Film review: Funny Games (Austria)

Before I get started on my book reviews for 20 books of summer, I wanted to do a little write-up of this really horrible 1997 Austrian film, written and directed by Michael Haneke. Funny Games, notorious for its focus on sadistic violence, is now heralded as something of an art-house classic, and inspired a 2007 frame-by-frame US remake, also written and directed by Haneke, and starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, which I haven’t seen and never will.

Funny Games is a home invasion movie, and is disconcerting from the start. My husband Anthony refused to watch it with me. As did my 17-year-old daughter. No one else was in the house. So I sat alone on the sofa, waiting to be entertained, anticipating a certain amount of adrenaline but not expecting to be horrified.

The film opens with a married couple, Anna and Georg (played by married actors Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Mühe) arriving at their lakeside holiday home, complete with a boathouse and rural setting, to spend a pleasant break relaxing and meeting up with friends in neighbouring houses. They are accompanied by their tween son Georgi (Stefan Clapczynski) and friendly Alsatian dog Rolfi. However, their peaceful idyll is almost instantly interrupted by the arrival of two sinister young men (played by Frank Giering and Arno Frisch), who lull the family into a false sense of security by claiming to be friends of their neighbours. What plays out is horrific but I won’t detail it.

What’s particularly brutal about this horror/thriller is its callous knowingness. It feels designed solely to provoke. There are two baddies, ‘Peter’ and ‘Paul’. Paul is more ostentatiously evil than the other, and he repeatedly breaks the fourth wall, speaking directly to the camera or throwing the viewer a knowing smirk. This makes us complicit, but also makes it impossible to forget that the world of the film is a fiction, and a horribly uncomfortable fiction at that. The family have opportunities to fight back against the hostage-takers, but in one scene, when they successfully begin to do just that, Paul simply picks up the TV remote control and ‘rewinds’ the scene to make it go the way he intended. Again this highlights the powerless of the victims, but I didn’t enjoy the relish that Haneke takes in manipulating the viewer, and the victims’ fates, in this way. The early real life deaths of Susanne Lothar and Ulrich Mühe didn’t make me feel any less unsettled.

Interestingly, after completing my initial review, I googled the film as, at face value, I wasn’t wholly convinced of its art house credentials. However, I read an article on indiewire.com that claimed that “Haneke conceived of the project as a way to comment on what he saw as excessive gruesomeness in the media, setting out to make a deliberately pointless film to prompt audiences to reflect about the amount of brutality they’ll tolerate on screen”. Wikipedia told me, in its entry for Funny Games that film scholar Brigitte Peucker has argued that the function of the film is to “assault the spectator”: in which case it can only be described as a success.

Overall progress in bucket list aim to Read and Watch the World (by reading/reviewing for each country at least 5 books, a mix of fiction and non-fiction, 5 films, a TV programme, an artist, food and music)

AUSTRIA

Books:

Film/TV:

Artists:

Gustav Klimt/Egon Schiele

Food

Lebkuchen

Music

Parov Stelar

20 Books of Summer 2024

It’s that time of year again, when I sign up for Cathy’s challenge. It’s very relaxed: pick a number of books to read and review between 1 June and 1 September. Every year I spend a long time carefully selecting 20 titles (possibly the bit that is most fun), then inevitably fail to get through them and review about half of those I do read… I do love choosing though, and I’m feeling quite excited and positive about my choices. At the end of this challenge I should have gained a fair amount of shelf space, assuming I rehome a few once they have been read! (see pic below).

