Customer Reviews

Lost in Translation

5 star:		(35)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Every once and a while you pick up a book or are introduced to a book with a theme around a culture and a series of personae that you find so incredibly foreign to your own existence that you are grateful for such a gift.   This book, while a well-written novel about a bit of a mystery, was a magnificent albeit fictional view through the author's window into the modern-day Chinese culture.   A culture so foreign and seemingly xenophobic that rare glimpses through, even a westerner's eye, are a treasure.  Alice Mannegan, whose father is a (fictional) US senator, and a bigoted and egoltistical one at that, is a young women who has done her best to melt unnoticed into the billions of the Chinese demographic landscape.  She works as a translator when she needs the work, and maintains a secret parallel life in the smoky bars of Beijing.  One day she is contracted to work as a translator for a young American archeologist named Adam Spencer who is in China tracking the potential whereabouts of the remains of the "Peking Man" (an archeological treasure) through the letters and writings of an 18th century French priest and his love.  This enchanting book is at once a political thriller, an adventure, a love story, and a novel about coming to terms with one's family, one's life, and the decisions one makes in an effort to take the right paths toward happiness.  A must read.

This novel of the intersection of language, identity, cultures and sex in an archeological expedition in China today is one of the best I have read in quite a while. With the Jesuit rebel priest and anthropologist, Teilhard de Chardin, as the leit-motif behind most of the personal interactions. the reader is offered new insights into human as well as divine love.The protagonists are an American woman trying to get as far away as possible from her racist father and the culture he ordains, an American anthropologist trying to recover Peking Man to restore his career, and a Chinese anthropologist who has been traumatized by the Cultural Revolution (called the Chaos by Chinese today)and his wife's destruction by it.Alice Mannegan's attempts to become Chinese are doomed despite her proficiency in the language and knowledge of the culture and history of China. It's painful but enthralling to watch her try to come to terms with her father, her "true Chinese man" Dr. Lin, and her possible future in China. She is not the most likeable person, but she is not repellant in any way. Just foolish in her understanding of herself and her history.Adam Spencer the American anthropologist who hires Alice as translator is the least interesting. Dr. Lin and the many Chinese actors in this tale reveal a great deal about contemporary China which I daresay most westerners,including myself, do not know.The mystery and the history of Peking Man's discovery, disappearance and possible final end is exciting. One learns much Chinese geography, customs and traditions, the subtleties of Chinese ideas, and the difficulties of life there today. We are very different from one another and we Americans do not realize how fortunate we are.As one who has lived in a foreign culture, I understand some of the difficulties an expatriate faces. This is a grand book which leaves one feeling satisfied by the truth of the emotions revealed and by the resolution of the mysteries at the core. Read it, you'll like it.

I loved this book, but I am biased. I am the same age, physical description, and emanate from the same geographical region as Alice. I also read this book while I was living in China and found it to be an accurate view of an American woman living in China. Alice is a woman who tries very hard to escape from her heritage and her past by immersing herself in the Chinese culture. This is also an approaching middle age story. Alice 36, has spent all her adult life in Beijing, and is pondering what she has to show for it all. Alice also agonizes over lost love, her biological clock running out, reconciliation with her estranged father, and future career plans.

The author manages to create novel around an actual historical event. The plot is built around a hunt for the bones of the Peking Man. They were stashed away for safekeeping during the Japanese invasion of China on the eve of WWII. They mysteriously vanished and remain unaccounted for to this day. I was so intrigued that I read some non-fiction books about the discovery of and disappearance of the Peking man, one of the oldest complete skulls ever found, and its disappearance. Fortunately, the archeologists made a plaster cast of the skull and it survived.

By the way, I noticed some criticism from some Asians who didn't like the premise of the story. I ask that they keep in mind the target audience and the cross-cultural aspects of the story. If Alice were Chinese it wouldn't be much of a story. While I was living in China I happened across a book written by a Chinese man who had attended Vanderbilt University. It was a bilingual book about how he "discovered" my city. I read it with great interest because I was curious to know how an outsider viewed my city and my culture. While it was basically a positive book I respect the fact that the author wrote about a few negative experiences he had in my city.

This book is a cannot put down, compelling read. It is one of the best books I've read in so many ways. The characters are fantastic, and so real. The historical aspects are presented in such a fascinating way --sculpted into the story so well. It is also a lesson in an entirely different culture. I hope Nicole Mones writes many more books -- though the research and attention to detail that went into this one must have taken years. There were so many plots and subplots in this book -- it is one I can invision myself picking up again at some point.

