Lost in Translation

✍ Scribed by Nicole Mones

• Publisher: Delta Trade Paperbacks
• Year: 1998;1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 255 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 073229018X

✦ Synopsis

Amazon.com Review

Nicole Mones doesn't waste any time getting to the heart of the matter in her first novel, Lost in Translation. Within the first 10 pages we discover that protagonist Alice Mannegan, an interpreter based in Beijing, has a yen for sex with Chinese men. By the time we reach page 20, we've learned that Alice is in full flight from her father, a racist U.S. congressman, and about to start working for Adam Spencer, an American archeologist on the hunt for the missing bones of one of the century's biggest scientific finds: Peking man. Having set the stage, Mones steps back and lets her characters do the work as she proceeds to spin a tale that is part mystery, part love story, and part cultural exchange. Alice and Spencer travel to a remote region of China, accompanied by Dr. Lin Shiyang, with whom Alice falls in love. Mones spends a fair amount of time on the team's search for the bones, whose mysterious disappearance during the Second World War has never been explained, but her main focus is less on finding Peking man than on exposing the skeletons in her main characters' closets. As Alice, Spencer, and Dr. Lin move forward in their quest, they are forced to reckon with their pasts. Each, it seems, has an ulterior reason for being where they are and doing what they do, and it is in the subtle play of personalities, motivations, and misunderstandings that Lost in Translation finds its rhythm.

The key to the novel's success is Mones's in-depth knowledge of China's culture, history, and politics. The question of cultural identity is at the core of her tale, and she skillfully weaves various aspects of Chinese life--from ancestor worship to the Cultural Revolution--into the personal relationships of her characters. By novel's end, readers have discovered a great deal about archeology, China, and most especially about the unmapped territories of memory, desire, and identity. Lost in Translation is a fine first novel, the first salvo of a promising literary career.

From Publishers Weekly

An attention-grabbing opening chapter in which the protagonist, translator/interpreter Alice Mannegan, rides off on her bicycle to a sexual tryst in Beijing, hints that this debut suspense novel will be a racy read. But Alice's sensuality is just one factor in Mones's complex portrait of a woman in search of herself, played out against the exotic background of some of China's remotest regions, a story that reveals as much about character and cultural difference as it does about a search for priceless, long-lost fossils. China is Alice's spiritual home, where she feels far removed from her loving but racist father, a U.S congressman whose political opinions she deplores. But despite her desire to belong there, she is still considered an "outside woman." She signs on as interpreter for archeologist Adam Spencer, who believes that the remains of Peking Man were hidden in the Mongolian desert during WWII by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Joined by two Chinese scientists, they venture into remote regions where the urgency of the search is paralleled by Alice's increasing attraction to Dr. Lin Shiyang, whose wife vanished from a labor camp in that region 20 years ago, and by the unfolding story of the relationship of Teilhard and an American woman who loved him. The authenticity of Mones's background detailAfrom the rituals of ancestor worship to the workings of the PLA police and the food at a Mongolian banquetAbrings fresh insight into the nuances of Chinese culture. Though the narrative tension is more intellectual than visceral, and some pivotal events of the plot seem too convenient, Mones succeeds in integrating archeological history, spiritual philosophy and cultural dislocation into a tale of identity on many levels. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.