  1. Calcutta by Amit Chaudhuri: a non-fiction account of living in Calcutta in 2009-11. I loved Chaudhuri’s 2022 book ‘Sojourn’ and am keen to catch up on more of his work, and bought a second-hand copy of this book earlier in May. (305 pages.)
  2. Love’s Work by Gillian Rose: a classic work of memoir, recently republished by Penguin, which I bought in April. (95 pages.) ✓
  3. Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux: a short book by the French writer, published by Fitzcarraldo and requested from the library, documenting a two-year affair with a married man. (Just 48 pages, hurray!) ✓
  4. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert: I bought this years ago second-hand and it’s clagging up my shelves. Expecting to find it quite irritating, but who knows! (334 pages.) ✓
  5. Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman: subtitled ‘A Life in a New Language’ this book was a much-wanted present bought from my wish list a couple of years ago, which I still haven’t got to. Hoffman moved from Poland to the USA at the age of 13 in 1959. (280 pages.)
  6. National Dish by Anya von Bremzen: the final work of non-fiction on my list, from the library and subtitled ‘Around the World in Search of Food, History and the Meaning of Home’. (310 pages.)
  7. The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: the book of the moment, I’m hoping for enjoyable time-travel nonsense, though I’m slightly alarmed by the Times newspaper’s description of its “extreme whimsy”. (350 pages.)
  8. The Echoes by Evie Wyld: a brand new release that promises literary experimentation combined with her usual readability. (225 pages.) ✓
  9. The New Life by Tom Crewe: another library loan, a much-lauded 2023 debut novel about gay men and illicit romance in the Victorian era. (368 pages.) ✓
  10. On Beauty by Zadie Smith: a 2006 novel that has been on my TBR for a very long time – I own a chunky hardback second-hand copy. (450 pages.)
  11. Intimacies by Katie Kitamura: psychological lit fic that I borrowed from the library after reading another blogger’s review. Amazon says: “An interpreter has come to The Hague to escape New York and work at the international court. A woman of many languages and identities, she is looking for a place to finally call home”. (225 pages.) ✓
  12. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray: a 2023 Booker contender and an An Post Irish book of the year. Tragicomic and “purely pleasurable” says the Observer. Though I’m put off by the fact that he wrote ‘Skippy Dies’, which I was not a big fan of. (A chunkster of 642 pages.)
  13. The Reader by Bernard Schlink: the international bestseller and modern classic. (220 pages.) ✓
  14. Friend of my Youth by Amit Chaudhuri: “a novelist called Amit Chaudhuri visits his childhood home of Bombay”, where he is unable to locate a childhood friend. (164 pages.)
  15. Garden by the Sea by Merce Rodereda: a Spanish novel set over six summers in a seaside villa in the 1920s. (202 pages.)
  16. White Tiger by Aravind Adiga: an Indian novel that won the Booker in 2008 – and I’ve had it unread on my Kindle since 2011. (292 pages.) ✓
  17. Under a Rock by Chris Stein: love a rock memoir (304 pages). ✓
  18. The Lover by Marguerite Duras: a classic short work of French literature (84 pages). ✓
  19. My Friends by Hisham Matar: a 2024 release, from the library, on three friends living in political exile, by the famed author. (456 pages.) ✓
  20. The Details by Ia Genberg: I don’t know much about this Swedish book, except that it was in contention for this year’s International Booker. And is fairly short! (156 pages.)

Total: 5,672 pages, which works out at 61 pages a day (quite a lot for me). Plus those 20 reviews: I’m aiming for a steady pace of one book review every four to five days, with seven in June, six in July and seven in August. Looking forward to following other people’s progress.

My Top 10 Tracks from Argentina

I’ve been enjoying listening to music from Argentina this month, and not only tango (with roots that date back to the 19th century slave trade), which remains popular, especially in Buenos Aires, and was rejuvenated in the early 2000s. Here’s my summary, with Spotify links.

  1. Astor Piazzolla (1921-92): Otoño Porteño – with pianist Daniel Barenboim. The ‘father of nuevo tango’, Piazzolla incorporated jazz and classical music to create a new form of tango, but his work received a tepid reception at home during his lifetime. “Without question the most important musical force to come from Argentina since Gardel” says my trusty manual on world music (a charity shop find, published by Routledge in 2005, so undoubtedly not the most up to date book out there, but very useful!).
  2. Por Una Cobeza by Carlos Gardel. Achingly beautiful. Suave working-class hero Gardel can be credited with bringing tango to worldwide attention, and transforming it into a vocal form, before his death in a plane crash in 1935. The link is to a Youtube clip of Colin Firth and Jessica Biel dancing in 2008 to this tune in the film Easy Virtue.
  3. Vasos Vacios by Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. A 1990s track by the ska and Latin rock band. Cuban guest singer Celia Cruz’s vocals really make this song.
  4. Fearless by Lola Ponce. There’s a Madonna feel to Lola Ponce’s vocals on this fierce English-language pop song, from her 2004 album of the same name.
  5. Santa Maria (del Buen Ayre) by The Gotan Project. I love this so much. The Gotan (an Argentinian slangy anagram of ‘tango’) Project in the early 2000s aimed to reinvent tango for the 21st century, creating ‘sultry soundscapes’ (a nice turn of phrase, but not mine – it’s from my 1001 Albums to hear before you die book!) and blending traditional ‘mystic’ tango with a modern, slower and Jamaican-influenced tango.
  6. Marimba by Kermesse. A 2020 release by an Argentinian duo who fuse electronic beats with a dancy world music feel. My husband Anthony calls it “ethno-dance bollox from a serial Deep Forest-botherer” (despite not knowing what their other tracks sounds like). Fine, but I like it. Have to say Ant’s music reviews are certainly more entertaining than mine, if less informative (see Parov Stelar).
  7. L’Orilla by Federico Aubele. Electronic, with a bit of Spanish guitar and a sultry female vocal. His track Somewhere Else, with vocals by Melody Gardot, has a similar feel.
  8. Ilalo by Chancha Via Circuito. A bit of ‘Alt Latino’ from the 2018 album Bienaventuranza. A fusion of electronic music and digital cumbia by a DJ, producer and composer from Buenos Aires.
  9. Almost finally, songs by the late artist Atahualpa Yupanqui (1908-1992), included, for example, on the album ‘From Argentina to the World’ (released in 1996, after his death). Included not because I especially love the music, but because he’s the leading example of an artist using folk music as political protest, a movement (el nuevo cancionero) that emerged in the 1940s in Argentina. It developed as a way to challenge the dictatorships and juntas of the late 20th century, and deals with the difficulties of rural peasants, and urges peace.
  10. Mercedes Sosa (1935-2009). Another influential devotee of el nuevo cancionero, with a stunning strong voice.

