From 'a week in books'

Boyd Tonkin
The Independent, 25 January 2008

[...]
In the meantime, we can catch up with what the irrepressible writer and film-maker Xiaolu Guo did before first Village of Stone (in translation) and then A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (in English) made her feisty and fearless presence felt here.

20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth (Chatto & Windus, £12.99) was the first novel that Guo published in China. Now, she has revised Rebecca Morris and Pamela Casey's translation so that this edition layers the mature author's insight on top of the beginner's pizzazz. If, in this book, it never quite scales the heights of bittersweet lyricism in Village of Stone or tender cross-cultural comedy in A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary..., Guo's literary voice remains a breath of the freshest air imaginable. She cuts through the smog of hype and platitude, whether in Haidian or Hackney.

Half a loveable klutz à la Bridget Jones, half a questing existential heroine out of Marguerite Duras (whose work she reveres), young Fenfang comes from a forlorn sweet potato-growing village in south China to the cold bright lights of Beijing. She wants to make it in the movies, just like all the other "brown-skinned peasant girls from yellow sandy provinces" who work as day-rate extras in parts such as "scared girl in police chase". As she bounces from boxy flat to boxy flat, dead-end job to dead-end job, from her over-intense Chinese lover Xiaolin to her too laid-back American chum Ben, Fenfang suffers all the sharp edges of boom-town Beijing: "a city that never showed its gentler side".

She runs foul both of old-style party hacks and new-model sleazebag entrepreneurs, such as the memorably gross "Comrade Loaded-with-Gold". Yet her cussed individualism wears Fenfang down. Behind Guo's deliciously mischievous take on every sort of bombast and bullshit within the Beijing city limits lies a lost girl who knows "I wasn't my own friend", even as she curses the "Heavenly Bastard in the Sky" for a streak of lousy luck.
[...]

Boyd Tonkin
from 'A week in books'
The Independent, London, 25 January 2008

read original article

back