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. ( )

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. ( )