Scan barcode
A review by coronaurora
I Am China by Xiaolu Guo
3.0
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.