Book Review: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (Sri Lanka)

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida won the Booker Prize in 2022 and is a fantastically imaginative, often darkly humorous, beautifully written feat of politically-minded speculative fiction.

The book is set in the Sri Lankan capital Colombo in 1990, during the civil conflict. This is a world of violence, corruption and disappearances. Though the protagonist, Maali, is no longer part of it: he’s in the afterlife, a mash-up of petty inefficient bureaucracy and horror movie.

In life, Maali (“Photographer. Gambler. Slut.”) was a 35-year-old war photographer, a compulsive gambler, and a gay man with a proclivity for beautiful young guys. Until he was brutally murdered and dismembered. He can’t remember the circumstances of his death, and he’s told by the powers that be in the celestial waiting room that he has seven moons (ie days) in which to figure out who killed him, and why, and to make sure that his controversial secret stash of photos ends up in the right hands. This is definitely the first detective novel I’ve read where the deceased person is the investigator.

The character of Maali is very loosely inspired by the real case of a murdered journalist and closeted gay man, Richard de Zoysa. Maali has left behind a boyfriend, DD (loved but extensively cheated on), and a good female friend, Jaki, both of whom are also determined to find out what happened to him. Seven Moons also comes with a large extended cast of the living and non-living: corrupt politicians, errant family members, spooks and demons. Karunatilaka has a vivid turn of phrase: one character is described as having “a smile that molested a thousand interns“.

In places the book is extremely violent, and brutal in its descriptions of (sometimes real-life) atrocities. It is lightened by humour, which rather than feeling inappropriate instead made it possible for me to traverse the book without being overwhelmed by the horror. It would definitely be best avoided by some readers though.

On the cover of the paperback, The Times describes the book as a combo of Stranger Things and Salman Rushdie. This does the book a disservice: it’s more high culture than Stranger Things and I found it less arrogant and more readable than Salman Rushdie’s fiction (though I was gripped by his new memoir Knife). If I have a criticism it is that Seven Moons is perhaps a tad overlong, at just over 400 pages. I felt that the action sagged in the last one-third of the novel – although the ending was worth the wait.

Book Review: Sidesplitter: How To Be From Two Worlds at Once by Phil Wang (Malaysia)

I have an Audible subscription and often struggle to choose my monthly book as I find so many narrators really irritating (mea culpa). Having enjoyed this audio book, written and narrated by British/Malaysian comic Phil Wang, I’m thinking work by comedians might be the way to go.

The book ticked a few boxes for me in terms of subject matter. Wang has a British mother and Chinese-Malaysian father, and although born in the UK he moved to Malaysia within weeks of his birth and was brought up and educated in Sabah, Borneo, only moving to the UK in his late teens.

I love a culture-shock story, and I’m hugely interested in the stories of those who are multi-lingual or who have been compelled to adapt to a new society, whether willingly as a traveller or student (eg Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton), or through less fortunate circumstances, perhaps as a refugee (eg the classic kids book When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr).

