Lost in Translation

I loved this book, but I am biased. I am the same age, physical description, and emanate from the same geographical region as Alice. I also read this book while I was living in China and found it to be an accurate view of an American woman living in China. Alice is a woman who tries very hard to escape from her heritage and her past by immersing herself in the Chinese culture. This is also an approaching middle age story. Alice 36, has spent all her adult life in Beijing, and is pondering what she has to show for it all. Alice also agonizes over lost love, her biological clock running out, reconciliation with her estranged father, and future career plans. The author manages to create novel around an actual historical event. The plot is built around a hunt for the bones of the Peking Man. They were stashed away for safekeeping during the Japanese invasion of China on the eve of WWII. They mysteriously vanished and remain unaccounted for to this day. I was so intrigued that I read some non-fiction books about the discovery of and disappearance of the Peking man, one of the oldest complete skulls ever found, and its disappearance. Fortunately, the archeologists made a plaster cast of the skull and it survived. By the way, I noticed some criticism from some Asians who didn't like the premise of the story. I ask that they keep in mind the target audience and the cross-cultural aspects of the story. If Alice were Chinese it wouldn't be much of a story. While I was living in China I happened across a book written by a Chinese man who had attended Vanderbilt University. It was a bilingual book about how he "discovered" my city. I read it with great interest because I was curious to know how an outsider viewed my city and my culture. While it was basically a positive book I respect the fact that the author wrote about a few negative experiences he had in my city.

This book is a cannot put down, compelling read. It is one of the best books I've read in so many ways. The characters are fantastic, and so real. The historical aspects are presented in such a fascinating way --sculpted into the story so well. It is also a lesson in an entirely different culture. I hope Nicole Mones writes many more books -- though the research and attention to detail that went into this one must have taken years. There were so many plots and subplots in this book -- it is one I can invision myself picking up again at some point.

Recently it has been hard to read fiction that has more than stick-figure characters. Not so, in Lost in Translation. the book would be good for its mystery-story quality, but what makes it special is the character development. The young female American translator who introduces us to China and then takes us on a seach more the missing bones forming a link to the past, is a real person in Mones' book. Although not graphically sexual, this woman exudes an exciting sensuality. Her growing attraction to the chinese scholar she accompanies on the search is the heart of a story within a story. I didn't want the book to end. I want to know more about this exotic woman. Not since Pat Conroy's Prince of Tides have I found people in a novel that felt like they were part of my life. I hope Ms. Mones will do it again in the future.

Every once and a while you pick up a book or are introduced to a book with a theme around a culture and a series of personae that you find so incredibly foreign to your own existence that you are grateful for such a gift.   This book, while a well-written novel about a bit of a mystery, was a magnificent albeit fictional view through the author's window into the modern-day Chinese culture.   A culture so foreign and seemingly xenophobic that rare glimpses through, even a westerner's eye, are a treasure.  Alice Mannegan, whose father is a (fictional) US senator, and a bigoted and egoltistical one at that, is a young women who has done her best to melt unnoticed into the billions of the Chinese demographic landscape.  She works as a translator when she needs the work, and maintains a secret parallel life in the smoky bars of Beijing.  One day she is contracted to work as a translator for a young American archeologist named Adam Spencer who is in China tracking the potential whereabouts of the remains of the "Peking Man" (an archeological treasure) through the letters and writings of an 18th century French priest and his love.  This enchanting book is at once a political thriller, an adventure, a love story, and a novel about coming to terms with one's family, one's life, and the decisions one makes in an effort to take the right paths toward happiness.  A must read.

This novel of the intersection of language, identity, cultures and sex in an archeological expedition in China today is one of the best I have read in quite a while. With the Jesuit rebel priest and anthropologist, Teilhard de Chardin, as the leit-motif behind most of the personal interactions. the reader is offered new insights into human as well as divine love.The protagonists are an American woman trying to get as far away as possible from her racist father and the culture he ordains, an American anthropologist trying to recover Peking Man to restore his career, and a Chinese anthropologist who has been traumatized by the Cultural Revolution (called the Chaos by Chinese today)and his wife's destruction by it.Alice Mannegan's attempts to become Chinese are doomed despite her proficiency in the language and knowledge of the culture and history of China. It's painful but enthralling to watch her try to come to terms with her father, her "true Chinese man" Dr. Lin, and her possible future in China. She is not the most likeable person, but she is not repellant in any way. Just foolish in her understanding of herself and her history.Adam Spencer the American anthropologist who hires Alice as translator is the least interesting. Dr. Lin and the many Chinese actors in this tale reveal a great deal about contemporary China which I daresay most westerners,including myself, do not know.The mystery and the history of Peking Man's discovery, disappearance and possible final end is exciting. One learns much Chinese geography, customs and traditions, the subtleties of Chinese ideas, and the difficulties of life there today. We are very different from one another and we Americans do not realize how fortunate we are.As one who has lived in a foreign culture, I understand some of the difficulties an expatriate faces. This is a grand book which leaves one feeling satisfied by the truth of the emotions revealed and by the resolution of the mysteries at the core. Read it, you'll like it.