A Chinese woman comes to London to study and we follow her as she embarks on a romantic relationship. We then follow them as they move in together, first in a flat then to a house boat moored in various spots around London's canals.

In this story, each character does not have an actual name, Without names it feels quite an impersonal story, and perhaps it makes it kind of bleak, like the concrete giant that London can be. She does return to China for her studies but for such an interesting place, I was left wanting to know more about the landscape and culture. Its quite strange to read, which left me feeling quite detached from the characters and the landscape.I

I received this book from netgalley in return for a honest review.

The language in A Lover's Discourse is very paired back. The lover, the child, the protagonist don't even have a name. The chapters are very short each concerned with a fragment of the dialogue between the lovers. I loved the clarity of language and ideas this generated. The humor is paired back to and funnier for it. Great writing!

I did like parts of this and i had a lot of potential but i think overall it just missed something for me. I liked the characters for the most but the dialogue and the chapters length (or lack of at times) was a bit of let down as this could have been done better. It was just missing soemthing for me and I was never too excited for the long passages of dialogue. This had such promise but it just missed it for me.

This is a story told in a series of short episodes or vignettes. A unnamed Chinese narrator moves to London for her PhD and forms a relationship with an unnamed German-English man she meets. The episodes we read form a sort of daisy-chain of conversations (the clue is in the book’s title) at various points in their relationship. There is no real story being told apart from the development of the relationship.

I understand, I think, the reason for this structure. The book begin with an epigraph taken from Barthes’ book “Fragments d’un discours amoureux”, which in English becomes “A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments”, and both books share, deliberately on Guo’s part (I assume) a fragmentary structure.

It’s an enjoyable read, but it did feel to me more like a construction than a story. The book begins just prior to the UK’s Brexit referendum and continues through the next few years. Brexit crops up several times (but things have moved on quite a bit since the time at which the book is set) and this allows conversations about belonging and about distances between people. And then the two protagonists have long conversations about art and architecture (due to her PhD topic and his job). These lead, in turn, to several passages about reproduction or copying of art (this became the dominant theme in my head as I look back on the book although I am not sure it actually is in terms of content). Then there’s talk about the limits of language, facilitated by a Chinese person living with a German-English person in, initially, London. There’s the search for a place to call home.

In between all these conversations, a sort of story emerges as the couple moves around and learns to live together.

I’m really not sure how I feel about the book overall. The developing relationship is sensitively explored but the fragmentary nature of the book means it never builds a real sense of flow. The conversations are often interesting to read but also have a tendency to feel a bit contrived in order to cover another topic on a list somewhere.

Overall, an enjoyable book to read but one that felt a bit over-constructed for me to get very excited about it. Or perhaps what I really mean is a book that makes its careful construction a bit too obvious.

It's a lovely book - a collection of vignettes rather than a typical novel - but if you have read several of Xiaolu Guo's novels before this one, you will find it rather similar to her most recent publications. Many of the vignettes are quite poetic and beautifully written, thoughts on love, belonging, fitting into a new environment, learning a language. Then some others just feel a bit forced, a bit pretentious in a way - using every flimsy pretext to throw in some more or less obscure reference and some not-so-deep commentary. The beginning is excellent and gets a bit.... boring towards the end. I still enjoyed it but if I had to save only one of Xiaolu Guo's beautiful books, it would not be this one.

Wow. I was not expecting to love this book as much as I do.

First of all... that cover! It's absolutely stunning. I had very high expectations due to the premise of the story paired with that cover! 😍 I loved the writing style. It was poetic without being too flowery. I also really loved the plot. This book follows the life of a Chinese woman as she moves to Britain and finds love. I really enjoyed reading about the woman's internal conflict. She struggles with her ethnicity quite a lot. As a chinese female moving to Europe, she has difficulty settling in and adjusting. And even years down the line, she's still adjusting. The battle between living in England and still feeling so alienated due to the different culture was very realistic, and I really liked that aspect of it.

This book was a joy to read, and I highly recommend.

"The idea was that slavery was at the heart of a capitalistic system where reproduction was the main engine. All the things I wrote about originality were kind of beside the point. Originality is a fetish of people who want to control the art market and the publishing industry. It’s also a fetish of academics, particularly the males and old farts. What I was really interested in – though right then even this was blurring in my mind – were the sweating workers in Chinese villages. It was their lives, their anonymity, their way of looking at Western classics, and their purely pragmatic attitude. I loved being with those artisans and feeling their energy and their lack of self-consciousness. They were not precious in any way about their work, or about their life. But they were full of heart, and at the same time they were not clinging to their achievements. They were part of the flow of life. I had come from the same culture, and I felt I could not make this clear or make Westerners understand. The Western language and mentality did not allow me to do it."

This book is the first I have read by the author – an award winning filmmaker, non-fiction writer and fiction writer and who was a judge for the 2019 Booker prize.

