MCLC: Guo Xiaolu and Jonathan Franzen

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Anne Henochowicz <anne at chinadigitaltimes.net>
Subject: Guo Xiaolu and Jonathan Franzen
***********************************************************

Source: China Real Time blob, WSJ (1/20/14):
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/01/20/chinese-novelist-guo-to-jonat
han-franzen-american-lit-massively-overrated/?KEYWORDS=xiaolu+guo

Chinese Novelist Guo to Jonathan Franzen: American Lit. ‘Massively
Overrated’

When Chinese writer Mo Yan nabbed the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012,
becoming the first Chinese citizen to claim the award, it launched a
debate about why China, despite a long and rich literary tradition, had to
wait so long to earn the Nobel committee’s respect. Were the works of
Chinese writers somehow less universal than those of writers in other
countries?

At the Jaipur Literature Festival in India over the weekend, Chinese-born
novelist Xiaolu Guo, went on the offensive, attacking the international
dominance of Anglophone novels during a panel discussion with celebrated
American author Jonathan Franzen on “The Global Novel.” As WSJ’s Raymond
Zhong reports, Ms. Guo, who currently lives in the U.K., was the only
member of the panel who writes in multiple languages:

“When I write in English,” Ms. Guo said, “I feel freer.” She added that
growing up in Communist China made writing in Chinese a task freighted
with ideological and personal baggage. Writing in a nonnative language
allowed her to work in “a different dimension.”

But writing in English is also the “easiest and laziest” to do, she
lamented, because you don’t have to wait months or years for the book to
be translated and thereby reach a world audience. “This is a battle,” she
said.

Ms. Guo turned to Mr. Franzen to express her frustration with the
Anglocentrism of today’s publishing industry: “I love your work, Jonathan,
but…American literature is massively overrated.”

For his part, Mr. Franzen, whose novel “The Corrections” won the National
Book Award in 2001, said that he didn’t think in global terms when he
wrote. “The worst way to be universal is to try to be universal,” he said.