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.

Product Description
A novel of searing intelligence and startling originality, Lost in Translation heralds the debut of a unique new voice on the literary landscape.Nicole Mones creates an unforgettable story of love and desire, of family ties and human conflict, and of one woman's struggle to lose herself in a foreign land--only to discover her home, her heart, herself.

At dawn in Beijing, Alice Mannegan pedals a bicycle through the deserted streets.An American by birth, a translator by profession, she spends her nights in Beijing's smoke-filled bars, and the Chinese men she so desires never misunderstand her intentions.All around her rushes the air of China, the scent of history and change, of a world where she has come to escape her father's love and her own pain.It is a world in which, each night as she slips from her hotel, she hopes to lose herself forever.

For Alice, it began with a phone call from an American archaeologist seeking a translator.And it ended in an intoxicating journey of the heart--one that would plunge her into a nation's past, and into some of the most rarely glimpsed regions of China.Hired by an archaeologist searching for the bones of Peking Man, Alice joins an expedition that penetrates a vast, uncharted land and brings Professor Lin Shiyang into her life.As they draw closer to unearthing the secret of Peking Man, as the group's every move is followed, their every whisper recorded, Alice and Lin find shelter in each other, slowly putting to rest the ghosts of their pasts.What happens between them becomes one of the most breathtakingly erotic love stories in recent fiction.Indeed, Lost in Translation is a novel about love--between a nation and its past, between a man and a memory, between a father and a daughter.Its powerful impact confirms the extraordinary gifts of a master storyteller, Nicole Mones.

This book, apparently, is Nicole Mones' first attempt at novelwriting. And I have to say she did a good job. The whole story and parallelism of Alice, Dr. Spencer and the Peking Man was well done and very original. Pacing was a bit slow though and I found myself struggling a bit to finish the book. And the ending could have been better. Mones' lines are very good though. Natural and not out-of-place and unnecessary.

It's a good first attempt but there is still room for improvement. But it's still a good read, especially if you like reading about other countries and cultures.


Connecting within and without   February 25, 2003
 6 out of 7 found this review helpful

The key to this novel lies in its epigraph, a quotation from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French anthropologist and priest whose explorations of fossil hominids in China in the early 20th century forms the backdrop for this ambitious novel. "...it would seem that we have only got to look at ourselves in order to understand the dynamic relationships existing between the within and the without of things at a given point in the universe. In fact so to do is one of the most difficult of all things." Mones's novel is not only an anthropological, quasi-Indiana Jones search for relics (in this case, the remains of Peking Man), but it is also a novel about its main character's search to make the complicated connections de Chardin speaks about in the quotation. Alice is an American interpreter living in China in an unspecified time period close to the present. Alienated from her Congressman father because of his overt racism, Alice seeks to leave America behind and become Chinese. As she joins the search for the skeleton of Peking Man, Alice confronts her own demons. The book works at more than one level, but never fully succeeds as a thriller or as a character study. Nonetheless, the title captures quite well the difficulties of trying to move between cultures, never being sure what has been lost in translation. In fact, as wenavigate between thewithin and the without, don't we all lose something in translation, an insight the book portrays rather well. This is a novel worth reading and worth discussing with a book group.


Weird but educational.   July 28, 2002
 3 out of 13 found this review helpful

Let me begin by saying that I did not enjoy the heroine of this novel. She's very vain and seeks only Chinese men for her love conquests. In fact, it kind of creeped me out how much she only focused on Chinese men. The only redeeming thing about this novel was that it taught some information about the Chinese cultural practices of mourning a family member, drinking tea, eating, and speaking Chinese in a respectful manner to other Chinese people. However, I think I'm just going to stick with reading Pearl S. Buck novels, because unlike Pearl Buck, the heroine/author of this novel was way too much of a poseur. The whole time you're reading this book you get the feeling that the heroine/author is trying to convince you that she was Chinese in a previous life. Well, she didn't convince me of this and she was way too cheesy in her approach.