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A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice
"[A] modernist masterpiece. . . . True, his characters are young people living in Brooklyn. And he writes about the Internet. But we should stop calling Tao Lin the voice of his generation. Taipei, his new novel, has less to do with his generation than with the literary tradition of Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Musil. . . . I cheerfully wrote "Proust" in the margin early on—because the hero, a young writer named Paul, takes such a meta attitude toward his own memories."—Benjamin Lytal, New York Observer
"Here we have a serious, first-rate novelist putting all his skills to work."—Clancy Martin, New York Times Book Review
"Mr. Lin casts a spell in Taipei. . . . [It is] his strongest book. At its best, it has distant echoes of early Hemingway, as filtered through Twitter and Klonopin: it's terse, neutral, composed of small and often intricate gestures. . . . it's about flickers of perception, flickers that the author catches as if they were fireflies."—Dwight Garner, New York Times
"Amazing. . . . the best writer about what it's like to be f*cked up on drugs that I've ever read."—John Horgan, author of The End of Science
"One thing I like about Tao's writing is how beside the point for me 'liking' it feels -- it's a frank depiction of the rhythm of a contemporary consciousness or lack of consciousness and so it has a power that bypasses those questions of taste entirely. Like it or not, it has the force of the real."—Ben Lerner, author of Leaving the Atocha Station
"[A] novel about disaffection that's oddly affecting. . . . for all its emotional reality, Taipei is a book without an ounce of self-pity, melodrama, or posturing."—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Lin is an existential writer, really, less interested in tracing the contours of his particular social group than in describing the very personal and sometimes unbearable tyranny of one's own mind. . . . the novel's climactic scene. . . . builds over a few pages to a revelation that, in its sheer unexpected beauty, recalls the powerfully moving ending of David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress."—Slate
- Sales Rank: #86035 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Vintage
- Published on: 2013-06-04
- Released on: 2013-06-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.98" h x .79" w x 5.18" l, .57 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Amazon.com Review
Guest Review of Taipei, by Tao Lin
By Charles Yu
Charles Yu is the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which was named one of the best books of the year by Time magazine. He received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award for his story collection Third Class Superhero, and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award. His work has been published in The New York Times, Playboy, and Slate, among other periodicals. Yu lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Michelle, and their two children.
What does it feel like to be alive? It's an inquiry central to many novels, either explicitly or implicitly, and it has been explored in so many ways, in so many variations and permutations, that it's remarkable when someone finds a new way of asking the question. With Taipei, Tao Lin has managed to do just that. The novel's protagonist, Paul, is a twenty-something writer living in New York City who has at least two extraordinary capabilities: (1) a terrifyingly high tolerance for pharmacological substances, and (2) a prodigious ability to record and recount the moment-to-moment flow of micro-impressions and fleeting sensations of his awareness. While Lin may not be the first writer to combine these two elements in the form of a novel, he is the first one to synthesize them in this particular way, and it is the tension and interaction of these things that make Taipei such a compelling read.
What does it feel like to be alive? Weird. Really weird. That's something very easy to forget - we have an ability to acclimate quickly to our own ambient mental environment. For similar reasons, the fundamental strangeness of being alive is also very hard to articulate. What Tao Lin does is to slow everything down, paying very close attention to everything, registering his findings. The noise and bustle and all-night lights of the big city, first New York City, and then Taipei, the blur of pills and parties and people's faces are presented not as an impressionistic smear, but in careful, deliberate language, prose so precise it cannot be anything but excruciatingly honest. At times, Taipei feels like an experiment, a study on how to use (and abuse) your brain, with Paul communicating in a way that almost feels scientific - he's a scientist studying the strange thing called his self, or an alien who experiences human consciousness as if he were test-driving a brand new technology. It is this detachment which allows Lin to render, in a very pure, very visceral way, what the fringe feels like, a displacement or distance from the center, from your own heart, the psychological impossibility of going to some real or imagined home. Taipei renders all of this with a brute and direct force, and I admit at times that force caused me to flinch. This kind of experience is why I read, though - to be challenged, to be confronted, to experience something completely familiar that has been made entirely new.
