![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
puritybrown.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
50books_poc1: The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
An excellent start to my second 50. Jhumpa Lahiri is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, and on the basis of this collection of short stories, I'd say it's well-deserved. Smooth, simple, polished prose that combines a sense of detachment with a singularly clear-eyed observation of people's emotional states. Lahiri's got a knack for character, and in particular for revealing two people's characters through one person's perspective on the other. My favourite in the collection is "Mrs Sen's", about a white American boy being looked after by a very homesick Indian woman, but all the stories are good.
2: A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo
I heard a lot of praise for this novel, and I was vaguely curious, but somehow the descriptions I'd heard made it sound twee and cutesy. It's not. Oh, it's so not. It's an incredibly gritty and emotionally intense account of one Chinese woman's year in London. She falls in love with an unnamed English man, addressed throughout as "you", as if the whole novel were a love letter addressed to him, and the joys and pains of this love affair amplify and interact with the joys and pains (mostly pains) of being Chinese in England. It's all written as if by her, so that the English is deliberately ungrammatical and frequently a bit odd, but it works -- I was afraid it might come across as condescending, but Zhuang Xiao Qiao's character sings out from every line, and she expresses herself so well even with her broken English that it's impossible not to feel for her. I picked it up as I was going to bed, saying to myself "I'll just read a few pages of this before I turn out the light", and 120 pages later I had to force myself to put it down because it was half past one in the morning and I needed to sleep. Thoroughly recommended.
An excellent start to my second 50. Jhumpa Lahiri is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, and on the basis of this collection of short stories, I'd say it's well-deserved. Smooth, simple, polished prose that combines a sense of detachment with a singularly clear-eyed observation of people's emotional states. Lahiri's got a knack for character, and in particular for revealing two people's characters through one person's perspective on the other. My favourite in the collection is "Mrs Sen's", about a white American boy being looked after by a very homesick Indian woman, but all the stories are good.
2: A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo
I heard a lot of praise for this novel, and I was vaguely curious, but somehow the descriptions I'd heard made it sound twee and cutesy. It's not. Oh, it's so not. It's an incredibly gritty and emotionally intense account of one Chinese woman's year in London. She falls in love with an unnamed English man, addressed throughout as "you", as if the whole novel were a love letter addressed to him, and the joys and pains of this love affair amplify and interact with the joys and pains (mostly pains) of being Chinese in England. It's all written as if by her, so that the English is deliberately ungrammatical and frequently a bit odd, but it works -- I was afraid it might come across as condescending, but Zhuang Xiao Qiao's character sings out from every line, and she expresses herself so well even with her broken English that it's impossible not to feel for her. I picked it up as I was going to bed, saying to myself "I'll just read a few pages of this before I turn out the light", and 120 pages later I had to force myself to put it down because it was half past one in the morning and I needed to sleep. Thoroughly recommended.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-02-22 06:59 pm (UTC)I love this comm. So many books, so little time...