Wu Ming-YiRezensionen

It's not often that a novel defeats me, but it took ages to read The Stolen Bicycle by Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi, and I still don't really know what the author was trying to achieve.

If you read Paul Fulcher's review at Goodreads, you can see that he was really impressed, and so were the judges who longlisted the book for the 2018 Man Booker Interational. It won the Taiwan Literary Award 2015 and the 2015 China Times Open Book Award too, so I am the one who is out-of-step on this one. I respect Paul's opinion and the judges', so I think that it's a case of the wrong book for me at this time.

Part of the problem is that there is more about bicycles than most of us really want to know. Yes, occasionally that's interesting: if you've ever marvelled at the size and variety of goods transported on bicycles in places like Indonesia, many of them are using repurposed war bicycles that were designed by the Japanese to carry weaponry along with their soldiers carving a way through the jungles of Southeast Asia. But as to the details of brands and designs that feature in so many pages of text labelled Bike Notes, well...

The text is intentionally discursive, and there are pastiches from different informants tracked down by the narrator on his quest. But the digression into the disgusting practice of killing butterflies to use for making pictures was repellent, and the long and sentimental story of the oldest elephant was tiresome, and I had read enough about the Pacific War to be familiar already with most of what was recounted there. By the time I was half way through I had devised my own scenario for the father's disappearance and kept going only out of a stubborn ambition to finish the first novel that I've come across from a Taiwanese author, and the first set in Taiwan.

Igazából minden adott ahhoz, hogy ez a könyv bukó legyen. Hisz annyi minden van belezsúfolva, annyi minden akar lenni egyszerre: 1.) családi dráma Alice-szal a középpontban, aki egyszerre veszítette el fiát és férjét 2.) kis tajvani mindentudó – a sziget geográfiájának, történelmének, törzseinek, törzsi hiedelmeinek és állatvilágának röpke bemutatása 3.) és még egy szemétsziget is száguld Tajvan felé apokaliptikus ökológiai katasztrófát ígérve – ez ugye már tudományos fantasztikum 4.) a szemétszigettel együtt pedig érkezik Atile'i is, aki egy anakronisztikus törzsi társadalom képviselője, és még sosem látott fehér embert 5.) meg ugye a macska. És mégis jó – sőt, pofátlanul jó. Wu Ming-Yi képes úgy elmondani egy tanmesét az emberi felelőtlenségről, arról, hogy – ami az általunk okozott környezeti ártalmakat illeti – a nulladik órában vagyunk, hogy mégsem érezzük propagandaízűnek az egészet – talán mert közben a cselekmény marad hangsúlyos, a szereplők egyéni tragédiái vannak középpontban, maguk a szereplők pedig pazarul vannak beledolgozva a szövegbe. Ami különösen annak fényében bravúros, hogy – mint fentebb említettem – zsúfolt könyv ez, és ez a szereplők számát illetően is igaz. Mégsem éreztem egy percig sem, hogy Wu Ming-Yi valamelyik figuráját csak úgy odakente volna: mindegyik elevenre van formázva, és mindegyiknek megvan a maga nélkülözhetetlen feladata a regénytérben. De ami engem leginkább megragadott (és erre csak jó órával azután jöttem rá, hogy becsuktam a könyvet), az az, hogy a szerző úgy tud végtelenül szomorú és végtelenül keserű szöveget írni, hogy közben az összes szereplője szerethető és szimpatikus marad. Talán azt akarja ezzel mondani, hogy nem az egyes ember a hibás: az egyes ember szerethető*. De az emberek sokasága, az emberek tömege már felelőtlen és veszélyes. Vagy talán nem ezt. De akárhogy is, jól mondja.

* Kivéve persze azt a fullasztó aurájú nénit, akivel tegnap összevesztem a facebook-on, mert azt állította, hogy a fasizmus nem rasszista ideológia. A wikipédia pedig liberálbolsevik izé, ha mást mond. Őt nem tudom szeretni, bocsánat Ezt meghagyom másnak.

Filled with fascinating ideas, engaging characters, and a framework of magic realism and Taiwanese mythology, the story nevertheless maintains a striking sense of plausibility concerning the unfolding ecological disaster at the core of the novel. Unfortunately, the novel begins to fall apart in the second half, taking on an increasingly soapbox tone and introduces characters and a long sub-plot that don't add a whole lot to the story. Meanwhile, the lecturing about the evils of climate change ramps up. The annoying thing is that all of the lectures are completely unnecessary. the urgency of the issues, the willful ignorance of most of the population, and the unwillingness of world governments to take action, are all effectively and subtly conveyed by the narrative early on. It is almost as if the writer stopped trusting their craft about halfway through the novel.