From Booklist
This novel follows Paul, a young, Brooklyn-based author, as his drug addiction spirals out of control. Though he experiments at first in the name of artistic expression, Paul becomes consumed by apathy, tripping during interviews and drifting out of touch with old friends. He meets and marries Erin, a fellow artist drug user, and they move to Taipei, Taiwan, where they become performance artists, videotaping themselves while on drugs in public. As their relationship breaks down, Paul nearly overdoses and is finally thankful to be alive. The characters are visibly suffering from loneliness, desperately wounded self-esteem, and an aimlessness that leads them to wander from poetry reading to movie theater to party to party, making the briefest and shallowest of encounters with those around them. Tao Lin’s writing style is definitively unique and mirrors the shifting reality his drugged characters perceive when submerged in their daze. At times, however, it is a haze too thick for the unencumbered reader to peer through. --Sarah Grant
Review
"[A] consolidation and vindication of everything [Lin] has produced to date. . . . extremely moving. . . . a daring, urgent voice for a malfunctioning age."—Times Literary Supplement
"Gchat as dialogue, endless drugs, misused words--welcome to the genius of Tao Lin's new novel. . . . Lin is one of the few fiction writers around who engages with contemporary life, rather than treating his writing online as existing in opposition to or apart from the hallowed analogue space of the novel. . . . exactly the kind of book I hoped Tao Lin would one day write."—Emily Witt, The Daily Beast
"A strange, hypnotic, memoir-reeking novel that is equal parts dissociative and heartbreaking, surreally hallucinogenic and grittily realist, ugly and beautiful."—Porochista Khakpour, author of Sons And Other Flammable Objects
"With Taipei Tao Lin becomes the most interesting prose stylist of his generation."—Bret Easton Ellis, author of Lunar Park
"Lin's great skill is to punctuate the narration with occasional moments of great lyricism, beauty, or pain."—Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Harper's
"[Taipei] could also have been called Drugs. But the marketing team at Vintage may not have wanted it placed alongside contemporary "drug fiction" like Irvine Welsh's The Acid House. . . . Lin has grander ambitions. . . . Lin doesn't romanticize drugs, or really even seem to enjoy them much. Nor does he moralize about them. Taipei carefully avoids the conventional drug genres of bacchanal and cautionary tale. . . . It is a depiction of the alienated subject in a personality-driven world."—LA Review of Books
"[Taipei] reads like a howl, and also—with its cast of angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night—rather like Allen Ginsberg's poem 'Howl.'"—The Guardian
"[P]sychologically astute, often beautiful and completely unexpected."—NPR
"Taipei might be the first spiritual narrative that millennials—that anyone living in 2013, really—can get behind."—PopMatters
"In an age when the young consume mass quantities of music, video, and film, Tao provides a broader statement about the difficulty and importance of giving birth to oneself. . . . startling and life affirming."—Paste
"Taipei brilliantly portrays the life of many young men—drifting and difficult to reach, bound only to technology and drugs."—Financial Times
"[T]he first book I'd recommend to people who want to read a next-level novel, something akin to space-age journalism."—David Miller, Matador
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
“[A] modernist masterpiece. . . . True, his characters are young people living in Brooklyn. And he writes about the Internet. But we should stop calling Tao Lin the voice of his generation. Taipei, his new novel, has less to do with his generation than with the literary tradition of Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Musil.”—Benjamin Lytal, New York Observer
“Here we have a serious, first-rate novelist putting all his skills to work.”—Clancy Martin, New York Times Book Review
”Mr. Lin casts a spell in Taipei. . . . [It is] his strongest book. At its best, it has distant echoes of early Hemingway, as filtered through Twitter and Klonopin: it’s terse, neutral, composed of small and often intricate gestures. . . . it’s about flickers of perception, flickers that the author catches as if they were fireflies.”—Dwight Garner, New York Times
"Amazing. . . . He's actually the best writer about what it's like to be f*cked up on drugs that I've ever read."—John Horgan, author of The End of Science
"The most moving depiction of the way we live now. . . . unutterably moving."—Michael Silverblatt, KCRW's Bookworm
“One thing I like about Tao's writing is how beside the point for me 'liking' it feels — it's a frank depiction of the rhythm of a contemporary consciousness or lack of consciousness and so it has a power that bypasses those questions of taste entirely. Like it or not, it has the force of the real.”—Ben Lerner, author of Leaving the Atocha Station
“[A] novel about disaffection that’s oddly affecting. . . . for all its emotional reality, Taipei is a book without an ounce of self-pity, melodrama, or posturing.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Prompted many thoughts, but almost none of them positive
By Sean Rueter
It's a pretty accurate to statement to say that I was an overly introspective and depressed twenty-something who "partied" too much. Taipei makes me glad that I wasn't doing it in the late aughts through the present day, or in Brooklyn. Because Tao Lin's characters take navel-gazing and selfish behavior to another level.
There's a great deal of craft on display, and I did find myself sucked into the downward spiral of Paul's life. If the goal was to make me care as little about his life, or to loathe the way he and his "friends" act, as he seems to, it's a success. I admire the honesty with which the protagonist's inner monologue is presented - I think most men will relate to the way Paul observes and categorizes his female acquaintenances. Taipei left me hoping that, even as a priviledged young adult of the late 90s / early aughts, that I wasn't this inwardly focused and oblivious to the suffering of the world around me. And praying that if this is an accurate representation of today's 20-somethings, that their journey takes them to a place of gratitude and maybe even a higher purpose like it seems Paul reaches at the novel's conclusion.
