.

It is beautifully written, at times switching between terse and broken, to evocative and sensual, to moments of clear truth.

One of my favorite books of the year.

See all my reviews at http://www.tushuguan.blogspot.com ( )

Wonderful book, both laugh-out-loud funny and cry-out-loud sad. At first I thought the broken English would make it really hard to read, but in fact made it easier and quicker. Lovely.

The first thing to note about this book is that it is not a dictionary! I mention it, because reading reviews on Amazon, I noticed that some people thought that it was, which was why they bought it.

The book is narrated by ‘Z’, a 24 year old Chinese girl, who is sent to England by her parents, to learn the English language. Inevitably, she learns far more than just the language, and discovers much about the differences in the English and Chinese cultures, as well as learning lots about herself. It is written almost in a dictionary format, with headings for different chapters being new words or phrases she has learnt, which generally have a tenuous link to the events of that chapter.

The book is written in deliberately bad English (which does improve, as Z spends more time in England, and learns the language). The first half of the book is rather charming, and we do see things which we are used to and take for granted, through Z’s eyes.

She falls in love with an English man, and the culture clash causes a few difficulties in their relationship.

Unfortunately, about halfway through the book, it started to lose it’s appeal. Both Z and her boyfriend are irritating and selfish characters. I found myself wanting to shake Z, and tell her to get a grip!!

I think it is a shame that Z seemed only able to define herself by the way men felt about her. Indeed, she had no interest in female friendships or bonding (there are barely any other female characters in the book, and those that are, are peripheral characters). Undoubtedly, Z’s language and understanding of a foreign culture advanced, but I’m not sure that she advanced emotionally very much at all, which is a shame.

An interesting idea, with some flashes of brilliance, but overall, I would say that this book was a wasted opportunity. ( )

This is the story of Zhuang, a 23-year-old woman who arrives in London to spend a year learning English. She is never far from her "concise Chinese-English dictionary," looking up words and keeping a diary of her new vocabulary. Early in her stay she meets an older man and quickly moves in with him. Through their intense relationship she learns the language, and much more about "the West," about her sexuality, and about herself.

The book is written in the first person, organized by month. Zhuang's language improved over time, and so did her ability to tell her story. Her feelings of confusion and isolation were most well developed. If there was one aspect i didn't like, it was that Zhuang's world was entirely centered on men. There were very few other women in this story, and all were ancillary characters. I would have liked this book more had Zhuang also grown as an independent woman. ( )

Although the writing style was intriguing I didn't feel any connection to the main charachters and didn't understand some of their behaviour. Interesting insights into hoe English culture may be viewed by an outsider. A quick read. ( )

In the vein of the new interest in Chinese culture, Guo shows the woman at the center of this story as she progresses from an immigrant to a fully-functioning citizen of British society. The beauty of her transformation is found in her prose. It is interesting to delve into the mind of the narrator, who seems to employ a certain amount of distance, even when speaking from the first person. Perhaps it indicates some distance between the western mindset and the eastern mindset. Either way, the story she has woven is beautiful and heart-breaking. The difficulty the narrator has in understanding the western world with her eastern world is endearing and inviting. It shows us a way to see the world from another's eyes, another who has quite a different experience from our own.

"A concise Chinese-English dictionary for Lovers," by Xiaolu Guo is a brilliant novel, said Princess Haiku. Guo serves up a tantalizing dish of dreams and pickled seaweed in her portrait of a young Chinese student in London, pursuing love, language and fine cuisine. 

Both love and language are equally incomprehensible in Guo's postmodern reality that strips sexuality down to essentials and sentiment to satire. With her little Chinese-English dictionary in tow at all times, Guo's character pursues the same enigmatic and elusive language of love, that leaves all of us bewildered. 



Guo's earthy and intellectual prose is reminiscent of the late Marguerite Duras with a splash of Colette. The novel's blend of satire and poetic meditation has a startling ability to ask existential questions without artifice. 

Within a few days of arriving in London, the student casually appropriates a worldly, older bisexual lover. The narrative difficulties of this avant-garde relationship are obvious and the erotic fruit discovered, is as random as a ripe pear falling from a tree near the Metro. The young woman enters the discourse of sensuality and sexuality as candidly, literally and without preconception as she enters language.

As the the relationship falters, the student is sent away, on a five week train trip to other European cities for the purpose of experiencing aloneness.

