The Stolen Bicycle by
Wu Ming-Yi
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
So, this book was longlisted for the Man Booker prize, and there was some controversy since Man Booker first listed the author as Taiwanese, then switched to Chinese (under pressure from Beijing), which made the author protest on his facebook page. Anyway, the book didn't make the shortlist, and I can't help thinking the whole China/Taiwan drama may have had something to do with it.
Regardless, this was an excellent book, although this may be partly because I love Taiwan, and this book is thoroughly Taiwanese. It delves deep into certain aspects of Taiwanese history that I otherwise would know nothing about. In the process you also get a more Japanese perspective of certain events in WW2.
It's certainly not a clean, straightforward narrative, but it branches out into many avenues. I won't say it gets sidetracked, since the narrator is always in pursuit of the same thing (the bicycle), but in doing so a lot of ground is covered.
There's quite a bit of interesting symbolism (holding onto peoples' waists while riding a bicycle behind them, to then being the person in front with someone holding on behind. Also the parallels between the inanimate bicycle and the animate elephant, and I'm sure there are plenty more I've missed).
The postscript is beautiful. And thanks to it I found my favorite Jonathan Franzen quote: "Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it."
A pet peeve though: The Chinese transliteration was really weird. Most of it was done using Wade-Giles (who does that anymore?), but some seemed haphazard (Ssu-Chuan for Sichuan/Szechuan)? I do wish I could read this in the original Chinese though, since I heard his prose is very poetic. I think some of this comes across in translation, but I'm sure a lot of it is lost.
If you're going to read one work of contemporary Taiwanese fiction, this should probably be it.
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Taiwan Literature English Translation Series - Special Issues on New Generation Fiction Writers of Taiwan by Kuo-ching Tu