This is why I was torn while reading Lin's book, and remain so after finishing. I found it be a profoundly unsettling experience that I wouldn't describe as enjoyable. But that's one of the goals of art. Right?
73 of 97 people found the following review helpful.
Not the messiah
By Peter Mathews
Tao Lin is hot property in the world of contemporary literature, with Taipei, his third novel, being hailed as his breakthrough work. Part of his appeal lies, no doubt, in his capacity to divide: whether as a person and a writer, he tends either to inspire adoration as the voice of his generation or hatred for being a shallow impostor. Lin also complicates matters further by blurring the lines between fiction and autobiography in making Paul, the protagonist of Taipei, into a rather transparent stand-in for his own self. Paul essentially shares every aspect of Tao Lin's history, from his Taiwanese background to his rampant drug use.
One of Lin's champions is Bret Easton Ellis, and it is perhaps no surprise that Taipei is being compared to Ellis's debut novel Less Than Zero (1985). In terms of personality, though, these two writers could not be more different. Unlike the self-promoting, egoistic Ellis, Lin, to coin a term, is a "black hole" provocateur. In the interviews I have read, he comes across as curiously passive and non-committal, much like the protagonist of Taipei, in a way that initially makes me want to punch him in the face for his apparent pretentiousness but, after further consideration, makes me also admire his ability to provoke such a reaction in spite of his utterly flavorless personality (nonetheless, I still want to punch him in the face).
Taipei had a similar effect on me as I was reading it. The opening pages were a lesson in patience: endlessly detailed descriptions of Paul's passive-aggressive interactions with his initial girlfriend Michelle, introductions to a myriad of characters who bobbed in and out of the story without much significance, a lack of clear plot direction, and most grating of all, the minutiae of Paul's online activity, as he cycles through an assortment of online chats, emails, blogs, texts, and other social media that are just as boring to him as they are to us as readers. Taipei is a boring, plot-less novel about a pretentious, self-absorbed protagonist who fritters away his time on worthless pursuits, goes to parties, does LOTS of drugs, whines about his poor relationships with his family, friends, and girlfriends while doing everything in his power to alienate them, and generally inhabits a zone of hipster privilege that is itself a cultural cliche. Not only that, but the novel's title misleads the reader into expecting that it will shed some light on Taipei in some way, but when Paul goes to that city he does the exact same things he does in America: takes lots of drugs, plays with his MacBook, and sets about alienating his female companion.
My opinion started to moderate a little not because the novel improved dramatically as it went on or suddenly took on some kind of coherent plot, but because I began to see some unexpected similarities between Lin's writing and earlier works of literature. Throughout Taipei, for instance, Lin uses quotation marks to indicate phrases that seem like cliches, and while in the early stages of reading I reacted, for instance, to Kyle's description of Traci as "really hot" in quotation marks with an angry note in the margin ("what is this? high school?"), I reluctantly remembered that Flaubert does much the same thing in Madame Bovary, albeit with italics rather than quotation marks. I remembered also reading about Sartre's drug habits, about how he was so amped up on speed that if you examine his handwritten manuscripts you can see where his handwriting slides off the edge of the page from writing so quickly.
It was the Sartre connection that really got me thinking, making me ponder a possible resonance between Taipei and Sartre's first novel Nausea (1938). Nausea is a meditation on the anxiety of existence, a haunting feeling which troubles all human beings but that bothers, in particular, the novel's sensitive central character Antoine Roquentin. Roquentin seems to be more attuned than others to this existential condition, and Sartre explores his protagonist's ongoing dilemma through two main avenues: Roquentin's ambivalent relationship with an Englishwoman, Anny, and various lyrical moments of philosophical insight, the most famous of which occurs when Roquentin sits on a park bench and contemplates the root of a chestnut tree (a passage that was inspired, it is said, by Sartre's experiments with mescaline).
The best parts of Taipei more or less follow these aspects of Sartre's novel. In place of Anny, Lin inserts Erin, a writer from Baltimore, into the story, who provides a breath of fresh air after Paul's earlier, insipid entanglements with Michelle and then Laura, relationships that revealed little about the characters and did not move along the plot in any way. Erin, by contrast, provides an excellent foil to Paul's character in the second half of the book, indulging his immature impulses by sharing drugs, making amateur films with Paul on their ubiquitous MacBooks, going to Las Vegas with him, visiting his family in Taipei, and then returning to New York for the novel's final binge on heroin and magic mushrooms. Erin is the only character in the novel with any warmth and depth, and it is for this reason that she actually manages to shed some light on the colorless protagonist in Paul.
