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A review by travisclau
I Am China by Xiaolu Guo
2.0
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.