Recently it has been hard to read fiction that has more than stick-figure characters. Not so, in Lost in Translation. the book would be good for its mystery-story quality, but what makes it special is the character development. The young female American translator who introduces us to China and then takes us on a seach more the missing bones forming a link to the past, is a real person in Mones' book. Although not graphically sexual, this woman exudes an exciting sensuality. Her growing attraction to the chinese scholar she accompanies on the search is the heart of a story within a story. I didn't want the book to end. I want to know more about this exotic woman. Not since Pat Conroy's Prince of Tides have I found people in a novel that felt like they were part of my life. I hope Ms. Mones will do it again in the future.

The key to this novel lies in its epigraph, a quotation from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French anthropologist and priest whose explorations of fossil hominids in China in the early 20th century forms the backdrop for this ambitious novel. "...it would seem that we have only got to look at ourselves in order to understand the dynamic relationships existing between the within and the without of things at a given point in the universe. In fact so to do is one of the most difficult of all things." Mones's novel is not only an anthropological, quasi-Indiana Jones search for relics (in this case, the remains of Peking Man), but it is also a novel about its main character's search to make the complicated connections de Chardin speaks about in the quotation. Alice is an American interpreter living in China in an unspecified time period close to the present. Alienated from her Congressman father because of his overt racism, Alice seeks to leave America behind and become Chinese. As she joins the search for the skeleton of Peking Man, Alice confronts her own demons. The book works at more than one level, but never fully succeeds as a thriller or as a character study. Nonetheless, the title captures quite well the difficulties of trying to move between cultures, never being sure what has been lost in translation. In fact, as wenavigate between thewithin and the without, don't we all lose something in translation, an insight the book portrays rather well. This is a novel worth reading and worth discussing with a book group.

It amazes me that once in a while I pick up a really good book, buy it and shelf it. Then when desparate for another written diversion, I finally read the waiting tome.

Thus, having recently finished Amy Tan's latest novel and being intrigued with the discovery of the Peking Man in 1929, I read Nicole Mones' intriguing novel with a plot that also centers on the 1980's search for the Peking Man bones that were lost during WWII.

I actually felt quite at home with Mones' book, as I had experienced a Tan baptismal of cultural information. Although Alice/Mo-Ai-Li is a radical departure from the women in Tan's book, her restless, liberated, amoral behavior reflects her desperate search for inner peace. For it is with Alice that the reader discovers a revered Chinese culture in which foreigners are second best and the skills of an American interpreter are seen as only talking.

Curiously, Alice and her near penniless employer, Adam Spencer, get themselves into Mongol lands where the dragon bones/early man's bones are thought to be hidden. Spencer's need to be an honored scientist parallels Alice's need to immerse herself in a culture other than her own. She tries to escape her forced notoriety as the Alice of her racist U. S. Senator father. Spencer tries to escape his low profile professorial position in order to win the admiration of his young son. In a plot that feels a bit like Indiana Jones, Alice and Adam, accompanied by two Chinese paleontoligists, manipulate their way through the military watch dogs of the Peoples Liberation Army to the lost treasure.

There is romance, very sensual sex, self-discovery, and a great twist at the end. If you enjoyed The Bonesetter's Daughter, Lost in Translation will add to your enjoyment and knowledge of China in modern times.

I don't know how accurately she portrayed China, the language, the people, etc. and frankly, I don't care. All I know is that couldn't put the book down. I love books with strong characters who are searching for understanding of themselves and the meaning of their lives, who struggle, are not perfect, but don't quit the journey. This struggle was embedded in a plot that was fascinating, plausible, and that had an ending that was not pat but feasible and satisfying. I can't wait to read more of this novelist's works.

If you read books to escape to far off places and see fascinating sights, this is for you. If you like books where you can relate to empathize with the main character, this might not be your cup of tea. Alice clearly had some serious self esteem issues that she dealt with in rather unorthadox ways. When I look at her reaction to people, though, I think that she is, in her own way, as racially biased as was her father. This would be an excellent choice for a discussion group.

A good, page-turning read to whisk you away to a foreign land full of mystery and romance. I thought it was a nice Eastern counterpart to the Western deserts of Ondaatje's English Patient, though certainly not as well written. I agree with other reviewers that suggest the Chinese phrases got in the way... and I understood them! I'd hate to think if one didn't. I appreciate Mones' way with characters more than her understanding of China-- like Alice Mannegan herself, she's more on the outside than she thinks. It's good to finally see China portrayed in a humanistic way, with each Chinese person as individual in a book written by an American. One final note: Amazon's review is terribly offensive-- "a yen for sex with Chinese men"? Hello? The yen is *Japanese*. You may think you're cute, but you're just being ignorant. and the rest of the review is equally offensive in its declarations of "authenticity." Keep that in mind when you read the book. All in all, it is a good book that doesn't deserve such a simplistic review.