![]() There is a quest that we, as readers, must assume.įragments d’un discours amoureux, Roland Barthes, Points, 2020 / A Lover’s Discourse, by Roland Barthes, trans by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang. In Barthes’ essay, the lover’s voice makes language shiver in the anguish of losing again what was once already lost. Language becomes the construct of the lover’s experience. ![]() The body becomes language, a fissured vase that is riddled with the fear of rupture and repetition. Borrowing the imagery of other great writers and thinkers (Plato’s, Goethe’s, Nietzsche’s, Sade’s, Blanchot’s…), he constructs a Dis-cursus: a path that the lover follows where an I is exposed , a subject that must endure the silence of the loved one. We traverse the wound of the lover through language. Roland Barthes in A lover’s discourse impels us to pierce and question the reality of love. from Nietzsche to Zen, from Ruysbroek to Debussy, the book might be considered an encyclopaedia of that affirmative discourse which is the lovers. As we read, we cherish the empathy of the Lovers experience, because we, as the voice we read, are also hoping, waiting, and embracing the abyss. His quest resides not in the other, but in the existence with the other. The lover conquers or fails in his speech. My language trembles with desire.” -Roland Barthes It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. She was a judge for the Booker Prize in 2019, and is currently a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York.“ Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. She has directed several award-winning films including She, A Chinese, and documentaries about China and Britain. In 2013 Xiaolu was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. Her recent memoir, Once Upon a Time in the East, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award, the Jhalak Prize and the Rathbones Folio Award 2018, and was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. Her books include Village of Stone which was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth which was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and I Am China which was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. She studied at the Beijing Film Academy and published six books in China before moving to London in 2002. ![]() ![]() Playing with language and the cultural differences that her narrator encounters as she settles into life in a post-Brexit Britain, Xiaolu Guo shows us how this couple navigate these differences, and their romance, whether on their unmoored houseboat or in a stifling flatshare in east London, or journeying through other continents together… Suffused with a wonderful sense of humour, this intimate and tender novel asks universal questions: what is the meaning of home when we’ve been uprooted? How can a man and woman be together? And how best to find solid ground in a world of uncertainty? She knew she would be lonely, adrift in the city, but will her new relationship bring her closer to this land she has chosen, will their love give her a home?Ī Lover’s Discourse is an exploration of romantic love told through fragments of conversations between the two lovers. A story of desire, love and language - and the meaning of home - told through conversations between two loversĪ Chinese woman comes to London to start a new life, away from her old world. ![]()
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