Village of Stone by Guo Xiaolu
China’s share of world markets is increasing in all sectors, including, it would appear, novelists. The number of new releases from Chinese writers in English, while still small in absolute numbers, seems on an inexorable upswing.
The latest is Guo Xiaolu, whose first novel in English Village of Stone, has just become available. Guo was born in a fishing village in the south of China in 1973. She is also a filmmaker and essayist, currently taking a sabbatical in Britain.
Village of Stone contrasts the narrator’s grim childhood in a small fishing village in southern China (yes, there’s an autobiographical element to the book) with a less trying but somewhat purposeless existence in modern Beijing, working in a video rental store, living on the ground floor of a twenty-five storey apartment block with a boyfriend whose career and life interest is Frisbee. Memories of the former life are awakened when a huge dried, salted eel arrives in the post from person or persons unknown.
This contrast, from primitive village to video rental store shows how far individual Chinese, and China, have traveled in just a few years.
But Village of Stone is a bit more than a tale of rural oppression and modern urban ennui and listlessness, for there’s a trace of magic realism in the descriptions of the Village of Stone which, indeed, hardly seems like China at all: it is cold and rocky, more like Sardinia crossed with Thomas Hardy.
Reality intrudes, in the form of bus stations and chemistry classes in the local secondary school.
The Beijing of the book could almost be anywhere, the anonymous apartment block in any city from New York to Hamburg or Tokyo, and her boyfriend Red’s Frisbee fanaticism as common (if perhaps somewhat passe) in Central Park or the campus of UC Berkeley. If there’s any solid indication as to Red’s ethnicity, I missed it (although in the French translation he’s apparently called Zhuzi, so perhaps he’s Chinese after all).
The novel does not, in other words, seem particularly ‘Chinese’—whatever that might mean. That is, perhaps, part of the point.