This novel is not only about a Chinese student coping with twin difficulties of language and cultural interpretation, but about disconnects that we all experience between feeling, thought, language and love. It has been a while since I have discovered such a gifted young writer.
 ( )

One of the greatest strengths of this novel is that the title is a perfect description. One really develops a feel for how love is understood and expressed across cultures and languages. I would even go so far as to say that this is a book about talking across sexualities or even between them. On the whole, the book was slow at points and perhaps a little too easy to read. Neither of the two main characters seems to get the deep treatment they deserve, and they are both worse off for it. ( )

At first I was chortling over the Chinglish and astute observations of the FOB (fresh off the boat) girl from China, e.g., demon-strators but the book is not about immigrant confusion. It's about love: from loneliness to resentful love, empty love, desperate love, estranged love, reckless love,.... I read the book in one night and haven't stopped thinking about it. ( )

Loved it! Read in one afternoon. Love the theme of the book, and how her english gets better and her understanding of her relationship changes. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

So first, a confession from my personal life that is relevant to today's essay; that like many others, I too once fell in love with someone while on a foreign trip, in many ways precisely because it was a foreign country and she was a foreigner within that country. And like many others, it wasn't just simple lust that made me fall in love with this person so intensely in such a short period, nor just a shared set of opinions and tastes; it was that I was feeling so scared and confused and alone in that foreign country, not able to even begin expressing myself adequately there about the emotions I was having, with this good-looking woman suddenly there and seemingly understanding everything I was going through without me ever having to say anything. In the middle of a very stressful international trip, she became a life preserver that I threw myself at, a small moment of calm in an unending storm that had been happening for nearly a month at the point I met her. And this of course is why the woman was ultimately not interested in a romance with me, because she understood where these emotions of mine were coming from, that for me it was all about the experience and little to do with her in particular; and she knew this of course because she had done some international traveling herself in the past, and had had the exact same experience that I was going through, but in her case did end up getting romantically involved with the person in question, which of course ended in disaster a few months later, such a surety that you didn't even really need me to mention it.

Like I said, it's a well-known story from the world of international travel, a situation that is tackled once again in the extremely delightful new novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, the first English-language book by Chinese-British author Xiaolu Guo, one that was short-listed for this year's Orange Prize and has gone on to become a surprise commercial hit. Based on Guo's own experiences when first moving to London at the turn of the millennium, the novel uses a personal-journal format to track the first year of a new immigrant, using only the words that immigrant knows at any given moment; it's a literary trick that could've been awfully gimmicky if flubbed, but here Guo uses it to profoundly comment on Western culture from the eyes of an Easterner, to use the difficulty of a new language to metaphorically examine the entire society that uses the language. It is a book simultaneously laugh-out-loud funny and heartbreakingly sad, a story that will strike a lot of powerful (and sometimes painful) chords among anyone who has done any amount of international traveling themselves; one of those books that makes you want to run out and buy a bunch of copies, so that you can slap them into friends' hands and yell, "See, this is why I go to all the trouble that I do so that I can travel. Read this and you'll finally get it." Oh, and did I mention that it's really freakin' dirty too? It's really freakin' dirty too, not in a shockingly pornographic way (as are many of the sexual projects that get reviewed here), but rather in a delightful and highly erotic way, with Guo again using the quirky details of the English language to get across some highly symbolic (and temperature-raising) mental images.

Like many travel stories, the actual plotline of Dictionary is a fairly simple one; it's the story of 23-year-old Chinese peasant girl Zhuang, whose factory-owning blue-collar parents send her to London for a year, in order to learn English "as the English speak it" and thus improve her chances of a well-paying job in this global age we're moving into these days. And, I mean, that's pretty much it as far as the actual storyline is concerned -- "Z," as she's known by most of her Western acquaintances, does end up moving to London for a year, keeps a journal about her school and life experiences while there, meets and dates and breaks up with a guy, then at the end of a year goes back home. Er, the end. What the novel really becomes about, then, is not so much the events that transpire but an examination of the people these events are happening to; a detailed look at the people involved, in fact, using the infinitely fascinating and international milieu of London in order to look at the lives of a few of its random citizens, with Guo playing against character expectations as much as humanly possible.

Because that's an important thing to know about Dictionary, and a big reason why the novel is so delightful in the first place, is that Z is in no way your typical meek Chinese peasant girl; she is an opinionated loudmouth, as a matter of fact, a bit of an a--hole as well, unusually aggressive in situations that fascinate her and ready to embrace this cosmopolitan urban environment she suddenly finds herself in, a money-focused realist who goes out of her way at cocktail parties to defend communism. This is an interesting enough play against type, of course, but then becomes even more so when examining the Welsh guy she ends up getting involved with, who in many ways is her opposite: a bisexual, globetrotting, radically liberal ex-hippie twenty years her senior, a lover of both farming and the countryside who hasn't dated a woman in years and years. Now add Z's misunderstanding at the beginning of their relationship, where she mistakes an invitation to come over one night for an invitation to move in; and then add the man's unwillingness to correct the mistake; and now you have yourself one engaging little love story indeed.

So why do the two end up getting so heavily involved? Well, for the reasons I mentioned at the beginning of today's review -- because of common traveling experiences bonding them in a temporary way, while a lack of a common language fluency hindering their ability to see how ideologically different they actually are. It's a unique aspect of international romances, this lack of a common fluent language besides the "unspoken one of love," something that makes the entire endeavor both thrillingly exotic and almost guaranteed to be doomed for failure; it's the fuel by which movies like Before Sunrise drive their story engines, the fantasy that inspires thousands of undergraduate backpacking trips across Europe every summer. And indeed, under Guo's masterful hands as an English-language writer (and seriously, she is so deft with the English language here that you can easily mistake her for a UK native), it's this exact fantasy that drives the relationship of Z and her lover for its first six months or so, and is the impetus behind so much of Z's glee and pathos during her "year in the West."

