From the author of the 2007 Orange Prize finalist A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers comes a wholly original and thoroughly ... read full description
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Oct 17, 2008
Karen
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This short novel tells the tale of Fenfang, a young Chinese woman who leaves her peasant village for Beijing in the hopes of changing her life. In Beijing she becomes an actress, scoring such enviable roles as Woman Walking Over Bridge or Woman Pouring Tea, all non-speaking, background parts. No matter how she tries to become a major player--both in film and in her own life--greatness seems to evade Fenfang. Barely scraping by, Fengang is ravenous for this meaningful life she so longs for but c
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Nov 12, 2008
The dust jacket of Xiaolu Guo’s Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth depicts not one but three young Chinese women: on the front, a doll-eyed girl sips a pink milkshake through pursed, glossed lips; on the spine, she leans against a subway pole with eyes closed, as if exhausted by the title that slices across her face; and finally, on the luridly red-tinted back, she crosses a darkened street, hurrying out of the photo head-first. You might read these women as Morning, Afternoon, and Night; or a
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Mar 02, 2009
Stephanie
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To be fair, the title doesn’t deny it: these vignettes are indeed shards: random, unpolished, occasionally sharp, but mostly something to be swept up, trashed and then forgotten.
After her accomplished English language debut A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, this translation of filmmaker-writer Xiaolu Guo’s 1988 semi-autobiographical book about a young village girl trying to make it in Beijing’s film industry seems juvenile and self-absorbed.
Perhaps lost in More...
After her accomplished English language debut A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary For Lovers, this translation of filmmaker-writer Xiaolu Guo’s 1988 semi-autobiographical book about a young village girl trying to make it in Beijing’s film industry seems juvenile and self-absorbed.
Perhaps lost in More...
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Jan 23, 2009
Tim
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This aptly titled little book is an interesting record of the life of a young girl in China around the end of the millennium. The best part of the book is that it captures the feeling of that time period in youth (late teens/ early twenties) when all your friends were desperately poor, nobody had anything permanent going on in their love life, nobody had a serious job or career, and everyone had time to hang out, watch movies, read books, and just talk. Also, since the novel is set in late-ninet
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Jan 11, 2009
Rachael
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Twenty-one-year-old Fenfang Wang is a little lost. She might know the general direction of where she’s headed, Beijing, but after that, nothing is certain. But she can’t go back to her little isolated village in the Chinese countryside; she’s had enough of that monotonous life of digging up sweet potatoes. And so, young Fenfang navigates her way through dusty Beijing, struggling to find a place she belongs in and some satisfaction to her life. But along the way as she barely gets by, she encount
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Jul 14, 2011
edward j
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A quick novella that I read over about an eight hour period. Began at 3am, fell asleep at 4am, woke at 10am and finished by 1130.
The life of a young rural chinese woman in Beijing and the chaos that is her life. She is in a search for the 'shiny things' which is never defined but never misunderstood. She's searching for what all young people want, for what all people want. She works as a film extra to make money and writes scripts because her friends tell her to.
The lang More...
The life of a young rural chinese woman in Beijing and the chaos that is her life. She is in a search for the 'shiny things' which is never defined but never misunderstood. She's searching for what all young people want, for what all people want. She works as a film extra to make money and writes scripts because her friends tell her to.
The lang More...
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Mar 28, 2011
Kathy
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Reviewed at : Mama Kucing Meow : 20 Fragment of a Ravenous Youth
Reviewed on : 11 March 2011
This is indeed an interesting book. Story is set in the current commercialised China. The main character, FenFang was just 17 years old when she decided to run away from home and venture into Beijing. She felt trapped in the runt of her village life. Day in day out doing and seeing the same thing.
There are 20 "fragments" in this book. Each"fragment" tell a More...
Reviewed on : 11 March 2011
This is indeed an interesting book. Story is set in the current commercialised China. The main character, FenFang was just 17 years old when she decided to run away from home and venture into Beijing. She felt trapped in the runt of her village life. Day in day out doing and seeing the same thing.
