XIAOLU GUO's second novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, was a refreshingly original and intelligent book on the fractures of the immigrant experience, seen through the prism of the strikingly awry and hilarious beginner's English of a newly arrived immigrant.

It shook up both the language and the experience of love and alienation. It was also beautifully romantic, and fully deserved its success both in sales and critical reaction.

The decision to bring out another novel hard on the heels of the Dictionary must have been pegged to that success, but I am not sure of the wisdom of that decision - while 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth is by no means a bad book, it is somewhat anti-climactic after the big bang of her previous novel.

The story revisits the broad theme of Guo's first novel in the West, Village of Stone - peasant girl from the middle of nowhere lost in the big city of Beijing. Here, Fenfang, a 17-year old girl from a village surrounded by sweet-potato fields as far as the eye can see, yearns for a life far away from this village where lives haven't changed for centuries.

People cough and spit in the same way, at the same time of the day, every day, at the same point in the road to the fields, as they have done for years, as their forefathers have done for years and their forefathers before them.

Fenfang wants the “shiny things” in life. The solution is to run away to Beijing to become a film extra in the hope of climbing the ladder to the stardom of, say, Gong Li. After scores of roles such as woman walking over the bridge in the background, or, as she puts it, “a shoulder here, a profile there, a face lost in a crowd”, the shiny things appear nowhere nearer. A relationship with Xiaolin, dogsbody on the set of a D-grade film, turns sour, and a romance with Ben, an American PhD student, ends when he returns to Boston. Her friend Huizi encourages her to write scripts and introduces her to A Streetcar Named Desire. (“Desire?” she muses. “That was a weird name for a car. I imagined that Tennessee Williams was from some shiny world swept by dramatic winds.”)

Guo has a nice line in deadpan humour and a nifty little script of a short film is inserted into the novel (narrated in what could have been called “Chapters” but “Fragments” sounds more cool, I suppose).

In the acknowledgements, Guo explains that the book was written more than ten years ago and that she has had to rewrite it after it was translated. It is funny and melancholy, scintillatingly observed, and has a very big heart, but is some distance from her achievement in Dictionary.

20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth by Xialu Guo
Chatto, £12.99

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