Wu Ming-yi’s (吳明益) “eco-fiction” fantasy The Man With the Compound Eyes (複眼人) is putting Taiwan on the international map in a novel way, with editions appearing in London, New York and Paris.
A recent US radio network gave the novel high marks and praised the author for his powerful imagery.
In a review, the National Public Radio network headquartered in Washington praised Wu’s novel for its insight and its poetry.
“It is so rare to find yourself at home in any book,” book reviewer Jason Sheehan said.
He then went on to heap praise on the little-known Taiwanese novel that is finding readers overseas.
“To land... amid the pages, to look around and to recognize the place you’ve come to as easily as you do your own bedroom; to be able to curl into the pulp and ink, and know this invented place in every smell, every sound — that’s magic,” Sheehan said. “Especially when you’ve never been to Taiwan. Especially when this Taiwan — the magical, spirit-infested Taiwan of Wu Ming-yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes — isn’t even the real Taiwan, and when the book wasn’t even written in your language. Not originally, anyhow. When it is, in every way a book can be, alien.”
Noting that the novel was translated by National Taiwan University professor Darryl Sterk, he said Wu’s novel was “just as much about stag beetles, mountaineering, love, sex, millet wine and whales as it is about the lives of the main [Taiwanese] characters in the book.”
“It’s the kind of book where you read 50 pages and you think that nothing has happened, but then you think harder about it and realize that everything has happened,” he said. “[There are] deaths and tsunamis, and inexorable ecological disasters that play out not with Hollywood pyrotechnics, but in the slow, creeping way that some inexorable ecological disasters actually happen.”
Comparing Wu’s novel to Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magic realism, Sheehan said the novel is “[haunting] in its quietness and power.”
Wu’s novel is to be published in French later this year.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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