There are 20 "fragments" in this book. Each"fragment" tell a More...
Nov 02, 2010
Heather
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This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.
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Jan 17, 2010
Angie
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This was a great book to break me out of my beginning-of-the-year reading slump. It's less than 200 pages, and while it is a light, quick read, there was also a lot to take in.
Stylistically, the title fits the novel in a way that I just adore. Not only is it written in 20 "fragments", but the idea of fragments, hunger, and youth are all touched upon in this book. It can be a little blunt at times, but not excessively so. (It'd be great for YA teachers/readers who are lookin More...
Stylistically, the title fits the novel in a way that I just adore. Not only is it written in 20 "fragments", but the idea of fragments, hunger, and youth are all touched upon in this book. It can be a little blunt at times, but not excessively so. (It'd be great for YA teachers/readers who are lookin More...
Feb 04, 2009
Saralibrarian
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I love this book because it has sentences like:
"I wanted to hide away and write. I wanted to meet characters who would climb up my pen."
"Around us everyone was screaming, but Patton and I were as silent as two pieces of tofu."
"I decided I had to get out of the narrow cupboard my life had become."
Originally written in Chinese the author reworked it into English several years after writing the original...
This book is about F More...
"I wanted to hide away and write. I wanted to meet characters who would climb up my pen."
"Around us everyone was screaming, but Patton and I were as silent as two pieces of tofu."
"I decided I had to get out of the narrow cupboard my life had become."
Originally written in Chinese the author reworked it into English several years after writing the original...
This book is about F More...
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Sep 03, 2011
Willem
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‘ Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth’ gives us an intimate glimpse into the life of a young girl, Fenfang, as she tries to find her place in life. Having run off from her small countryside village, she winds up in Beijing, looking for the shiny things in life. But Beijing, like the rest of China, is rapidly changing during the second half of the 1990’s and it’s not easy for young Fenfang to deal with her surroundings. The change is omnipresent: boyfriends who come and go without leaving a fulf
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Mar 23, 2010
Linda
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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 More...
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 More...
Jun 02, 2009
Michelle
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Xiaolu Guo’s impressive first novel has a narrator who leaps off the page and strides into our world commanding attention with her paradoxical fragility and virulence. Seventeen year old Fenfang leaves behind her family and their provincial way of life as sweet potato farmers for the seething city of Beijing in search of something more than a monotonous existence.
The story is told in twenty brief chapters brimming with deadpan humor and shining with Fenfeng’s resiliency amidst squalor an More...
The story is told in twenty brief chapters brimming with deadpan humor and shining with Fenfeng’s resiliency amidst squalor an More...
Aug 07, 2011
Andy
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I had picked this up a while ago around the same time as 'a concise...dictionary' which never set me alight. 20 Fragments leaves me with much the same feeling.
We follow Fenfang through (20) brief moments in her life over a number of years living in Beijing. Brief, generally unconnected and lacking much depth they are however, representative of a young, lost life, evoking the fragile place of a young girl alone in her world. She's idealistic, disconnected and often superficial. As More...
We follow Fenfang through (20) brief moments in her life over a number of years living in Beijing. Brief, generally unconnected and lacking much depth they are however, representative of a young, lost life, evoking the fragile place of a young girl alone in her world. She's idealistic, disconnected and often superficial. As More...
Jan 12, 2009
Jesse
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What at first seems a bit like hollow shards of reflection gain resonance as the pieces fall into place and some semblance of the self begin to be form. Each chapter--or fragment--conveyed in shimmery, deceptively simple prose, serves as a brief reflection of what initially seems to be a trivial situation or occurrence, only revealing its emotional weight later. It's as if the traces and residue of the "off moments" are the things that give shape to life itself, bringing to mind Joyc
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Nov 02, 2009
Cecily
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As the title implies, this is a fragmentary account of youthful ambition, rather than a conventional novel. It is deliberately raw and unpolished: fast-paced, often angry and slightly stilted.