I know from having researched her background when having tried (and failed) to predict what influence it may have on that longlist that her best known fictional book is probably “A Concise Chinese_English Dictionary for Lovers” – and in many ways this book feels like a variation on the basic tenets of that book (Chinese woman immigrates to London, learns English, reflects on the differences between English and Chinese, forms a relationship with someone from a very different cultural background) but one that loses the broken English and dictionary conceit and is instead very explicitly based around (and even has the characters discuss) Roland Barthes “A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments” – a book which the author stated in a 2018 Guardian Q&A as the book she most wishes she had written.

The narrator is an unnamed woman – bought up in the Chinese countryside (and I think of peasant background) who after an MA in Sociology and Film Making in Beijing, moves to London in late 2015 (against the background of the Brexit referendum) to do a PhD in Visual Anthopology – he PhD project based around a village in Guangdong Province which collectively specialises in copyings of famous Western paintings.

She struggles with London pub-culture (“What were we supposed to do at night in our rented rooms, if we didn’t drink or watch sports”), English language differences (she takes a doctor’s enquiry into her a family history as asking if she is of peasant/city dweller stock and if her family are Party members “I didn’t expect I would have to carry all this old baggage to England”) and sometimes both (“Liverpool versus Arsenal? I had thought arsenal was a weapons factory, I didn’t know it was a football place too”).

But she meets a man – who she first sees picking elderflowers – and forms a relationship with him. He was bought up in Australia and then Germany by an English mother and German father and works as a contract landscape architect. Whereas she is looking for (but failing to find) solidity and put down roots – he enjoys fluidity and non-conventionality. The two move into a houseboat together, she travels to China for her documentary, they go together to Australia and then Germany (where they live for a period), they have a daughter together.

Their relationship and the tensions/differences in it (as well as the three languages they share) form the basis of the book, which, like Barthes book, explores love in its widest sense but also language, art, landscape, belonging, nostalgia, identity and perhaps most of all the concept of home.

Like Barthes book – the book is structured around a series of short chapters, each starts with a fragment of their conversation and then explores the conversation and events around that fragment.

I was reminded a little of some of the early writing of Alain de Botton, partly of Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous” (although this is a much gentler book – note this book’s lack of a longlisting was my Booker failure referred to earlier).

Overall I found this a delightful read – a great way to re-examine a Western classic, full of energy and heart.

This is a seemingly simple tale of life told from the perspective of a young Chinese woman on a three year post graduate student visa to study in Britain. She is trying to settle in London and build educational links and friendships with all the issues that involves, but having been recently orphaned she is still suffering from grief and has no home to return to. She has a deep curiosity as to life with interest in culture and literature and the use of languages. But she is inevitably in a “strange” place culturally, so her struggles with a new language overlap with trying to understand what an “other” might be really saying. This is especially true as she settles into a relationship with an architect of joint Australian-German background who is also trying to find his way in life (complicated, possibly, by worries about life in post-Brexit Britain).
Paralleling the studies of this woman as a student, the book will ruminate on language as used in varying cultures and that the “real” meaning of words and ideas can be so different – even assuming one was even prepared to consider, or discuss, them in the first place. But much of one’s life will be bed-rocked on one’s previous life – a life that has certainly passed and which it is impossible to directly replicate. How much does memory and experiences still form a person’s present? When you have no early collective memories with another how do you understand them and their deeper values?
She will enter into a relationship and marriage with this man and go on to have a child. His life is in flux as he wishes to build his desired career in creative architecture. But his dream is to move away from urban living, looking for more – first in creating a home in a narrow boat. He will then explore whether his childhood experiences of life in Australia can be positively re-created. Then he will buy and move to a derelict farm in Germany that he can re-design and live the rural life in, in conjunction with his architecture. His dreams inexorably turn into practical targets for himself. She – still trying to complete her academic work (the basis for her right even to be in Britain) must follow him or live her life alone and in greater uncertainty. His desire for a rural life is exactly the ones that she has moved away from in China. But relationships are all about compromises and how people come to them.
This novel is very much from the perspective of this young woman trying to move herself towards a new life. It addresses how you build significant partnerships with someone who speaks a different language (both literally and at a deeper level). It is about how one can build a place of emotional security, through things both large and small. It is about how one can create a “home” and build a life for yourself and perhaps children. Through this story life is seen as a series of choices, albeit in a larger changing world in which one has very little control or impact. This perhaps is why Guo comes to the conclusion that her main characters’ lives never was about her choices it was all pre-determined.
This is a quietly immersive novel that draws the reader along at pace. All the while, not just asking the most basic questions of life but about deeper cultural experience and meaning. Guo is an extraordinary writer and more critically an assured story teller as well and this is another fine and enquiring novel.

I just love her books. They are hard to describe, a combination of scenes and witty observations. A relationship unfolds between a Chinese PHD student and a German-English man in Brexit Britain. Guo’s observations, thoughts and things she finds funny just chime so much with me. And I have that with all her books. She is just witty and smart. And I love that.

This read like an updated version of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers - a quick and easy read about romantic love framed in the context of A Lover's Discourse: Fragments.

My view was that the thoughts shared by the protagonist, a Chinese woman who moves to London to study for a PhD just on the cusp of the Brexit vote, were not quite as deep or profound as Guo perhaps considered them to be. Our unnamed main character strikes up a relationship with a man who is half British and half German, and the novel follows them as their relationship develops. Their "discourse" started off well but the focus in later parts of the book felt like more of a lack of communication to me, with our female protagonist having less and less agency towards the end. I enjoyed the references to Chinese language, appreciated Guo's writing and found the book quite readable, but it was lacking a certain something for this reader.

