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UFO in Her Eyes
by Guo Xiaolu
Reviewed by Peter Gordon
Chinese author Guo Xiaolu's latest novel UFO in Her Eyes started, at least in my eyes, with several strikes against it. It is, first, rather slight in extent, and second, it makes uses of sketches, blots and blotches, blacked-out text, bits made to look like notes paper-clipped to a dossier, etc., the sorts of things now common in books designed to get teenagers to actually read something, anything. For a reader brought up on Dostoevsky and Hardy, these additional non-textual elements can be disconcerting. And then there's the title: any book with "UFO" in the title is best approached with trepidation.
But if any writer can pull this sort of thing off, it's Guo, and the result is satire with echoes of Jonathan Swift. UFO in Her Eyes is structured as police reports and interviews initiated in a Chinese backwater when on 9/11 (yes, 9/11) 2012, a peasant woman sees what is later deemed to be a UFO, faints, wakes up to find an abandoned foreigner, who has been bitten by a snake.
This triggers a chain of events that results in an investment and development boom in the tiny village, driven by the village chief, a political operator of the first order, spouting pseudo-Communist slogans, paving over fields, cutting down trees, and closing down local shops, for parking lots, shopping malls, swimming pools and cultural complexes, an outcome made even more grotesque by the fact it is not in fact that different from newspaper articles about what actually happens in China: a recent article in the New York Times about the redevelopment of Kashgar was headlined "To Protect an Ancient City, China Moves to Raze It".
And therein partly lies the rub: UFO in Her Eyes is light on plot and characterization, with language that is often raw and heavy on visual gimmickry -- a reader without background knowledge of rural Chinese development practices might mistake it for farce or perhaps a heavy-handed environmental parable rather than a rather tightly-targeted piece of satire.
Guo, in her attempts merge East and West, in language, form and content, never ceases to be an interesting writer. Whether UFO in Her Eyes entirely succeeds is open to question, but not only is it topical (and very readable by open-minded "young adults"), it also gives a fascinating view into the development of a new Chinese voice.
Was there a UFO? Who knows… and who cares?
--
Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books.
by Guo Xiaolu
Reviewed by Peter Gordon
Chinese author Guo Xiaolu's latest novel UFO in Her Eyes started, at least in my eyes, with several strikes against it. It is, first, rather slight in extent, and second, it makes uses of sketches, blots and blotches, blacked-out text, bits made to look like notes paper-clipped to a dossier, etc., the sorts of things now common in books designed to get teenagers to actually read something, anything. For a reader brought up on Dostoevsky and Hardy, these additional non-textual elements can be disconcerting. And then there's the title: any book with "UFO" in the title is best approached with trepidation.
But if any writer can pull this sort of thing off, it's Guo, and the result is satire with echoes of Jonathan Swift. UFO in Her Eyes is structured as police reports and interviews initiated in a Chinese backwater when on 9/11 (yes, 9/11) 2012, a peasant woman sees what is later deemed to be a UFO, faints, wakes up to find an abandoned foreigner, who has been bitten by a snake.
This triggers a chain of events that results in an investment and development boom in the tiny village, driven by the village chief, a political operator of the first order, spouting pseudo-Communist slogans, paving over fields, cutting down trees, and closing down local shops, for parking lots, shopping malls, swimming pools and cultural complexes, an outcome made even more grotesque by the fact it is not in fact that different from newspaper articles about what actually happens in China: a recent article in the New York Times about the redevelopment of Kashgar was headlined "To Protect an Ancient City, China Moves to Raze It".
And therein partly lies the rub: UFO in Her Eyes is light on plot and characterization, with language that is often raw and heavy on visual gimmickry -- a reader without background knowledge of rural Chinese development practices might mistake it for farce or perhaps a heavy-handed environmental parable rather than a rather tightly-targeted piece of satire.
Guo, in her attempts merge East and West, in language, form and content, never ceases to be an interesting writer. Whether UFO in Her Eyes entirely succeeds is open to question, but not only is it topical (and very readable by open-minded "young adults"), it also gives a fascinating view into the development of a new Chinese voice.
Was there a UFO? Who knows… and who cares?
--
Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books.
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