Fenfang is a young Chinese woman who, around the turn of the millennium, leaves the claustrophobic monotony of her family and village life to go to Beijing and get into the film industry. Even once there, she is torn between the need to conform (her "Mao drawer") and desire to rebel ( More...
Fenfang is a young Chinese woman who, around the turn of the millennium, leaves the claustrophobic monotony of her family and village life to go to Beijing and get into the film industry. Even once there, she is torn between the need to conform (her "Mao drawer") and desire to rebel ( More...
Aug 22, 2010
Zee
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Quick Review | '20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth' - Xiaolu Guo
4/5 Stars
"Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, isn't it about time I got my lucky break?"
'20 fragments of a Ravenous Youth' is the disjointed chronicle of Fenfang Wang; a young woman who leaves the monotonous life of Ginger Hill Village behind to make it big in one of the most complex capitals of the world, Beijing.
Unlike the other inhabitants, Fenfang is painfully aware of the hum-dru More...
4/5 Stars
"Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, isn't it about time I got my lucky break?"
'20 fragments of a Ravenous Youth' is the disjointed chronicle of Fenfang Wang; a young woman who leaves the monotonous life of Ginger Hill Village behind to make it big in one of the most complex capitals of the world, Beijing.
Unlike the other inhabitants, Fenfang is painfully aware of the hum-dru More...
Jul 06, 2009
Tanya
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I just finished "Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth" by Xiaolu Guo (who also wrote A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers). Twenty Fragments is a great YAish book, though I'm not sure you could use it in school (it probably depends where you are and how old your students are). There's mild sexual content and some swearing. The main character, for instance, refers to god as "heavenly bastard up in the sky." (Okay, so I laughed EVERY single time she said it, but I k
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Jan 03, 2011
Melinda
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I approached this book as if it was a bunch of short stories. If you read it any other way, you're likely to be disappointed, as there is no particular time line connecting the stories, and indeed some jump back and forth through the main characters life and can become quite confusing.
Being so short, it was hard to establish a dislike for the character or the premise, and insights are predominantly superficial. She struggles to become much of anything, choosing acting when someone s More...
Being so short, it was hard to establish a dislike for the character or the premise, and insights are predominantly superficial. She struggles to become much of anything, choosing acting when someone s More...
Feb 06, 2011
Nesa
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This is a first book I'm reading by this writer and I must say that I liked it very much. I read it through in one sitting and the way the story is written pretty much demands that.
Fenfang is and has travelled one thousand eight hundred miles to seek her fortune in Beijing. In the city she tries the persona of a movie extra. She's tired of making tin cans, cleaning rooms and tidying movie theaters for a living. She's hungry for love, to appease the loneliness in her stomach that ev More...
Fenfang is and has travelled one thousand eight hundred miles to seek her fortune in Beijing. In the city she tries the persona of a movie extra. She's tired of making tin cans, cleaning rooms and tidying movie theaters for a living. She's hungry for love, to appease the loneliness in her stomach that ev More...
Aug 17, 2011
Vanessa
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I think Xiaolu Guo has a problem with narrative. That's why she likes writing in fragments. I wonder what her films are like. It's possible to make films without having to explain anything. In a novel, if this is a novel, you can't really get away with that for long. Which is probably why this nearly-novel is very short.
One of the things I didn't like is that it jumps around in time without being clear about the chronology. Just when did this little 17 year old from a sweet potato far More...
One of the things I didn't like is that it jumps around in time without being clear about the chronology. Just when did this little 17 year old from a sweet potato far More...
Jul 29, 2008
kira
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Beautifully written and a little sad. Guo's books (well, this one and A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary) remind me a bit of Jean Rhys... stories of women who have moved to places that are foreign to them in search of something -- freedom, love, change, challenge -- and the alienation and loneliness they suffer there, often at the hands of various men.
