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A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo

5 reviews

bookophie's review

emotional hopeful inspiring lighthearted reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

"A Concise Chinese- English Dictionary for Lovers" is a beautiful story set in early 2000s London, of a Chinese girl, Zhuang, or Z, in her 20s, whose just moved to London and throughout the book is discovering what love is essentially, with a couple chapters mostly devoted to sex, though it is still described and narrated through the same strange, romantic style the rest of the story is in, with metaphors and short love quote like sentences. And at the same time, the main character is learning the English "culture", and learning the language. Z also refers to her life back in China a lot, and compares it to her new English life, and it was fun learning a bit more about the differences in beliefs and mannerisms (?) and overall the different culture, and a few pages have Chinese words and English definitions too, which I think adds to the running language theme. It's narrated through Z's broken English, which was interesting to read in such a different way than usual, and added to her character and character development I think. The book is also written to her "lover", addressed as "you", which again adds to the uniqueness of Xiaolu Guo's writing style in this (This is the first of her books I have read so I can't really compare, but I expect she's written in similar ways somewhat in her other stories. Which I do also plan to read.)
There is a lot of other themes I've probably missed out on covering, but they're the few that I can really remember it all being about.

Quite possibly my favourite book ever, it's so unique compared to what I've read before, and it inspired me to read again after a very long reading block. My favourite quote from it (probably not my favourite actually if I re-read it, or not the one I'd go for if I were asked to pick a quote which summarises a theme or the whole book as it's from a really miniscule part of the book with very little meaning or essence to the plot but I still think about it a lot) is "I take off my guilty shoes."

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