An interesting subject constrained by the writing style. I tried this three times but each time found myself drifting and struggling with the long sentences and on. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. Not for the casual reader.

Beautifully written, experimental and rewarding. Illuminates a brutal history of colonialism and occupation. I found this hard-going, as it needs to be to convey the pain felt by the Atayal people. I would recommend this to readers with an interest in South East Asian history; it may be more of a challenge to pitch to commerical fiction readers.

I got this book hoping to learn about the native peoples of Taiwan, intrigued by the idea of a crime story interwoven into the cultural history of a people unknown in America or other far-flung parts.

I didn't finish the book. The syntax--long sentences that weaved and wended all over the place--really bogged down my reading. The story crept along, and ultimately I lost interest.

I'm not sure if a bad translation is to blame, rather than the efforts of the writer. Perhaps I just didn't have the level of curiosity in indigenous Taiwanese culture necessary to push through such a difficult read.

Oh, jeez... this was a difficult one to read. The writing style just turned me off, but I kept at it, skimming some parts as I went a long. Sorry. it was just too , too much. But the story behind this story was just heartbreaking. I took Japanese history in college for a quarter, sadly I only took pt. 1. I wonder if the class would have covered the atrocities committed by the Japanese? So sad.

This is an immensely challenging read and one which I found ultimately too much for me. Without the excellent and essential introduction I would have been completely at sea. As it was, having that to guide me, plus some internet research, I ended up understanding what the book was about but still didn’t find it an accessible one and I gave up about half way through. It’s considered a “milestone in Chinese literature”, winning numerous awards, and I can accept its place in literary history, but I’m not a fan of literary modernism anyway and seeing it compared frequently to Ulysses didn’t encourage me. What I did find worthwhile, however, was learning about the Musha Incident, around which the book is based, a little known uprising in Taiwan against the Japanese colonisers. Unfortunately this wasn’t enough to keep me persevering with this long, fractured and rambling text with its nearly complete lack of full stops. A book for the literary scholar or academic, perhaps, but not one for the general reader and not one for me.

Remains of Life is a difficult yet rewarding novel about a tragic uprising in the mountains of Taiwan in the 1930s. While it was perhaps too long, it is an important novel about a mostly unknown part of the past.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book. I had a difficult time becoming engrossed in the narrative but have hope that it will be very well received by other readers.

During the Japanese occupation of Korea a group of indigenous tribespeople conducted a massacre of the occupying forces. Retribution was swift and severe, a virtual genocide of those people and a cover up for the rest of the world. In this book Wu He explores the aftermath.

This book has had many excellent reviews and it is interesting to read about a culture so alien from my own and a part of history I am not familiar with. Unfortunately I found the book virtually impenetrable despite my attempts to engage with the writing.

This book was an experience! While I learnt a great deal about incidents of Taiwanese genocide and wandered upon insights along the way, there was a great deal of rambling. It felt very long.

I confess I had a lot of difficulty with this book and did not finish it. Not so much because of the writing but because there are no paragraph breaks. That might be an artifact of the electronic files for Kindle and Adobe Digital Reader and not the author's intent...so if you consider reading it and flip the pages and there are paragraph breaks, then jump on it because what I could read was sometimes deliciously sarcastic. I snorted out loud at an old woman letting the writer know in very clear terms how little she appreciates being studied. There's a bitingly cynical conversation with the local Priest as well. Add a truly humane sensibility and I think this will be a great book that I will try to read after it's published. Unfortunately, the electronic copies gave me a headache because there are no paragraph breaks. It's only that it was so intriguing that I persevered a quarter of the way through despite the flawed formatting in the electronic edition.

I did not finish this book as I did not engage with this story at all.

For an American reader, Remains of Life is reminiscent of Faulkner and Joyce as well as the postmodern metafiction writers of the 1960s and 70s. The cultural commentary can be difficult to find due to the artistic choices; it is unclear if this is an effect of the cultural divide or the translation. Regardless, the English version effectively conveys the complexity of the social situation at hand and skillful blends cerebral stream-of-consciousness contemplation with gritty, real-time characters and episodes.

Popular fiction readers should be prepared for the experimental nature of the text. I can see it appealing to a small demographic of academics..

For me this is probably more of a 2 star read but I bumped it up because of the subject matter and it was interesting. I just found the writing a but hard to get into. Although it was an interesting read, I was abit confused at times as I didn't have any prior knowledge of the subject matter and due to the writing as well.