Wang pokes fun at the idiosyncracies of both British and Malaysian culture. Malaysian cuisine sounds amazing (except the deserts), and made we want to seek out a restaurant pronto. British food is always an easy target (although has improved immeasurably), but he makes some funny observations about the national aversion to flavour – unless it’s English mustard or Marmite – and the strange way that, considering the UK is an island nation, so many people are squeamish about eating fish.

One chapter covers language. Wang speaks English, Malay (“relatively easy to learn and mercifully hard to forget”) and (some) Mandarin (easy to forget, as if it was an “extremely long password” or “designed specifically to punish those who would dare to leave China and curse them with muteness if they ever returned”). He gives a hilarious account of attempting to film in China with a more-limited-than-remembered vocabulary. Most Malaysians know both Malay and English, and many know more, and being multi-lingual is very much the norm. In the UK, of course, some people seem to almost take pride in not knowing another language: where’s the motivation?

This book covers some serious topics and is informative amid the humour. Wang discusses the inconsistencies of colonialism, Malaysia’s route to independence, the difficulties of having a dual identity, the irrationalities of cancel culture (“culture is appropriation”) and his experiences of casual racism in the UK.

But the book also made me laugh out loud at frequent intervals, while Phil Wang’s delivery lifted the content, and I suspect made it more immediately engaging than it would be on paper.

Book review: Great British Chefs – Kitchen Twists

My husband was a judge last year for the Guild of Food Writers, for the category of Best Self-published Book. Looking at the books after the competition was over I didn’t expect to find a new favourite. I didn’t expect much at all from a self-published book – revealing some unpalatable prejudice on my part. But when I flipped through Great British Chefs: Kitchen Twists though I was stunned and delighted to find a recipe for my favourite childhood treat, which I always called ‘minty chocolate squares’.

I have only ever seen these for sale in two locations in the last 50 years: in Oldrids department store in the small English market town of Boston in the 1980s, and in a caff near Loch Lomond in Scotland about five years ago.

Oldrids (‘Boston’s own department store’) closed down years ago, and anyway I’ve lived in London for three decades, but back in the day minty chocolate squares were a highly prized treat. Mum only ever took me to the restaurant in Oldrids after a dental check-up. That’s a maximum of two opportunities a year to eat a minty choc square. What’s more, the minty choc squares were rare even in the sole purveyor of such glories, and I was only allowed to go if I hadn’t needed a filling (thankfully a rare but NOT UNKNOWN occurrence).

So let’s estimate that, prior to opening Great British Chefs: Kitchen Twists, I had eaten less than 15 of these sweet delicacies over my entire lifespan, and only one in the last 30 years.

Now, I have the power to conjure such treats whenever I wish, and what’s more, they are astonishingly easy to make. Pure pleasure, and without the need even for an oven.

The concept of the book (published in 2022) is classic recipes, which have been pimped by the Great British Chefs teams to give them a contemporary, original or inspiring twist, and inject an extra dose of flavour into a traditional dish. There are several clearly laid out sections, focusing on Small Plates, Weeknight Favourites, Comfort Food, Date Night, Summer Feasts, Sunday Lunches, Treats and Desserts. There are tons of recipes I’m keen to try out (bearing in mind too that I HATE cooking, although admittedly love eating).

I’m not much of a meat-eater, but one recipe adds merguez sausages and harissa to toad in the hole, while another adds crab to a croque monsieur. I want to try the sweetcorn smash burgers with candied jalapenos, the tuna and tomato ‘tomato tonnato’ salad, and the marmite-battered fried fish sandwiches with lemony fried potatoes. The book is available in the usual hardback and ebook versions, but also as a PDF from the Great British Chefs online shop.

March ’24 Round-Up/Plans for April

Books Read

My favourite read last month was The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez, which read like barely disguised autobiography and reflected on lockdown life in a borrowed flat with an unwanted, much younger flatmate and a needy parrot. It referenced lots of other writers (Virginia Woolf, Annie Ernaux etc. etc.) and was intelligent, reflective and often quite funny. (5* for me)

I also enjoyed a memoir of living in Buenos Aires in the 1990s, Bad Times in Buenos Aires by Miranda France, which mixed some dark history and serious issues with humour and witty anecdote. (4*)

Less said about the Jeeves book I tried the better (P. G. Wodehouse, 1*), and I found new release Piglet by Lottie Hazell tedious and kind of pointless (1*). Yellowface by R. F. Kuang is another book that has attracted a lot of hype, and it was a solid read, but I didn’t love it (3*).

