A Necessary Detachment:
Xiaolu Guo's A Lover's Discourse was reviewed in the New York Review of Books.
“The work of Xiaolu Guo both plays with this globalization of literature and rebukes it. A writer and filmmaker, she has spent the past fifteen years working in English on books and films that take on the distance between England, where she moved in 2002, and China, where she was born in 1973 (she has since worked in New York and Berlin as well). In addition to writing more than a dozen books, she has made a number of films, both documentaries and features. (I was frustrated to find that most of her movies can be watched only by e-mailing her agent.) She is clearly as wide-ranging a reader as she is a writer, with a particular affection for the French nouveau roman and other experimental fictions of the 1960s, which she often cites and argues with in her work. (Whereas Godard’s 1967 La Chinoise follows foppish French Maoists on vacation, Guo’s film She, a Chinese follows a young woman who leaves a provincial Chinese village and marries a retired teacher in London.) The problems she treats—alienation, displacement, borders—repeat like memories across her work.”