However, there may be another issue which is contributing to the appearance of the hamfisted narrative approach. This feels to me like a clunky translation. Now I don't speak the original language, so I would love someone who has read the book in the original and then read this translation to weigh in. But I've read an awful lot of literature in translation from a variety of languages, and you can just feel when a translation is working to fully realize the original style. Its a combination of rhythm, the seeming appropriateness of word choice (or rather, avoiding jarring word choices, of which there are quite a few here), the way a translation handles idiomatic phrases, etc.

That said, while a clunky translation probably isn't helping the author's cause here, a better translation wouldn't fix the structural narrative and characterization issues.

Beautiful and strange. I get the impression that the book was let down a bit by its translation, since the phrasing was occasionally kind of stilted. However it was still quite enjoyable and had some moments that really moved me. Nonlinear magical realism done with a deft touch.

"At first she couldn't understand anything i said, but gradually we have come to recognize the scales and tails of speech, to realise the fish eyes of what the other is saying."

I struggled with this book. The premise was attractive - historical fiction set in Taiwan over the past 100 year - but the result failed to deliver for me.
The plot is told in a quirky, unnecessarily disjointed manner, with multiple different voices, including, memorably, that of an elephant. I found it hard to stay with it. The plot is sketchy, with not a lot of resolution by the end. The historical background seemed too sketchy for much of the time, with short bursts of unnecessarily detailed reporting.
The bicycles are used as a plot device to connect different events and characters. I thought this worked well, and spent too much time wishing there were more bicycles and fewer spiritual elephants.
This could have been a very good book; and I'm sure that others will have enjoyed it more than me, but . . .

Two decades ago a man disappeared in mysterious circumstances. His son ponders why he vanished in such mysterious circumstances and memories from that time keep flooding back to him. The one lead that he does have was that his father rode off on a particular bicycle and it helped him remember the bicycles that his father that had stolen or lost after particular family events.

The son’s investigation into his father begins to uncover all sorts of things and details in the overlapping histories between his family and others in the neighbourhoods that they lived. Discovering the little known world of those that collect antique bicycles brings all sort of revelations for him and a moment where he finds a tangible link. Draped over this is a history of Taiwan all the way back to the Second World War.

I was recommended this by Jessica J. Lee, the author of Turning as she described it as one of her all-time favourites. I didn’t fall for it in the same way that she did and I think that is because some of the cultural references are lost on me. However, I did enjoy the wistful and dreamlike writing, though the plot seemed to almost be stretched to gossamer-thin at times. 2.5 stars.

Stopped reading at 36%.
I tried to persist with this book, but in the end its structure and length defeated me. The book has a habit of leading you into an intriguing section of story only to digress into something else. And when you get into that part, it switches again. In some books this works, but in this case it left me frustrated and unable to smoothly follow the story. Ultimately, I felt no compulsion to pick it up and continue reading.

I received my copy through NetGalley.

The Man with the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi is a recommended novel that weaves magic realism into a novel with an environmental message.

Originally published in Taiwan, the narrative of The Man with the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi follows two very different people, Atile’i and Alice. Atile’i, is an exiled teen from the Wayo Wayoan tribe, who "thought the whole world was but a single island."Atile'i shared the fate of every Wayo Wayoan second son - he is exiled and sent off into the ocean in a canoe and expected to die. Instead he finds himself living on an island made of garbage. Alice Shih is a grieving mother in Taiwan who "got up early one morning and decided to kill herself." When a massive earthquake hits, she goes back to sleep with the thought that she was planning to die anyway. Rather than dying "She got up, looked out the window, and found herself standing on a remote island in the midst of an immense ocean, as frothy waves rolled relentlessly across the distance toward the shore."

The narration of the story switches between Atile’i and Alice. The two find themselves together when a tsunami causes the garbage island to collide with Taiwan. The two form a family-like bond and go on to meet a cast of others. Included is a dose of magic realism, surrealism, share cultural stories and myths, and a very pro-environmentalism message. It is very much concerned with the relationship people have with each other and especially with the earth. The progression of the narrative is not in a linear fashion, but instead has memories and stories intertwined with the plot development.

While The Man with the Compound Eyes is well written and the translation seems to capture some of the lyricism that must be present in the original version, it is also not an easy, quick read as it will take some time and dedication to start to understand the rhythm of the book and the flow of the plot. Those who enjoy hearing stories and folk lore from other cultures and magic realism will likely appreciate this book. The overwhelming arching theme, however, is that we are destroying our environment, so if that will upset you, pass this one up.


Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Knopf Doubleday for review purposes.

Not quite surreal.½