I meant to review Colum McCann‘s Dancer for Reading Ireland month, but my review tally for March is very poor. However, I did read it at least, so that is one book off the TBR. A multi-perspective view of the legendary ballet-dancer Rudolf Nureyev it was a bit of a mixed bag for me, as some sections worked better than others (Nureyev’s fictionalized diary being one part that very much didn’t work for me). McCann had done his research though, and he captured the loneliness and glamour of his life after Nureyev’s defection to the West effectively and without resorting to cliche. (3*)

Films

I streamed 2013’s Gravity (not impressed) as well as 2020 release Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Chadwick Boseman stole the show), also re-watched The Menu (2022), which is a highly entertaining piece of ‘kill the rich’ comedy-horror. At the cinema, I saw Zone of Interest, which was devastating (and accomplished), to the extent that when I tried to describe it to my husband the next morning I burst into tears.

Art

My mum came to London to visit for a weekend and we made the most of my under-used Tate membership and went to see the Yoko Ono show at Tate Modern and the fascinating John Singer Sargent show at Tate Britain. That was the more enjoyable show, though I got the giggles from some of Yoko Ono’s more avant garde work (maybe I’m not the target audience for most conceptual art – see top of post).

The Sargent show juxtaposed some of his most iconic portraits with items pictured in the paintings: dresses or accessories. It was sumptuous.

March cultural highs and lows/Aprils TBR

TV

On Apple TV we’ve been watching The New Look (about Dior and Chanel and their experiences during the 40s in Nazi-occupied Paris) as well as Palm Royale, a much more light-hearted look at a social climber in 1960s America.

Plans for April

Here’s the pile of everything on my list for April (plus Woolf‘s The Years for #1937month which is in transit!).

Documentary Film Review: Navalny (Russia)

“My message for the situation if I am killed is very simple: don’t give up.”

When I heard of the death of Aleksei Navalny, Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic inside Russia, I involuntarily gasped out loud. It probably shouldn’t have come as such a shock, given the brazen brutality of the Putin dictatorship. I think my horror and sadness largely resulted from having previously watched the Oscar-winning documentary Navalny, filmed in Germany during 2020, when Navalny was recovering there after the near-successful Novichok assassination attempt against him in Russia.

The film follows Navalny’s life in Germany, the determination by the investigative organization Bellingcat (led by “a nice and very kind Bulgarian nerd with a laptop”) to unearth the perpetrators of the poisoning, and Navalny’s return to Moscow and inevitable detention in early 2021. The film combines political intrigue, biopic and farce, and was again made available on BBC iplayer in the UK after his death from ‘sudden death syndrome’ – which can be translated as state-sponsored murder – on 16 February 2024.

Bellingcat, working with Navalny’s team, was able to prove that he had been poisoned – and how and by whom – after an investigation that showed evidence of unprofessionalism and even idiocy from members of the Russian security services. As a piece of pro-Navalny propaganda the film could hardly have been better. Navalny – whose corruption-busting videos attracted some 30m. YouTube subscribers – was charismatic, humorous, engaging, fiercely determined, altogether human. Memes sprung up all over the web after the video evidence was released of Navalny tricking an FSB agent into admitting that the Novichok used to poison him had been administered by infiltrating his underwear. Putin’s regime shook off the revelation by suggesting Navalny demonstrated “a Freudian fascination with his own crotch”. But Putin was clearly rattled by Navalny, a man whose name he refused to say out loud (resorting to circuitous formulations, my personal favourite being “the man you mentioned who can be called whoever”).

Navalny wasn’t a saint, and some of his more questionable demonstrations of nationalism, repeatedly picked over by the Western media, were challenged by the film’s Director Daniel Roher. But Navalny was an incredibly brave and strong-willed man with an appealing sense of the ridiculous and a clearly loving family life. Do watch this film.

Feb ’24 Round-Up/Plans for March ’24

My reading hasn’t been up to speed recently, but I got through seven books in February, including (finally) A. S. Byatt’s Possession, as well as the Xiaolu Guo book I reviewed last week. Tellywise I’ve been enjoying the new Mr and Mrs Smith series on Amazon Prime, with Donald Glover and Maya Erskine. It’s very entertaining, with some great cameos. I don’t much remember the 2005 Brangelina film on which it’s loosely based, but I think this is better, the two leads have great chemistry, and it can be very funny. And I’ve loved One Day of course, it’s a real nostalgia-fest and has reminded me how much I loved the book.

