I hated this book. It’s literary fiction of the people having affairs
variety. It has three main characters: Li Jing (aphasia patient), Zhou Meiling (his wife), and Rosalyn Neal (one of his doctors). A few secondary characters appear, and some even get a little of the story told from their perspective. But it isn’t enough to relieve the tedium of the main characters’ bad behavior.
Li Jing is the owner of an investment company, a wheeler-dealer. While having lunch with his father (whose full name I don’t remember but who is mostly called Professor Li) at the Swan Hotel, a gas explosion tears through the place, embedding a piece of glass in Li Jing’s head. When he wakes up, he can’t remember how to speak Chinese. He can, however, remember some of his English from his childhood in the U.S. Rosalyn Neal is a bilingual aphasia specialist brought in from the U.S. to treat Li Jing.
Li Jing at first clams up because he is so demoralized by his loss of Chinese. Later on he not only clams up but refuses to interact with his wife unless he’s playing a victim. Zhou Meiling won’t communicate with her husband as she takes on his role as president of the investment company. Both of them treat each other like crap. Rosalyn Neal, while supposedly an aphasia researcher, spends most of her time acting like an ugly American version of a sorority girl. She blunders her way through Li Jing’s life, causing problems with her closeness to Li Jing.
All of these people make such bad choices and behave so badly I could not feel for any of them when things blew up in their faces. Leave your husband with your kid and then you are hurt when he isn’t home when you decide to come back? Throw your kid’s laptop against the floor and wall and cry when your wife won’t speak to you afterward? Lead a fellow expatriate on and then act hurt when his friends no longer embrace you? These are not things that endear your character to me. They make me actively hate them. Those are but an opening into the hollowness of these characters. I liked one character only, the interpreter Alan. When given a choice to do the right thing, he’s the only one in the whole damn book who chooses well.
You know the saying about how literary fiction is books about when bad things happen to people you don’t like very much. This is the epitome of that.
Given the blurbs for the book, I expected something more about the beauty of language and culture and what happens when a person is cut off from that. This is the same old people having affairs
crap set in a city with which its American readers are less familiar.
On to better books, hopefully.
A couple other blogged reviews for balance.
Title: The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai
Author: Ruiyan Xu
Imprint / publisher: St. Martin’s Press / Macmillan
Format: Advance Readers Copy
Length: 340 p.
Publication date: October 2010
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-58654-6
I received a review copy for this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program in exchange for a review to be published on LibraryThing. There are no restrictions on the content of the review. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I will donate $16.59 (the price of the book on Amazon) to the A.L.S.A.
Ouch! Sounds like a pretty miserable book. It’s not always like this. Sometimes lit fic is about good things happening to people you don’t like.
Hi, I happened on your blogsite because I am a writer of literary fiction (my new novel, Seeing Red, is due out shortly.) I am also a journalist (formerly, The Wall Street Journal). I’ve written many reviews of books in my day. I am only writing to say that I met Ruiyan at a writer’s colony here in Austerlitz, N.Y. and she is a lovely person. I have not read her book but I decided to promote it in my writer’s blog, My Story Lives, http://www.mystorylives.blogspot.com, because I know how INCREDIBLY hard it is to be a writer, and I think we writers should support each other. While I certainly respect your thoughts on the book, and your right to say you hate it (I teach literature at the University level and I always tell my students “you can hate the book, you just have to know why, AND you have to read it :) I found myself wanting to defend Ruiyan because this is her first book, and she is a very serious writer. Anyway, nice to “meet” you :) and you by the way write very well…do you write fiction? Claudia Ricci
I do not write fiction. I’m not trying to say that Ms. Xu is not a lovely person, and she may yet publish some really good fiction. I hope she does, and looks back at this one and cringes. But different people like different things. I rarely hold a differing opinion on literature against someone’s character.