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3.73 AVERAGE
3.73 AVERAGE
Easy read; a love story wrapped within a love story, told via letters and viewpoint chapters. Mildly boring.
The premise of this book was very interesting but it lacked a motive force. The main character Iona doesn't really possess qualities that interest me.
dark
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
For me, this book is a soft 3/3.5 stars. I didn't really care for Iona as a character. The sections that were about her just bored me and I couldn't wait to get back to Jian and Mu's respective stories.
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
what did i think? i am not finished processing the read in my mind yet, but i wanted to get some thoughts down in this space while it's fresh.
so... i found much about this novel fascinating. i have read very little fiction that shines a light on post-tiannamen square china. so the cultural insights were very interesting. as well, i liked the format of the novel: a translator based in london receives a mess of letters and journals and it's up to her to not only translate the work from chinese to english, but to also makes sense of the papers and get them into some coherent order. the papers alternate voices between jian - a punk singer and political activist, and mu - a poet and jian's partner. the translator - iona - gets much time in the novel too. she becomes completely immersed in jian and mu's relationship, but while she is working, we learn a bit about her life and her past. so this format, alternating between the different writings of different characters, coupled with iona in the present, does give a bit of disjointed feel to the work. and i think that helps to reinforce the tone of the novel which is fairly melancholy through lack of physical connections. though it's clear jian and mu had a deep love at one time, life is complicated and life in china is portrayed as adding even further challenges, especially for those who are creatively inclined - poets, musicians, painters... does art only exist as a prop for political beliefs?
guo has a lovely style to her prose. some of her sentences are just beautiful. at other times though, i felt they were a bit overwritten. but the odd experience for me is that i felt kept at a distance while i read. for all the potential in the story, i was never fully immersed, the way iona was. now this may be intentional on guo's part. several times in the book characters are protecting themselves from love. or loving. they want to remain protected. they don't want to be vulnerable. so i get that about the story. but it leaves a bit of an emotional void. i also felt iona wasn't quite as fully realized as she could have been.
having said that, though, i was keen to turn each page and follow guo, wherever she was going. i am still debating the ending... it wasn't surprising, but i find it questionable. so... i think that this is quite an ambitious novel that almost succeeds. while there is much i appreciated, the things that niggled at me became too hard to overlook, to tip this into 4- or 5-star territory.
oh - should note that this book was longlisted for the 2015 bailey's women's prize for fiction. i think it is a good inclusion on the list, and i am curious to see whether it will advance to the shortlist. this it the 5th book (out of 20) which i have read from the longlist. so far... i haven't been in love with any of the five, though they have all been alright. (ringing endorsement... i know! heh! but i am still quite optimistic i will find a gem in the 15 remaining reads.)
edited to add: new interview with xiaolu guo: http://penguinblog.co.uk/2015/03/27/interview-xiaolu-guo-author-of-i-am-china/
so... i found much about this novel fascinating. i have read very little fiction that shines a light on post-tiannamen square china. so the cultural insights were very interesting. as well, i liked the format of the novel: a translator based in london receives a mess of letters and journals and it's up to her to not only translate the work from chinese to english, but to also makes sense of the papers and get them into some coherent order. the papers alternate voices between jian - a punk singer and political activist, and mu - a poet and jian's partner. the translator - iona - gets much time in the novel too. she becomes completely immersed in jian and mu's relationship, but while she is working, we learn a bit about her life and her past. so this format, alternating between the different writings of different characters, coupled with iona in the present, does give a bit of disjointed feel to the work. and i think that helps to reinforce the tone of the novel which is fairly melancholy through lack of physical connections. though it's clear jian and mu had a deep love at one time, life is complicated and life in china is portrayed as adding even further challenges, especially for those who are creatively inclined - poets, musicians, painters... does art only exist as a prop for political beliefs?
guo has a lovely style to her prose. some of her sentences are just beautiful. at other times though, i felt they were a bit overwritten. but the odd experience for me is that i felt kept at a distance while i read. for all the potential in the story, i was never fully immersed, the way iona was. now this may be intentional on guo's part. several times in the book characters are protecting themselves from love. or loving. they want to remain protected. they don't want to be vulnerable. so i get that about the story. but it leaves a bit of an emotional void. i also felt iona wasn't quite as fully realized as she could have been.
having said that, though, i was keen to turn each page and follow guo, wherever she was going. i am still debating the ending... it wasn't surprising, but i find it questionable. so... i think that this is quite an ambitious novel that almost succeeds. while there is much i appreciated, the things that niggled at me became too hard to overlook, to tip this into 4- or 5-star territory.
oh - should note that this book was longlisted for the 2015 bailey's women's prize for fiction. i think it is a good inclusion on the list, and i am curious to see whether it will advance to the shortlist. this it the 5th book (out of 20) which i have read from the longlist. so far... i haven't been in love with any of the five, though they have all been alright. (ringing endorsement... i know! heh! but i am still quite optimistic i will find a gem in the 15 remaining reads.)
edited to add: new interview with xiaolu guo: http://penguinblog.co.uk/2015/03/27/interview-xiaolu-guo-author-of-i-am-china/
This was depressing. Two self-serious kids, born in 90s and noughties China, punch drunk on the insidious totalitarianism, fashion themselves into anti-Establishment culture producers: him crafting a resume as a "positive" punk musician blasting out his manifestos in the underground clubs, and her channelling her inner Allen Ginsberg into sonnets of lament and wake-up jabs. They bunk together at university, trying to right the wrongs around them with words and strings, until they open the door and get headhunted. Cherry-picked to be put out or be milked, they both find themselves flung to different continents, and find their ideologies, their idea of liberty and love mauled by alienating sights, sounds and purposes of living. Knocked and drifting in different corners, they allow their thoughts and private cries to leak into indignant letters to each other.