It was my birthday early in the month, and I enjoyed going to see Standing at the Sky’s Edge at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in London with my Sheffield friend Emily. It’s set in one flat in Sheffield’s Park Hill over three decades, with events told in a series of songs by Richard Hawley. It was very sad though, and I’m slightly embarrassed to confess that my trip to Strictly Live at the London O2 was more fun, albeit 100 times more cheesy.

I saw a couple of exhibitions, aside from the Myanmar show that I’ve already written about. At the British Museum I saw a newly opened show Legion: Life in the Roman Army, which was a story of violence, social mobility – and endless bureaucracy. The exhibition was built around the story of one individual, informed by surviving correspondence from a young solder to his family: after 25 years’ service he was able to retire with a pension worth 10 years’ pay. When he started out in the navy, though, he resented the lack of attention paid to him by his colleagues, and said he might as well be “a toilet sponge on a stick”, which made me smile, and which suddenly made ancient Rome feel much closer. Highlights were the crocodile armour – literally made of tanned crocodile skin – and the amazingly well-preserved Draco dragon standard, pictured above. The label alongside said that the bronze standard head would have had a tube made of colourful materials attached to it, which would trail behind the rider making a whistling sound to emulate a terrifying beast.

I also went on a day trip to Brighton to see my daughter, and we saw the Lee Miller: Dressed exhibition at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. I was fascinated by her outfits, plus her special suitcase for shoes, which held 12 different pairs. The highlight of the day though was seeing a murmuration of starlings off the pier – it was mesmerising, and I missed my train because of it!

As for films, I’ve seen a couple: Wonka, which was a bit disappointing, though Hugh Grant stole the show, and All of Us Strangers, starring Andrew Scott, which was evocative and moving, but also confused the hell out of me.

My husband is going to be in Kyoto for a week this month (so jealous, I’ve always wanted to go to Japan), so it’s possible I will have more time over the next few days (or less since I’ve no one to share the school drop-offs and cooking with). Plans for March include reading ahead for 1937 week, and attempting to find suitable reading material for me to participate in Cathy’s annual Reading Ireland month and Paula’s Reading Wales 2024 (though I can’t find any Welsh books at home at the moment!).

My tbr pile currently looks like this.

Book Review: A Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo (China)

This was a very enjoyable coming of age tale from my local library. It’s not a dictionary! Instead it tells the story of 23-year-old Zhuang (or Z), who is sent by her parents to London to study English at a language school for an extended period.

In a monthly journal-style format, she describes her linguistic trials and her difficulties in accustoming herself to the strange new culture (complete with strange food), and the much more individualistic people. As the months progress her writing, initially tentative and inarticulate, becomes increasing fluent and expressive, reflecting her diligent studies at her language school – as well as the influence of an older man who she meets at the cinema within a few weeks of her arrival.

This is something of an odd couple romance: he is 20 yrs older than Z and bisexual, having had most of his sexual relationships with other men, and the power dynamic is certainly problematic from a 2024 perspective (and probably always!). Z has limited English and has had no sexual experience with anyone at all. She makes unexpected assumptions about the relationship, including that her new boyfriend is inviting her to stay indefinitely (when she asks to see his place, and he replies ‘be my guest’), and that, as her partner, he will pay for everything.

It’s a rom-com of sorts, full of quirky insights into the differences between British and Chinese culture. For example, Z is incredulous at her boyfriend’s vegetarianism. I found certain linguistic differences fascinating to read about: the conditional tense that we use in the UK is new to Z, and she rages against circuitous British uses of language like “I’m going to go…”

As the first flush of romance begins to pall, paradoxically the couple’s communication difficulties intensify as the cultural obstacles to their intimate relationship become more evident, even while Z’s language skills are improving rapidly.

The story develops beyond the domestic sphere and is something of a psychogeography of navigating London as a young foreign woman and, after her boyfriend encourages her to use her summer holidays to explore more widely, as a woman negotiating wider European travel alone. The book is a deceptively quick and easy read, even while it tackles important issues of identity, alienation and assimilation.

Xiaolu Guo grew up in China before moving to the UK as a young adult, and she says the language side of the novel at least is semi-autobiographical. She has continued to live outside China, and has described the need she felt to sacrifice her attachment to her homeland in order to pursue artistic freedom. She has published widely, and this novel, which came out in 2007, is the first that she wrote in English, and was nominated for high-profile prizes, including being shortlisted for the Orange Prize.