A Lover’s Discourse
XIAOLU GUO
(CHATTO & WINDUS, 288 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • Tel 020 7799 4064
Xiaolu Guo is adept at exploring cultural difference. Her delightful 2007 novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, was a humorous examination of linguistic confusion and miscommunication between the sexes, related by Ziao, a young Chinese woman, newly arrived in London to study English.
A Lover’s Discourse, a meditation on a mixed marriage told from the woman’s perspective, attempts something similar, but the unnamed narrator is older, more assured, less naive and with better language skills. She refers to her partner (also unnamed) in the second person, creating a vivid sense of a continuous conversation – albeit in fragments. Guo’s narrator arrives in London six months before the Brexit referendum to study for a PhD in visual anthropology. She falls for an Australian-British-German landscape architect, allowing further opportunities for cultural dissonance.
