Word: englisher
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International interest in China's contemporary visual arts has hit exuberant heights, which makes the relative international ignorance of contemporary Chinese literature more conspicuous. Contemporary Chinese writing remains woefully undertranslated in English. Expectations for a translation boom, created when émigré Chinese writer Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, remain unfulfilled. So what is an ambitious Chinese writer who desires to reach an international audience to do? The 35-year-old Xiaolu Guo has taken matters into her own hands by writing in English. As a novelist who is equally at home as a filmmaker...
...latest novel available in English, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, is a wry coming-of-age account of a young woman's struggle to carve out a place for herself in the wider world. Set in contemporary Beijing, it peeks into the mind of Fenfang, a plucky dreamer who left her provincial sweet-potato-farming village in south China for the distant capital at the age of 17. Her youth, she tells us in the novel's first lines, began several years and odd jobs after that, when she finally succeeded in parting from her "peasant" mentality and realizing...
...island off south China's coast, and went to Beijing at around the same age as her character Fenfang. She churned out novels to support herself while in film school. In 2002, she left Beijing for London, where she continued her film studies and began writing A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, a humorous novel about her struggles with the English language and a British paramour. An expired visa forced her to return to Beijing, where she put the novel on hold and made Concrete Revolution, a documentary about how the capital's ruthless physical transformation has affected residents...
...This is a short, spry, slangy novel, but it speaks about the conundrums of identity and individuality with gestures that remain long in the mind. The germ for the story emerged from Guo's first book, published in China when she was just 19. Guo reworked that in English, with the aid of a translation by Rebecca Morris and Pamela Casey. Now she has written in English again. Chinese critics may moan, as they have over Ha Jin, about linguistic "betrayal." Let them. Literature is about a place beyond the provincial, and wherever writers like...
Move away from London, however, and you get a rather different perspective. Across the English Channel, Thierry Jacquillat, chairman of the Greater Paris Investment Agency, looks at what's happening in world financial markets and says: "The economy of Paris will resist the shock better than London. We're more diversified." And in Brussels, at the European Trade Union Institute, economist Andrew Watt draws some uncomfortable historical parallels. "There was some idea that the financial sector was immune," he says. "It's like pinning your hopes on anything, whether it's textiles in the north of England...