The true potential of this novel, however, comes into focus whenever Lin follows Sartre by providing the reader with lyrical contemplations about the meaning of existence. Normally, the prose style of the novel is either dull (tedious, in-depth descriptions of drug-taking and email-checking) or, in some cases, laughably clumsy. Lin comes up with some awful similes, from comparing Paul's inability to understand others to "an amoeba trying to create a personal webpage using CSS" (p.10), to his protagonist's social discomfort being "not unlike playing a difficult Nintendo game alone, with no instruction manual" (p.37). But these moments are somewhat redeemed by some glimpses of true lyrical beauty, such as this passage in which Paul imagines technology subverting its role as humanity's slave and slowing taking over society:
"At some point, Paul vaguely realized, technology had begun for him to mostly only indicate the inevitability and vicinity of nothingness. Instead of postponing death by releasing nanobots into the bloodstream to fix things faster than they deteriorated, implanting little computers into people's brains, or other methods Paul had probably read about on Wikipedia, until it became the distant, shrinking, nearly nonexistent somethingness that was currently life-- and life, for immortal humans, became the predominate ["predominant"?] distraction that was currently death-- technology seemed more likely to permanently eliminate life by uncontrollably fulfilling its only function: to indiscriminately convert matter, animate or inanimate, into computerized matter, for the sole purpose, it seemed, of increased functioning, until the universe was one computer. Technology, an abstraction, undetectable in concrete reality, was accomplishing its concrete task, Paul dimly intuited while idly petting Erin's hair, by way of an increasingly committed and multiplying workforce of humans , who receive , over hundreds of generations, a certain kind of advancement (from feet to bicycles to cars, faces to bulletin boards to the internet) in exchange for converting a sufficient amount of matter into computerized matter for computers to be able to build themselves." (p.167)
Or, to give an another example, here is a beautiful passage from late in the story in which Paul, high on mushrooms, imagines that his being is melding with that of Erin:
"His steady, controlled petting of one of Erin's vertebra with the cuticle of his right index finger gradually felt like his only method of remaining in concrete reality, where he and Erin, and other people, shared a world. Sometimes, forgetting what he was doing, his finger would slow or stop and he would become aware of a drifting sensation and realize he was being absorbed-- from an indiscernible distance, beyond which he wouldn't know how to return-- and, with some urgency, move his body or open his eyes, seeing grid-like overlays on the walls and holograms of graph paper in the air, to interrupt his being taken. The effort became gradually smaller and more unconscious and, as if for something to do, in place of what was now automatic, Paul began to discern his rhythmic petting as a continuous striving to elicit certain information from Erin by responding or not responding to her rhythms, in a cycle whose goal was to produce momentary equilibriums. He felt increasingly attuned to the speed and quality of her breathing and heart rate, until he felt able to instantly discern changes in her physiology, which in entirety began to seem like an inconstant unit of unique, irreducible information (an ever-changing display of only prime numbers) that was continuously expressed and that bypassed the parts of them that allowed for deliberation or perception or intuition, beginning and ending in the only place where they were exactly together, undifferentiated and unknowable, but couldn't, in their present form, ever reach, like a thing communicating directly with itself, rendering them both irrelevant." (pp.243-4)
These are the kind of occasional gems that are buried in the midst of a novel that is otherwise focused on the annoying and pretentious task of enumerating the banality of a certain class of people in America. Could it be that one style cannot exist without the other, that these lyrical passages need the tedium of Paul's postmodern life in the same way that a picture needs a frame, that light needs darkness? Whatever the case, I certainly don't think that Taipei is the next great work in contemporary literature, nor that Tao Lin is mature enough to break through at this stage, even though the consensus seems to be against me. Young writers tend to suffer from a lack of discipline, but Taipei perhaps suffers from too much: its relentlessly unemotional style is suffocating, a drawback made all the more stark by the intrusion of its best, most lyrical moments, those rare times when the novel breaks free from its pretentious shackles and shows glimpses of the writer that Lin might someday become.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Takes place in a painfully boring bubble
By M. Gutierrez
I really wanted to love this book. There are some beautifully constructed sentences (this man can properly punctuate the hell out of a paragraph~page long sentence) and some hilarious sentences that would seem contrite outside of whatever blurry, boring context is often given. Mostly, though, this book documents self-pitying mumbling addicts, so willing to live in (and constantly reconstruct) awkward tangents around every person and thing they touch. I mean, we're all sad, but these people are awful and, worst of all, in the literary world, just not that interesting :/
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