RaveBook Post[A Lover\'s Discourse] shares its title with Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, and like Barthes’s book it takes a fragmented form, that of casual conversations, mostly between two lovers. More important than this nod to Barthes, though, is the novel’s own singular linguistic texture and the ongoing jolt of its political setting. Guo keenly inverts the anthropological gaze onto the British, their language and other cultural peculiarities. Her new arrival faces a society that cannot agree on its own boundaries or nature, apparently at war with itself. Within this she calmly considers the meaning of artistic authenticity in the age of mass production ... A Lover’s Discourse examines what it is to be alone within language and burrowing into a new language, while reconciling it with your native tongue ... Guo’s prose has a plain, precise, and somewhat documentary quality ... In Guo’s trapping of the humorous minutiae of language and loss, she opens her literary borders to a playful and nuanced meadow.
Sheila Heti
PositiveThe Globe and MailThe book, described as a \'fictional notebook,\' is a recording of the curiosity and conundrums of one woman, Sheila. The form of this inquiry owes more to social anthropology or documentary than fiction. This is a beguiling choice on Heti\'s part that is stimulating when blended into literary fiction ... Heti takes consistent pleasure in exploring contradiction and injecting erratic humour. (Her humour has the clout of a cricket bat) ... The most engaging part of the novel is the platonic, intellectual love affair between Sheila and Margaux and their respective learning and negotiation of how a person should be - and the problems that manifest when a person \'is\' or \'does be\' ... If such a novel sounds like hard work, it\'s not. If anything, it\'s not hard enough work. When you go to this extent to invoke and provoke with form, we want challenging content too, so Heti could have gone much further ... Curious and combative company.