An intimate story of a relationship between a Chinese woman and a German man living in London, told in the first person by the unnamed woman.
It’s a fascinating meditation on east meeting west, the nature of language and how you co-exist with someone who has utterly different ways of living to you.
The writing is lyrical but also quite pared back. It feels like there aren’t loads of words in this short novel but there is loads of meaning.
I sometimes felt that ideas took precedence over emotion but the central theme of an outsider struggling to find a home resonated. It’s overwhelmingly honest - life can feel like a struggle and more so if you’re out of tune with the person you love.,
In short, a beautiful and dense read, questioning the nature of home, love and foreignness. Recommended.

Thank you for the ARC.

I wasn’t best disposed to A Lover’s Discourse from the outset. It opens with a quote from Roland Barthes, with whose work it shares a title. Oh God, Barthes – didn’t I read him for my Master’s? Am I really up for a book that opens with a Barthes quote? Am I going to have to Think? And then – horror of horrors – the book opens in London in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The last thing I want to read about right now is Brexit. Every piece of fiction I’ve encountered that tries to be a post-Brexit state of the nation piece has fallen flat on its face, usually misjudging the tone entirely (hello, Last Christmas). My guard was most definitely up.
But take a deep breath and, happily, my first impressions were wrong. Phew. This is a short book about big ideas: language, semantics, identity, belonging. But it doesn’t wear these themes too heavily, and is a deeply thoughtful, touching and empathetic book.
Somehow I didn’t read her 2008 hit A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, nominated for the Orange Prize, at the time. Like her new novel, it is about a young Chinese woman in London, and it is inspired by Barthes. I don’t know if she considers A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary essential reading to appreciate A Lover’s Discourse, but I chose to familiarise myself with it first.
Our protagonist is an unnamed Chinese woman from Zhejiang who arrives in London in 2016 to undertake a PhD. We follow her up to the present day as she meets a (unnamed) Australian-German landscape architect lover, moves in with him, buys a houseboat, travels the world, marries and has a child with him, as well as completing her PhD. The story is told in eight chapters (titled West, South, East North, Down, Up, Left and Right, for reasons not made explicitly clear) made up of a series of vignettes, each also titled (‘An Ordinary Tradesman’s Job’; ‘Memory and Architecture’; ‘Power Is Beautiful’) and each also with a leading quote taken from the vignette. This feels like a distractingly detailed scaffold for a short book, and reinforces the idea that we should be Thinking. I don’t think the book needs this. The vignettes stand up by themselves, more often than not as effective springboards for deeper thought and ideas, particularly about language. I am a Germanophile second only to a Sinophile, and enjoyed the many musings on the differences between German, Chinese and English, but also how these are perceived by our native Chinese protagonist (‘English was always in the atmosphere like pollen…whereas German was like a specific mountain’).
In particular I found her relationship with English fascinating. It is always ‘borrowed’ to her: ‘I could not possess this language. It alienated me and it was never mine’. Unlike A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary, the book is written in a fluent English, including her reported speech, although the protagonist writes about feeling ‘wordless’ or uncomfortable with her English. I found this conveyed a disconnect between her own perception of her language with her true ability to communicate. I found this quite touching, and it reminded me of conversations with Chinese colleagues and students in the UK where they had said similar things to me, usually in embarrassingly fluent English. I remember one PhD student feeling upset because she couldn’t swallow the ‘dn’ in ‘London’ like a native speaker. I had always thought of English as a highly flexible, highly resilient language, making it perfect for non-native speakers to inhabit and use and found this perspective quite eye-opening.
Her relationship with place is similar to her relationship with language. This is a great description of London, the London that people travel to from across the world to begin their adult lives. But London is a hard place to ‘belong’ to, and even with her ‘need to put down roots’ in London our protagonist can never really settle. This is shown quite literally in her inability to register her marriage. Her lover also lacks deep roots; she wonders ‘Where would you place your nostalgia, your heimweh, your sehnsucht?’ Her choice of PhD topic – a Chinese village where artists replicate masterworks of western art – also explores ideas of authenticity. The theme of belonging is intensely concentrated throughout.
Guo is effective at encouraging reflection, but is sensationally good at building empathy. She builds empathy in passing glances, such as the protagonist’s relationship with English, or her frustration in her PhD viva being challenges on Walter Benjamin (‘damn it, the Jewish / Nazi thing again – how could a Chinese person ever hope to get it right?’). She also does it very deliberately in the longer narrative passages, particularly those that tell us about our protagonist’s early life such as the deeply moving depiction of an abortion. Her reflections on new motherhood were painfully true.
This should be essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the lives of young Chinese professionals and students abroad, who appear to ‘come here purely with practical aims… faceless and voiceless.’

Very much feels like an updated version of A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. Very interesting East-West dynamic at play and thoughts about identity, culture and language. I always enjoy reading Xiaolu Guo's book and this one was no exception.