This correspondence between the two lands in the hand of a British publisher touring a literary festival in China. A freelance translator gets employed to sort this cache of correspondence unsorted by year and this unsociable, self doubting worker bee finds herself breathlessly translating this unpredictable stash finding herself inadvertently wrapped in the narrative of these lovers. The book we hold in our hands then is revealed to be her labour of translation.
In scale and flavour, Guo's book reminded me of Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire; though being a confident dabbler in media other than fiction writing, she really gets her hands in there to scramble chronology, insert photos of "original" correspondence, and for a good first half this found-footage trope is mysterious with the mystery compounded by an all-too self aware linguist-translator who worries herself crazy at probably not getting to the core of things given whole lakes of "untranslatedness" that stare at her within the valleys of text coined in incomprehensible colloquial expressions of another language.
But as the wrinkles and creases get ironed, the shape of the stories contained within this come to focus, and we enter into the final third of the book, switching between three narrators and timelines, my attention wavered and I found myself oddly getting indifferent to the fate of all three. A lot had to do with the dispiriting trajectory of lost innocence and horrifying histories of lost and muted generations that are recounted without relief. It called for a crisper climax as it builds itself into the reader/translator engulfed and absorbed into the stories of the still-alive people whose lives are being chronicled by her. Here I find myself feeling like those airport-novel readers who'd like that choicest of moments in the finale, when the author meets her subject, to be milked for that final giant emotional take-away scene rather than the indifferent poetry readout at Foyles! There are way too many intersecting personal histories, half-realised cynical epiphanies from fleeting impressions here, and the collective monotone of this weighed the book down for me.
This correspondence between the two lands in the hand of a British publisher touring a literary festival in China. A freelance translator gets employed to sort this cache of correspondence unsorted by year and this unsociable, self doubting worker bee finds herself breathlessly translating this unpredictable stash finding herself inadvertently wrapped in the narrative of these lovers. The book we hold in our hands then is revealed to be her labour of translation.
In scale and flavour, Guo's book reminded me of Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire; though being a confident dabbler in media other than fiction writing, she really gets her hands in there to scramble chronology, insert photos of "original" correspondence, and for a good first half this found-footage trope is mysterious with the mystery compounded by an all-too self aware linguist-translator who worries herself crazy at probably not getting to the core of things given whole lakes of "untranslatedness" that stare at her within the valleys of text coined in incomprehensible colloquial expressions of another language.
But as the wrinkles and creases get ironed, the shape of the stories contained within this come to focus, and we enter into the final third of the book, switching between three narrators and timelines, my attention wavered and I found myself oddly getting indifferent to the fate of all three. A lot had to do with the dispiriting trajectory of lost innocence and horrifying histories of lost and muted generations that are recounted without relief. It called for a crisper climax as it builds itself into the reader/translator engulfed and absorbed into the stories of the still-alive people whose lives are being chronicled by her. Here I find myself feeling like those airport-novel readers who'd like that choicest of moments in the finale, when the author meets her subject, to be milked for that final giant emotional take-away scene rather than the indifferent poetry readout at Foyles! There are way too many intersecting personal histories, half-realised cynical epiphanies from fleeting impressions here, and the collective monotone of this weighed the book down for me.
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I deeply appreciated the novel's interwoven narrative structure and its play with metanarrative as we occupy Iona's position as translator trying to piece life stories together. As we learn the backstory behind Jian and Mu, we see how delicately complex their history is that unfolds through beautifully inset reprints of letters between them and third-person narration.
Yet I left the novel feeling like the characters were sketches or even caricatures at points. Iona felt particularly thin as a character -- defined repeatedly in terms of her short-lived sexual flings (then later pines for her older employer) and then as a kind of valiant white rescuer for the star-crossed lovers, Jian and Mu, who are to be reunited with her volume of translations. The couple, too, seemed ridiculously pretentious in many instances (I.e. Jian's punk aesthetic and the manifesto, Mu's tastes in literature l), which framed them less as memorable characters than parodies of a certain cultural revolution persona that Guo plays with.
Yet I left the novel feeling like the characters were sketches or even caricatures at points. Iona felt particularly thin as a character -- defined repeatedly in terms of her short-lived sexual flings (then later pines for her older employer) and then as a kind of valiant white rescuer for the star-crossed lovers, Jian and Mu, who are to be reunited with her volume of translations. The couple, too, seemed ridiculously pretentious in many instances (I.e. Jian's punk aesthetic and the manifesto, Mu's tastes in literature l), which framed them less as memorable characters than parodies of a certain cultural revolution persona that Guo plays with.