Something is happening this year with my reading list that two weeks into the year already and I haven´t fully enjoy ANY of my current reads. (There is a book that may have a potential for a four-star review but I am still struggling to finish it, although a relatively short one, but the intensive work of the last days prevented me from it).
A Concise Chinese English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo is a book I´ve read many years ago, in German. I loved very much the idea of the book but was disappointed by the execution. The conversations between lovers were stereotypical and false, sophisticated on purpose.
A Lover´s Discourse is a continuation of the idea - lovers from two different cultural environment, trying to cope with the other´s diversity sometimes in a very adverse and conflictual way. As in the case of the ...Dictionary, when it´s come to intellectual exchange the two lovers are both of them in an alienated state of mind. Here, when he says something, she is wondering rhetorically and keeps telling her own little story. The book is envisioned like a long letter the woman - Chinese-born, moving to London to pursue a PhD, falling for a German-Australian man, a desirable immigrant, getting pregnant, failing to accomplish her dream - writes to her man. The story takes place during the pre- and post-Brexit referendum which amplifies the alienation and jeopardizes her future chances of the future she was aiming at when arrived in the UK. The book is the story of their relationship.
The title is from a book by Roland Barthes and there are other intellectual references in the book, like Walter Benjamin. Indeed, we are wearing the language as a skin, as Barthes said. But the skin has a natural flexibility and so has the language. The fact that the woman in the book applied for a PhD in London, in English, and things that ´hangover´ may be the name of a place, it´s belonging to a very different intellectual category. In relationships when the two belong to different cultural and linguistic realms misunderstandings and alienation and the feeling of loneliness are an occurence, but so it´s the chance of a beautiful dialogue, even it takes place in a language that it is not the mother tongue for any of the two. However, in this book, the fact that the two of them are different and want to maintain their differenve on purpose turns tragi-comical any attempt of a dialogue.
However, there is something that I really liked about this book that I had access to in audiobook format: the beauty of the cover.
Rating: 2 stars
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