Radical

July 24, 2023
Novelist and documentarian Guo (A Lover’s Discourse) pursues “an etymology of herself” in this fragmented and fascinating memoir. Rejecting “overly written, perfectly told yet dead books,” Guo dizzyingly toggles between her native China and New York City, with occasional stops in Europe, to contemplate the influences of romantic love, language, and nature on her sense of self. The main action centers on Guo leaving behind her partner and child in Britain, traveling to New York, and beginning an affair with a man she calls “E.” Guo tells this story matter-of-factly, framing it as an attempt “to make... a female life not trapped by domestic duty and patriarchal constraints.” In addition to her time with E, Guo finds freedom in long walks in the flaneur tradition (“the absence of ‘flâneuse’ in literature reflects the reality that women’s freedom has been and still is limited,” she writes), sojourns with the natural world, and literature, particularly the works of Walt Whitman and postmodernists including Beckett and Foucault. Hyperliterate and formally inventive, this often exhilarating memoir lives up to its title and then some. Photos. Agent: Rebecca Carter, Rebecca Carter Literary.

August 1, 2023
A linguistically and structurally avant-garde contribution to the life-writing genre, Radical moves: it treks across American and British streets while wandering through centuries of Eastern and Western cultural landscapes. Divided into four multilingual chapters that include French, German, Sanskrit, and Mandarin, Guo's memoir provides snapshots of how her move to New York and return to the UK are marked by ruptures: firstly, the leaving behind of her daughter and daughter's father in the UK, and secondly, the physical parting from her lover upon leaving the U.S. as the pandemic began. Straying from the traditional memoir, Guo's fl�neur perspective allows for temporal fluidity as her everyday observations contemplate otherness, xenophobia, and sexual violence and lead to interpretations of Western canonic writers and lesser-known Eastern thinkers. Reclaiming this high theory, she penetrates scholarly musings with sharp commentary on women's oppression, challenging the male gaze with fierce accounts of feminine sexual desire. Readers interested in fragmented, intellectually stimulating discussions of timely topics, including ecofeminism and infotech, will find Guo's bonding of language with lived experience enticing.

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July 1, 2023
The award-winning novelist and filmmaker presents essays "in pursuit of an etymology of myself." In this "inner monologue," Guo, a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Awards for her memoir, Nine Continents, reflects on her recent life using the prompt of Chinese radicals, the roots "from which other words grow and meanings bloom." A radical ideogram representing sex, color, beauty, for example, gives rise to thoughts about autoeroticism, the difference between Eros and Aphrodite, and sexual joy between a man and a woman, for which the Chinese idiom is "clouds and rain." For Guo, "language is everything," with words "my very physical existence." The mind and the body, though, must be "in harmony" because "our body is the root of our emotional life, and our imagination." That she often reflects on her flower garden and sex with her lover, E, reveals Guo as not just compulsively cerebral, but deeply sensual as well. She gives form to her lexicon through the use of radicals, grouping essays under such headings as encountering, separations, enduring, and impermanence--words suggesting her deepest concerns. Early on, the author describes a visit to New York City and her affair with E. When the pandemic struck, she returned to London to live with her child and her child's father, J. There, she obsessed on her yearnings for E. The book ends with her revisiting New York two years later, when E was not there. This narrative arc will be familiar to readers of Guo's novels: a Chinese woman travels to another country, meets an English-speaking man, falls in love, and reflects on how cultural differences color her experiences. In her novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary of Lovers, Guo writes, "If you are a real artist, everything in your life is part of your art." An elegant and unreserved account of a life lived in full recognition of its possibilities.

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