A Lover's Discourse: A Novel

Xiaolu Guo

Oct 2020 · Grove Press

About this ebook

A story of desire, love, language, and the meaning of home set against the backdrop of Brexit London—from the award-winning author of Nine Continents.

A Chinese woman moves from Beijing to London for a doctoral program—and to begin a new life—just as the Brexit campaign reaches a fever pitch. Isolated and lonely in a Britain increasingly hostile to foreigners, she meets a landscape architect and the two begin to build a life together.

A Lover’s Discourse is an exploration of romantic love told through fragments of conversations between the two lovers. Playing with language and the cultural differences that her narrator encounters as she settles into life in post-Brexit vote Britain, the lovers must navigate their differences and their romance, whether on their unmoored houseboat or in a cramped and stifling apartment in east London. Suffused with a wonderful sense of humor, this intimate and tender novel asks what it means to make a home and a family in a new land.

“Through her precise and unflinching language, a revealing account emerges of how one mind opens to another, how it processes each decision and moment of wondering.” —USA Today

“A fragmentary meditation on the nature of love, on desire and on connection between two humans . . . sets off cross-cultural echoes with the lightest of strokes.” —The Guardian

“Unlike Roland Barthes’ book by the same name, Xiaolu Guo’s A Lover’s Discourse is a love story as a genuine dialogue, not only between lovers, but between languages, cultures, and philosophies. Swift, astute, and funny.” —Siri Hustvedt, international–bestselling author

Ratings and reviews

Pluses But Mostly Minuses Audiobook Review: In this book, the heroine relates her experiences and views as a Chinese immigrant to the UK, where she is pursuing her doctorate. I think the author does a good job giving an idea of how all the differences between two very different cultures can be alarming, potentially embarrassing, and confusing for an immigrant, especially one from a relatively closed-off society. The author doesn't just tell us this; she shows it through the heroine's thoughts, actions, and inactions. But the story had a weird setup. It is told in the first-person present from the heroine's viewpoint (not a favorite POV of mine), but when she refers to her boyfriend, instead of calling him “he,” she calls him “you,” adding a very strange and somewhat jarring second-person perspective that is not often seen in contemporary writing. As such, it just didn't feel right for me and never did. Aside from the occasional moments of showing “immigrant-ness” described above, much of this book felt like telling. We are told of events and even thoughts, instead of seeing them play out in real-time. Quite often this happens at the beginning of books—and I don't even like it then—and is termed info-dumping, but in this book, it happened all the way through, effectively distancing the reader from the story the entire time. The narrator was fine except for one point that drove me a little nuts. It takes place in Great Britain, mostly London, with references to other UK places. The narrator could not say Edinburgh properly. She said it like “Edinburg,” instead of the way the natives say it, which is either “Edin-bra” or “Edin-bura.” That got on my last nerve. All in all, I did not enjoy this book or think it was well written. I received a free copy of this audiobook, but that did not affect my review.

About the author

Xiaolu Guo was born in south China. She received a MA at the Beijing Film Academy and published six books in China before she moved to London in 2002. The English translation of Village of Stone was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her first novel written in English, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, published in 2008, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Her most recent novel, I Am China, was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and was a NPR’s Best Book of the Year. In 2013 she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Her memoir Nine Continents won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography in 2017 and shortlisted for the Costa Award as well as the Royal Society of Literature Prize. Xiaolu has also directed several award-winning films including She, A Chinese, and documentaries including Five Men and A Caravaggio and Late at Night. She was an inaugural fellow at the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination in Paris and is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York City. She will serve as the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College in the fall 2020 in New York.