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Feb 09, 2011
Lucia
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This book is displayed as the titles suggests, depicting in twenty parts, the life of Fenfang, a young Chinese woman living in Beijing. Having grown up in rural China on a sweet potato farm with her silent parents, Fenfang has never wanted anything more than to live a more modern life as her own person. Working primarily as a film extra, but also taking on such mismatched jobs as a cleaner, usherette and tin can assembler, Fenfang feels she is observing her life rather than actually living it, w
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Mar 06, 2009
earthy
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(I don't even know what genre to put this one in!) It's short and definitely fragmented (i.e., very little plot connecting the twenty "chapters"), but it's a tough, often lyrical look at life in Beijing from the point of view of a young country girl who goes there to make her fortune. Unfortunately, her "fortune" basically means a string of meaningless jobs and half-hearted attempts at romance and the film industry.
Not a good book, per se, and a bit depressing, More...
Not a good book, per se, and a bit depressing, More...
Apr 08, 2011
Neury72
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Je m'attendais à une suite de l'histoire d'amour... Mais non, je me suis trompée...
A travers des photos, la vie d'une Chinoise en Chine cette fois est décrite, avec ses rêves de devenir une célèbre actrice (débuter en figurante, puis finir en star) et ses illusions du quotidien.
J'ai eu moins de plaisir à parcourir cet ouvrage que le précédent. Les photos ne sont pas esthétiques, je n'ai pas réussi à saisir leur essence, leur objectif, leur but...
Je me suis tou More...
Mar 18, 2010
Sarah
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I read this book in a few short hours. I couldn't put it down. I think some people may not understand the simple style, but it resonated with me. The simplicity of the language is a reflection of the isolation of the character and the short, sparse sentences reflected perfectly the loneliness and depression of a woman in huge city. Bonus: it managed to highlight current issues in China without being preachy.
The author doesn't play around with pretty words, because the character does More...
The author doesn't play around with pretty words, because the character does More...
Jun 02, 2011
Charlotte
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I started reading this book a month or two ago, when I was meant to be revising for my exams. I read six or so of the twenty fragments before putting it aside, and then yesterday I came back to it, ready to finish.
It's beautifully written and really striking – the structure of the book, the way it's told in fragments, definitely helps here. Everything seems very emblematic, very important. There's no dead weight. & it made me feel like I was getting to know a lot about Fenfang when rea More...
It's beautifully written and really striking – the structure of the book, the way it's told in fragments, definitely helps here. Everything seems very emblematic, very important. There's no dead weight. & it made me feel like I was getting to know a lot about Fenfang when rea More...
Mar 13, 2011
Jessica
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I have got to read more from this author. Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth is poetic and unsettling, raw and beautiful. Trapped in an unchanging village all her youth, Fenfang traveled 1,800 miles to the supposedly progressive capital only to find a world filled with sexism, judgement, censorship, and distance.
Each of the twenty chapters represents a "fragment" of the years she spends in Beijing; each fragment is a perfectly rendered glimpse into the young woman's life a More...
Each of the twenty chapters represents a "fragment" of the years she spends in Beijing; each fragment is a perfectly rendered glimpse into the young woman's life a More...
Jan 26, 2012
Toni
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Very glad I didn't judge the book by the cover. I go through phases where it seems like I will never really get into fiction like I used to. It just seems like life is so busy and hectic that I can't make time for the characters. They demand more of me than I can give, and I get really frustrated. I couldn't put this down from the time I picked it up at the library to the time I finished it this morning. It was sharp, beautiful, realistic, exciting, and sort of inspiring. Fengfang's story captur
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Feb 17, 2009
Kim
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I really loved this book in the same way that I loved Recollections of My Life As a Woman from Diane DiPrima. The story of Fenfang and her quest to adapt to the push herself to the boundaries through a big city life in Beijing all the while trying to write a script at the suggestions of one of her friends. The reality of her day-to-day life is far away from mine, but really captured that same essence of being in your twenties, escaping your reality to make something new and trying to figure out
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