But alas, such relationships can never sustain themselves for very long, not once the people involved start getting a deeper understanding of this lover they've been seeing; and in Dictionary Guo charts the unmaking of this relationship just so brilliantly, by timing it with Z's growing understanding of "English as the English speak it," watching her not only come to all these new complex realizations about her lover but also be able to express them in a more sophisticated way with each passing day. Make no mistake, Guo pulls no punches here; the story can get quite dark at certain points, and certainly does a devastating job at expressing the deep loneliness and alienation that immigrants can sometimes experience (especially on bad days). It's a very real book, I guess I'm saying; one that paints such a deep portrait of some very complex characters that you'll swear by the end that they must actually exist, that if you were to ever go to London you might have a shot of actually running into them on the street there.

And then finally, like I mentioned, this book is a surprisingly erotic one as well, definitely not its main point but a nice little unexpected bonus nonetheless; and as mentioned, the eroticism in Dictionary is not a dysfunctional, in-your-face kind as often featured here at CCLaP, but rather a flowery and nerdy kind (which I mean in a good way), which much like the rest of the novel depends on an expert skill over language and cleverness to be as effective as it is. It's one of those stories that titillates, not overwhelms; a book that helps clueless men understand the complex and emotionally weighted way so many women approach the subject of sexuality in the first place. I hesitate to use the term "chick-lit," because it's just such a loaded term that so many people find so disagreeable; but I will say this, that this is a good book to buy your friend who's into all those horrible chick-lit novels, as a way of getting her to read more intelligent stuff that will still naturally appeal to her. Can I say that without anyone getting angry or offended? We'll see, I guess.

To tell you the truth, there is barely anything in Dictionary that I myself would change, and the only reason it didn't get a larger score than it did is because of it essentially being a niche publication; that if you're not naturally a fan of delicate love stories with international travel at their core, you're likely to find this novel tedious to the point of tears, and will be tempted to throw it back on the "Books Destined to Be Made Into Cheap Looking Cable Television Movies That Your Mom Inexplicably Freaking Loves" shelf, where it rightly belongs. You definitely have to be of a certain type to enjoy this book; if like me, though, you are of this type, you're bound to love Dictionary from its very first page to its very last.

Out of 10:
Story: 7.3
Characters: 9.9
Style: 8.5
Overall: 8.8, or 9.8 for fans of delicate love stories ( )

My local library has a display devoted to the 2007 Orange Broadband prize for fiction; if it didn't have this display, I would never have picked up this little jem of a book.

Z is a Chinese girl sent by her parents to England to study the language. During her year there she falls in love with an older man, experiences English life, discovers her sexuality, and travels around Europe. So far, so ordinary, I suppose, but the real joy of this book is the way in which Z's life is expressed in words, in bad English, and in language that truly reflects the journey she takes in becoming an adult.

It's a breathtakingly beautiful story, told beautifully. I haven't read a book that uses the English language as well as this since "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time." It is also crushingly sad at times, and carries an urgency that led me to read the book in its entirety in a single day - an unusual feat for me, and one I haven't accomplished since a friend gave me a copy of Fowles' "The Collector."

Extraordinary. ( )

A young woman from rural China learns how to comprehend love and heartbreak in English in this quirky, touching novel. Zhuang, or Z to tongue-tied foreigners, arrives in London at age 23 after being dispatched by her parents to get an education. Her immersion and painful education are laid bare to readers, who witness Z's vocabulary, grammar and understanding blossom throughout her diarylike account, sped along by an intense romance with a man met at the cinema. Her consuming love begins promisingly, but her failure to interpret her lover's lifestyle as a hippie drifter (who's 20 years her senior) alerts readers to potential trouble in paradise, even while such a notion remains beyond Z's not-yet-jaded imagination. The novel overflows with gentle jokes about culture shock and language barriers including Z's inability to understand why Brits bother talking about the weather when it's obvious—but there are deeper observations beneath the humor. Z's comically earnest exploration of a sex shop illuminates the pathos of Western seediness, and her encounters with men reveal both the exploitative and meaningful sides of romance. Z's unique, evolving voice fits perfectly for a heroine whose naïveté is matched by a willingness to relay the truth. ( )

This book is written in broken English which improves as the Chinese narrator learns the language, partly through attending language school in London, but primarily through her relationship with an older English man. I enjoyed it and found it very readable, but ultimately it felt a bit like it didn't fulfil its potential. The use of broken English is not always very convincing, neither is the narrators trip to a peepshow. Poignant but not always plausible. I liked the ending very much though, and some of the bits that reminded me whats it like to be in an alien culture where everything is slightly scary and strange and exciting. ( )

Part romantic comedy, part bittersweet love story, this delightful novel has much to say about two different cultures, language and communication. Written deliberately 'bad' English which improves over the course of the book. I think this sentence from the back of the book is quite accurate: "{the novel] is a funny, romantic, and moving story that gives us a sparkling new lens through which we view ourselves." ( )