Reading a book as soon as I acquire it is often a question of discipline, and most of the time I fail in that regard. My shelves are overflowing with books I have yet to read and those I want to reread, and I am rarely capable of spending a couple of hours at my local library (ostensibly to get some work done in a quiet space) without checking out an armful of books. I wish I’d read this one sooner, instead of letting it languish on a lower TBR shelf for so long.
From the first paragraph the writing is like a breath of fresh air. Guo’s style is elegant and deceptively spare. On the surface, the story deals with a young Chinese woman who moves to London to complete a graduate degree shortly before the Brexit referendum, but there’s a lot more going on than a woman learning to navigate an unfamiliar country and culture.
The story is related in a series of vignettes, each detailing an experience or choice that build up a portrait of the protagonist as an immigrant, a lover, an academic, a spouse, a mother. Her descriptions of living in cramped, poorly maintained housing in London brought back vivid memories of my first couple of years in Edinburgh—I could almost taste the inescapable damp cold in winter. Guo has an exceptional gift for relating how her character’s environment feels, whether it’s stifling humidity or bitter cold, and how those surroundings affect not just the protagonist’s mood but her deeper emotions about where she is and who she’s with.
We never learn the protagonist’s name, nor those of her partner and, later, their child. Her relationship with her partner seemed to me to be fraught and difficult in ways that the protagonist herself either did not recognize or did not care about, at least until they have a baby, at which point she starts thinking about why women become radical feminists. For a good part of the novel it felt to me like she was forcing herself to stay with a man she did not really love and who did not seem to love her (but he definitely enjoyed having someone around to pick up after him). This impression isn’t justified by the end of the story, although I maintain that the boyfriend/spouse is more than a bit of a jackass for a significant portion of the novel. Halfway through the novel I began to wonder why she didn’t start throwing things at him out of sheer frustration. I would have. The pattern does shift, though; in the course of their life together and through the decisions and compromises made in between the glimpses of them we see, it becomes clear that he chooses their life together over constant self-indulgence.
Knowing as little as I do about Barthes and his work is a disadvantage—even with the couple’s discussions of his A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, I know there is more depth to the story than I was able to recognize. The love alluded to encompasses much more than romantic love. For me, one of the great things about rereading a great work of fiction is that the more I learn, the more cultural references I recognize tucked away among what seems like a straightforward narrative. I look forward to revisiting this novel once I’ve read some of Barthes’ writings, but in the meantime I also intend to read everything else of Xuo’s I can get my hands on.
