Xiaolu Guo

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 show more 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. show less

This is not a parody or homage to Melville’s “Moby Dick.” Instead, it seeks to insist on a female presence within that novel and perhaps an entire literary tradition that excluded women from epic narratives. Guo’s clear ambition and intelligent approach to interrogating who gets to tell stories and how mythologies are constructed are powerful. As such, her novel succeeds as a provocative and powerful counterpoint to “Moby Dick.”

By recasting Ishmael as Ishmaelle, a woman show more navigating both the literal dangers of life at sea and the structural violence of patriarchy, Guo turns the canonical adventure into a meditation on power and belonging. Ishmaelle is a compelling protagonist not because she is a dominant heroic figure but because she is intelligent, perceptive and quietly defiant. Guo pits her against a maritime culture that is exclusively masculine and pointedly authoritarian. Ishmaelle’s quiet negotiation with these forces to think, to speak and just to exist is the overriding source of tension in the novel. Guo achieves this elegantly by creating a mood that is primarily contemplative, yet unsettling. Despite moments of high drama chasing and killing whales, Guo chooses restraint and introspection over the grandiosity that marked the Melville original. show less

This short novel (about 180 pages) is blessed by exceptional writing, the more impressive considering the challenging subject matter. The story moves back and forth between Coral’s life with her boyfriend in Beijing now and her upbringing in the Village of Stone, a largely isolated, poverty-stricken fishing village on the South China Sea. Orphaned and raised by grandparents who did not speak to each other, Little Dog is not only scorned by the village but is raped, abused, and imprisoned show more by the village mute, then deals with an unwanted pregnancy followed by an abortion, and finds both herself and her grandmother ostracized within the village. Her resilience and fortitude in the face of her life are little short of extraordinary. I was very impressed with Xiaolu’s writing and dismayed to learn just how much of the story may be autobiographical. Notwithstanding a horrendous childhood, she not only survived but prospered. She moved from China to Britain at the age of 29 and published her first novel written in English a mere five years later. (She has written at least six other novels, a couple memoirs, essays, a short story collection and directed nearly a dozen films, picking up prizes in both mediums frequently along the way.) This particular book was shortlisted for both the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (forerunner to the Booker) as well as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and it’s easy to see why. Highly recommended. show less

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, show more 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. show less