Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth: A Novel [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Xiaolu Guo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 5, 2008

From the author of the 2007 Orange Prize finalist A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers comes a wholly original and thoroughly captivating coming-of-age story that follows a bright, impassioned young woman as she rushes headlong into the maelstrom of a rapidly changing Beijing to chase her dreams.

Twenty-one year old Fenfang Wang has traveled one thousand eight hundred miles to seek her fortune in contemporary urban Beijing, and has no desire to return to the drudgery of the sweet potato fields back home. However, Fenfang is ill-prepared for what greets her: a Communist regime that has outworn its welcome, a city under rampant destruction and slap-dash development, and a sexist attitude seemingly more in keeping with her peasant upbringing than the country’s progressive capital. Yet Fenfang is determined to live a modern life. With courage and purpose, she forges ahead, and soon lands a job as a film extra. While playing roles like woman-walking-over-the bridge and waitress-wiping-a-table help her eke out a meager living, Fenfang comes under the spell of two unsuitable young men, keeps her cupboard stocked with UFO noodles, and after mastering the fever and tumult of the city, ultimately finds her true independence in the one place she never expected.

At once wry and moving, Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth gives us a clear-eyed glimpse into the precarious and fragile state of China’s new identity and asserts Xiaolu Guo as her generation’s voice of modern China.

Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

Guo's début novel, first published eleven years ago in China and now reworked in English, distills the rush to modernization through the experience of Fenfang, a young peasant who leaves her village for Beijing. Part of the post-Cultural Revolution generation, Fenfang is untethered from history and profoundly alone, and Guo imbues her flailing efforts to establish herself with a raw, adolescent pain. Pirated books and DVDs provide an education, as Fenfang takes cues from "Betty Blue," "Chungking Express," Marguerite Duras, and Tennessee Williams, progressing from work as an extra in state film productions to a screenwriting career. Guo is a filmmaker herself, and, if her recurrent homages occasionally cloy, Fenfang's rage to express herself carries an unmistakable autobiographical intensity. The book establishes a theme of spiritual estrangement and homesickness that has persisted in Guo's subsequent output.
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From Booklist

Fenfang has fled the dreariness of her impoverished village in a never-changing land of sweet-potato fields and made the long journey to Beijing. There she copes with wretched little apartments, a violently angry lover, and the viciousness of nosy old neighbors who, resentful of her loveliness and independence, sic the police on her. Cockroaches swarm the walls, while on the street she confronts the great press of humanity, dense smog, corruption, and repression. But things are changing in Beijing, and Fenfang is smart, tough, and funny. She works as a film extra and gets a little break in the role “Female Number Three Hundred.” Writer and filmmaker Guo, whose A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007) was a Orange Prize finalist, is a master of concision, filling each “fragment” of her alluring and admirable narrator’s life with irony, anguish, and insight. Once Fenfang recognizes that her loneliness and yearning for dignity and freedom are shared by all, she finds her voice and path to self-expression. A remarkably atmospheric, metaphoric, and piquant novel of personal and cultural metamorphosis. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 167 pages
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese; First U.S. Edition edition (August 5, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385525923
• ISBN-13: 978-0385525923
• Product Dimensions: 4.6 x 0.7 x 7.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,346,688 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Compulsive Reader's Reviews, August 5, 2008

By 

The Compulsive Reader (Big Rapids, MI, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth: A Novel (Hardcover)

Fenfang is seventeen years old when she escapes from her tiny, suffocating village, where all that awaits her is a life full of sweet potato farming. She travels to Beijing, where she works many odd jobs to stay afloat, before finally managing to become a film extra. In between making minute appearances in TV shows and films, Fenfang struggles to build a modern life for herself in the vast city of Beijing, facing sexist men, the strict Communist rules, and struggles to learn where her own destiny lies.

Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth is a highly intriguing and scintillating novel that will leave the reader with much to ponder. Fenfang is a very easygoing narrator and the story unrolls smoothly from her perspective, giving the reader an educational, but still very substantial glimpse into the bustling life of China's younger generation, all in an honest and sure voice that will make a lasting impression. This is a book that demands your complete attention, through random observations, inquisitive contemplations, and a gritty and realistic grasp on life, making the connection between readers and author an instantaneous one.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Coming of Age story set in modern Bejing, February 3, 2010

By 

Linda A. Slott "Ladyslott" (Oceanside, NY) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth (Paperback)

Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth is a small book, but it does provide an insight into a world many of us know so little about, life inside Communist China.

Told in twenty chapters, each a fragment of Fenfang's life, this book is a series of small narratives in the life of this young woman. Growing up in a small village Fenfang sees her future as a never ending farming of the sweet potato fields all around her. Her parents are silent and worn down so Fenfeng decides to pack it all in and head for the big city Bejing. At only seventeen years of age Fenfeng is a little out of her depth, and struggles to survive.

I enjoyed this novella that depicts this determined young woman's search for success. She takes a series of menial jobs slowly working her way into the movie business, playing unnamed woman in non-speaking extra roles. She is at times, brave, scared, brash and submissive. She has a few relationships with men, one a bit of a stalker, another is an American citizen who's slumming and a third that's her closest friend and obviously in love with her. Living in a handful of different apartments, she has some trouble with the Communist Neighborhood Committee; their main purpose is to spy on everyone. Most of these are old school Communists who are looked at with disdain by the younger Chinese who are obsessed with American movies and TV, all DVD's acquired on the Black Market. The clash with the old and new was particularly interesting to me.

Fenfang eventually works her way into writing a screenplay that is accepted for filming, and succeeds in leaving her life on the edges of life behind. Since Xiaolu Guo is a screenwriter herself I have to believe that this is a semi-autographical work, one that at first seems slight but grows on you and makes you wonder about these young people that will be forming the direction of the new China.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Ravenous for life, October 1, 2008

By 

Gwendolyn Dawson "Literary License" (Houston, Texas United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth: A Novel (Hardcover)

Fenfang Wang, a twenty-one-year-old woman living in Beijing, is ravenous for life. Her story begins:

"My youth began when I was twenty-one. At least, that's when I decided it began. That was when I started to think that all those shiny things in life--some of them might possibly be for me. ... Be young or die. That was my plan."

Fenfang finds a job as a minor actress of silent roles while nursing plans to sell a screenplay. She embraces Beijing but often recalls her childhood on a sweet potato farm with her peasant parents.

This novella consists of twenty "fragments," many of which are curiously supplemented with photographs. Each fragment is a kind of set piece, often centered around a meal. This disjointed structure, along with Fenfang's voice, capture the innocence and immediacy of youth without glossing over the difficulties. At one point, Fenfang despairs, "I was always drifting and believed in nothing." Twenty Fragments lacks momentum and character development but succeeds in depicting Fenfang's youthful angst. This is an engaging (and brief) book.