Xiaolu Guo: Village of Stone

Reviewed by FEDERICO MONSALVE

In Harpers magazine Mike Meyers made a list of the names of residential high-rises constructed in the past few years in Beijing. The buildings were baptised with corporate-culture superlatives aiming to mirror the lifestyle — or long-awaited pay rises — of their tenants: Top Aristocrat, CEO, Glory Vogue, and my all-time favourite, Yuppie International Garden.

Video-store attendant Coral and her unemployed boyfriend Red live on the first floor of one of these buildings in the enormous, parched megalopolis that is Beijing.

In Village of Stone, the
25-storey complex remains unnamed, yet one gets the feeling this urban monument should be christened Basement Limbo or Clerks' Purgatory.

Apart from Red's obsession with playing frisbee, the couple don't get out much.

They have little-to-no aspirations and in the shadows of their flat they engage in a life that's nothing more than a slow-paced maiden-call to oblivion.

Yet when Coral receives a mysterious parcel from her long-forgotten hometown (the village of Stone), containing a dry eel, the salt scent of the East China Sea comes rushing back. The torrents of memory unleashed.

Her romanticised and often painful past
as an orphan is explored through a style of writing that has the visual potency of a young Gao Xingjian and the finely attuned nose of
a Chinese version of Patrick Suskind.

Coral's sedentary life is shaken even further when ghosts from her past start to reappear and force her to make choices she'd never
imagined.

The first half of the book is
a melodic remembrance of childhood. She is able to recount small details of her village life and has an affinity with language and metaphor. Unfortunately this is often stunted by images and metaphors that are repeated twice, and often thrice, perhaps in an attempt to make the book more understandable to the West.

The second half, the perennial return of the rural migrant to see her homeland, is rushed, almost dismissed, without realising that the return could have been as life-changing to Coral as the arrival of the dry eel.

This is Guo's sixth book and her first to
be translated into English and French, yet the 28-year-old is already making waves in British film after having been nominated to last year's Beck's Futures Student Film Award for her short film Far and Near.

Village of Stone is a poetic account of
a Beijing jammed between modernity and its influx of newcomers from the countryside. Unlike the Chinese Scar Literature of the 70s and 80s, Xiaolu seems to have healed from the artistic lashes of Mao's Cultural Revolution and, although still timid, is a literary talent to watch climb the high-rise to success.

* Chatto and Windus, $35.75