Foreignness and alienation were the themes Xiaolu Guo explored in her first novel, the Orange prize-nominated A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. Her new book returns to the same territory, subtly unpicking cultural misunderstandings and the feelings of otherness associated with migrancy and exile.
Iona, a London-based translator, pieces together the complex and tragic past of separated Chinese couple Jian (an exiled, rebel punk musician drifting through Europe) and Mu (a slam-poet). The concept of truth, throughout, is unstable; with no definitive means of interpreting certain Chinese characters and their tenses, Iona's translations often rely on assumption. As Iona traverses through the fragments of diary entries and correspondence, the couple's story becomes a life-source for her own existence, to the extent that she takes it upon herself to reunite Jian and Mu. Consequently, her interpretations cease to simply be demonstrations of the subjectivity and instability of translation and become, instead, instrumental and crucial to the fate of all three characters.
Hints of government intervention emerge in the couple's story, too, opening the novel up to a complex and fascinating political narrative. The lives of Jian and Mu, haunted by the turbulent history of Chinese politics (in particular, the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989), read like a eulogy for a lost vision of China.
