Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth
By Xiaolu Guo
London-based novelist and documentary filmmaker Guo was a 2007 Orange Prize finalist for A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. She has completely re-written, in English, this story of tough, sprightly heroine Fenfang Wang, first published in 1997 in Mandarin (and earlier this year in a different, U.K.-only English translation). Fenfang, 17, leaves her mother a note and flees her rural farming village for Beijing. An odd job cleaning a movie theater brings her in contact with a low-level director and leads to higher-paying work as a movie extra, where she's a face among thousands. Her affections, stuck between volatile producer's assistant Xiaolin and beloved American student Ben, do little to lessen the hard knocks, which keep coming. Then, at the suggestion of her friend Huizi, Fenfang gives script writing a go, and things start to change. Guo beautifully captures the sense of a young girl struggling to forge a life. Fenfang's voice is bracing and welcome. (Aug.) Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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