Xiaolu Guo: ‘Write less, in order to write stronger’

Xiaolu Guo, 52, was born in China and lives in London. The author of more than 20 books in a variety of genres in Chinese and English, she’s also a film director whose awards include the Golden Leopard at the Locarno film festival, previously won by Claire Denis and Jim Jarmusch. This month she publishes two books: the paperback of her 2024 memoir, My Battle of Hastings: Chronicle of a Year By the Sea, and a new novel, Call Me Ishmaelle, a retelling of Moby-Dick

What led you to take on Herman Melville’s 1851 classic?
I was in New York, a foreigner walking around for a year while teaching at Columbia and writing my memoir, Radical [2023], and this was a parallel project, a philosophical experiment. Most people are Asiatic – the world’s population is 60% Asian – and with each novel I write, I ask myself in what ways a non-westerner from a non-biblical background can engage in dialogue with the western literary canon. The word “Christendom” appears repeatedly in Moby-Dick. I wondered: what if people never knew what that is? If it said “Taoism” instead, would you still listen to the story? I’m a guerrilla gardener – I secretly go out planting trees in my neighbourhood – and it made me think: can I somehow just bring ancient east Asian philosophy into this American landscape? Guerrilla sabotage. I wanted the whole world on that ship. I spent so much time figuring out how to get a black captain from the civil war period into dialogue with a Chinese Taoist sailmaker.

And then there’s the headline twist. Why Ishmaelle rather than the original novel’s Ishmael?
I was so struck by stories of working-class Victorian girls who went to sea out of poverty and desperation. I drew on the case of Anne Jane Thornton, who met a captain from New York when she was 15. Those girls just wanted more life: they put on cabin boys’ clothes, shaved their hair and went on the ships. A lot of them were discovered only when they were pregnant: the captain wouldn’t know, because when a girl was discovered, the sailors would have sex – a secret agreement. I was so struck by these cases that I almost forgot about the nautical journey: I wanted to write about Ishmaelle’s journey, from Ishmaelle to Ishmael and then Ishmaelle again.

In content, the book is deliberately disruptive, yet in style it feels more traditional than your previous books. How come?
I couldn’t see the necessity to write novels any more after A Lover’s Discourse [shortlisted for the Goldsmiths prize for experimental fiction in 2020]. I had an overwhelming sense of nausea at the overproduced superfluousness of contemporary fiction. I don’t have this need to consume “story”: I need to have a debate, a dialogue with truth; to think more, write less, and to address issues not in a political way but in a philosophical way, a poetic way. Write less, in order to write stronger. But somehow in this book – the biggest I’ve ever written – I was carried away by the characters. I have to confess, it’s the first time. I’ve returned to the addictive power of fiction… Our fascination with myth-making seems to be a human malady.

Can you recall the first time you read Moby-Dick?
It was in translation at university [in China]. In Chinese, the Shakespearean and biblical language becomes utterly abstract and meaningless – it’s such a challenge, you give up. The second time, in New York, I still found it difficult, especially the huge cetology chapter, which troubles most readers in English. That’s pre-Wikipedia writing: you’d never write a novel that way these days, but Melville just accumulates so much. I’d rather have the nautical stuff first-hand. He was very affected by the Essex whaling tragedy – shipwrecked sailors who started to eat one another – and I found the memoir by the ship’s first mate, Owen Chase, more powerful than reading Moby-Dick 10 times for research.

What sways you to work in one genre or another?
This question isn’t a problem for a writer who isn’t a wordsmith. Most writers are wordsmiths – they invent the same stories every few years – but I don’t feel like I’m a writer. I think of something and play with it: I make a film and think, oh, that’s actually prose, or memoir, or verse. I’m very idea-led. A lot of my previous work is close to my life, because when I came to the west [in 2002], I suddenly became a young girl again and had a prolonged adolescence to discover myself in Europe as a woman. Turning 50, I realised I never really went deep into history. People change: Tolstoy became a vegetarian at 50, after eating 50 years of Russian sausage and Russian meat! Reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Domesday Book to write My Battle of Hastings was part of a process of self-education in the dynamics of power over the past 1,000 years; it gave me confidence for this Moby-Dick project.

Tell us what you’ve been reading lately.
Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, every night before bed for the past two weeks. I’ve been reading Coleridge for ever because of Kubla Khan: whenever a western author writes about Asia, you have this immediate feeling of generosity. “Yes, man, thank you! You addressed the east, I’m gonna look at your work to find out why.” It’s like a dream language when I read Coleridge every night before bed. Wordsworth is much more rational, more structured.

What was the last book you gave as a gift?
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, which has one of the most original female characters in the British novel. For years, I loved DH Lawrence. I wanted to find out where his prose came from and had to go back to Hardy: so good. That same week, I gave someone John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. I had three copies at home, to keep it in easy reach, because I love that novel so much. I reread it again after visiting Lyme Regis [where it’s set]. I wish we still wrote novels like that: reflection and narrative, not just narrative.

Call Me Ishmaelle by Xiaolu Guo is published on 20 March by Chatto & Windus (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply