Ben Reviewed It

Rating:

‘A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers’ is the first novel by Chinese writer Guo Xiaolu to be written in English, and tells the story of a young Chinese woman who comes to the UK to learn the language. Lost and lonely, she soon starts up a relationship with an older English guy, a man who is different from herself in almost every way.

The book is written in the first person in deliberately poor English that gradually improves as the main character’s English becomes more fluent. This allows for some really endearing misspelling and misunderstanding of English words. It is very easy to read – I read the whole book in less than a day. One of the things I found particularly effective was that the narrative vividly captures single events and situations, but speeds along effortlessly through the plot because there is no need to give a consistent, continuous account of events. I guess that’s pretty common with a lot of contemporary fiction; maybe I noticed it because I’ve been reading a lot of crime novels recently. The format is superficially like a dictionary, with a particular word and definition at the top of each chapter, but in fact is more like a diary.

This book really shows what it’s like for someone to come from another culture and live in the West. It also provides a lot of insight into Chinese culture and Chinese psychology. I have a lot of direct experience of Chinese culture myself (having lived in China) and I found it insightful to see how the main Character thought and felt.

In some ways this book is a ‘coming of age’ novel, in the same vein as Catcher in the Rye (although I found Concise Dictionary much more engaging). It explores issues of dependency and expectation in relationships. But at its heart it is a love story; a story of two lovers facing the deepest differences and misunderstandings.