International bestseller R.F. Kuang is back exploring language and how it can fail us with her seventh novel, Taipei Story.
Language isn’t new for Kuang — she’s written it about before in her bestselling award-winning fantasy novel Babel: An Arcane History, and she’s been open about her personal struggles grasping Mandarin. In Taipei Story, Kuang effectively shows readers the failures of language and how language is a performance, but fails to convey that through a main character that resonates.
The book follows Lily, a Chinese-American freshman who just finished her first year at Yale. She’s travelling to Taipei for the summer to complete an intensive language program that she seems to think will bring her closer to understanding her Chinese identity and history.
Kuang credits Elif Batuman’s The Idiot as an inspiration, a novel that explores the humour and absurdity of language-learning and growing up through Selin, a first-year Harvard student learning Russian who spends the summer in Hungary teaching English. While it shares similar profound reflections, Taipei Story falls flat because Lily lacks a strong voice, unlike Selin.
The book is split into two parts.
Despite loving slow plotless fiction, the first half of the story dragged on, as Lily went through the language program using academia to work through her interpersonal relationships and the world around her. However, Lily was simply so passive. Her reflections seemed whiny, self-indulgent, and under-explored. She seemed to only skim the surface of her thoughts, leaving the meatiest, juiciest parts untouched.
The second half focuses on her grief after finding out her grandpa died. It focuses on the diasporic experience and what gets loss through the cracks of history and time, as well as Lily’s guilt for being too caught up in her own feelings and disconnection at the expense of a stronger relationship with her grandfather.
The second half was better. It should’ve come earlier in the story and been expanded upon more. I especially enjoyed when Lily imagined her grandfather’s reflections. As well, how we got to see more of Lily’s relationship to her mother and Lily’s private grappling with the nuance of wanting to leave a place but not wanting to lose what you know you must in order to leave.
Although the whole novel is told through Lily’s perspective, I don’t feel as though I really know her, and even the things I do know about her didn’t compel me. The characters around her felt too black and white, lacking the grayness that makes characters interesting.
While I didn’t believe in Lily as a character, I still enjoyed the book because I loved the real main character — language.
As someone who lived abroad in a country that didn’t speak my language, there were many parts of the novel that resonated with me, all of which revolved the idea of language. Language as a performance, language as a failing system, language as unknowable.
What stood out to me was the idea of intentionally listening; how we take for granted simply understanding the world around us. When you’re in a foreign country and you stop focusing, a “hubbub of voices” washes over you. Then it’s just you, isolated and alone in your thoughts. It takes a lot of work to parse through letters and characters on signs and menus. When sounding out vowels, it’s easy to get lost in your head trying to survive when you don’t have the words. And Kuang got that all right.
She also touched on the failure of translation, something she did beautifully with Babel, when writing about the nuance of subtitles, saying, “there was a world of difference between ‘Never mind’ and ‘You could never possibly understand’”. I remember thinking this while living in Türkiye. There seemed an impassable gap between phrases, like “güle güle” (“go smilingly”) and its English translation “bye bye,”, or “thank you for the meal” and “ellerine sağlık” (“bless your hands”).
There’s this idea that language is the key to understanding; it’s one that many of us hold, including Lily. Throughout the novel, she skillfully disproves this idea and deepens the already complicated experience of being human, of trying and failing to understand one another.
“I found this all strangely reassuring. So not all barriers come from language. You could be perfectly fluent […] and still fail to communicate anything essential,” Kuang wrote.
Tags
Book review, coming of age, language, Literature
All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s) in Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be contacted, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to eic@queensjournal.ca.