I couldn't get into this book, I'm afraid, so it's a "did not finish" for me, and on that basis, I haven't reviewed on the normal channels.

This story really wasn’t for me. The writing style was just hard to follow and I couldn’t get into it. Guess I like my stories a little more simplistic.

Twenty years ago, when Father first went missing, it occurred to us if we could find his bicycle, we might find him. Only then did we discover that his bicycle was gone, too – that Father and his iron steed had left us together.

Lucky brand bicycles, which in fact seem to bring no luck at all. Butterfly wings made into collages. Mudslides in the jungle of Burma and granades exploding. An orangutan named Mr. Ichiro, and elephants named Miss Ma and Ah Mei, so carefully portrayed they seem to have human characteristics. Red cedars and banyans within the branches of which one could climb to hide from enemy soldiers.

A man, on a search for his father.

Dead, or missing fathers, everywhere.

These images swirl in my head as I read, letting me know that I am reading about much more than just a stolen bicycle. This novel is about war and the horrendous things people have done to one another, but it is also gentle and insightful.

Stories exist in the moment when you have no way of knowing how you got from the past to the present. We never know at first why they continue to survive, as if in hibernation, despite the erosive power of time. But as you listen to them, you feel like they have been woken up, and end up breathing them in. Needle-like, they poke along your spine into your brain before stinging you, hot and cold, in the heart.

Some favorite quotes as I read:

“Brother had bawled on the whole way home on Ma’s back – well on his way to a career of annoying everyone around him to no end.”

“The boss had reached that age when loneliness starts to choke you and any company will do.”

“The truth of a novel does not depend on facts.”

“Then I did my best to forget about it. This is my habit in the face of uncertainty – I try not to think about things, hoping they’ll turn out fine.”

“Bicycles in War lists some of the advantages of war bicycles. For starters, bicycles were as fast and agile as cavalry, but didn’t have to eat, drink, shit, piss or sleep like a horse. A bicycle also won’t kick or bite. Even more important, a bicycle unit doesn’t consume gasoline like a motorcycle unit. And riding a bike is much quieter than riding a horse or driving a vehicle.”

“I was shocked to realise how quickly a familar face could fade from memory after just a few days’ absence.”

“But as I grew older, I discovered that people living for their own happiness often bring pain to those around them. They don’t seem able to consider their family members’ opinions, or their feelings. Everyone envies this kind of person. Sometimes I felt I was a lot like him, the difference being that I didn’t have the courage to face disapproval.”

“Emotionally he stayed underwater, only occasionally sending up a periscope.”

“If you can accept that – that some things aren’t meant to be, that you can’t get all you want – you can be more accepting in your own life.”

For readers who enjoy the avant-garde and an atypical writing style.

Not for readers who enjoy being pulled into a book by compelling characters and a sense of atmosphere that enhances an anticipated plot.

I belong in the second category. So, I was unable to enjoy my reading experience and set the book aside, unfinished.

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.

The Stolen Bicycle seems to mix in fiction with nonfiction, producing the effects of an illusion to the facts of war. The fact of a memento, existing with these markings and memories, is a reality that every human can empathize with. This object reminds us of this terribly awful time and that reminds us of a quite happy time. This investigative story tracks the long history of a certain bicycle once widely used, but now almost extinct. It carries the memories of war, of a country in transition, and of the legacy of ancestors. At times, the book got too technical where bicycle blueprints were laid out, but in others the stories carried by the inanimate vessel of a bicycle served to provide remarkable insights into history once lost.

Hmmm, fascinating story. I couldn't relate to looking for a stolen bicycle years after the fact. It would seem that one would be trying to solve the mystery of the missing father! But different time, different culture. My family "lost" relatives during war, too; we assumed they were killed. Maybe Wu Ming-Yi's father suffered the same fate? It was a good read and I enjoyed the story, just found it odd. I am sure it will find it's audience and that they will enjoy the story very much. It's well written and thought provoking.

I really wanted to like this one. I tried. I really tried. I ended up DNFing it....Some of the stories within the story were interesting, especially the chapter about the butterflies, but overall, I felt like they were long-winded. The overall premise of this book was very intriguing for me, but unfortunately it just didn't work for me.

I thought that this would have been one of those books that I could just dive right into, but, it did not interest me at all. If a book does not stand out to me within the first chapter, it most likely won't be one that will make a lasting impression on me. Sorry.

I received The Stolen Bicycle as an ARC from NetGalley, and that’s how I came to read Wu Ming-yi’s brilliant novel set in Taiwan. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018, The Stolen Bicycle retains its distinct flavour thanks to the masterful translation by Darryl Sterk, a teacher at the National Taiwan University specializing in translation and interpretation.

The title of the novel actually represents a very small corner of the story, and acts more like a prompt that unravels a wide range of themes. Heavily blurring the line between memoir and fiction, the narrator takes us through a bicycle ride through these vastly diverse topics that are somehow threaded together by bicycles.
The novel begins with the narrator describing how ‘thih be’, iron horses in Taiwanese, have always been extremely important in his life since childhood.

“No matter how I tell it, this story has to start with bicycles. To be more precise, it has to start with stolen bicycles. ‘Iron horses have influenced the fate of our entire family,’ my mother used to say.”

Using this as the springboard, Wu takes us on his quest to find his father who went missing 20 years ago along with his bicycle. His only clue to finding his father is the bicycle he used.

“Pa’s last bicycle was a Lucky. The only thing I remember about that bike is that it was unisex: you could adjust the top tube, turning a man’s bike into a woman’s. From then on, wherever this early Lucky unisex model turned up, I would go take a look. And that was how it started: my obsession with antique bicycles flowed from my missing father.”

By now we can gather how bicycles are a central figure in people’s lives with the brands, the make, and type indicating a person’s education and standing in society. In his search for antique bicycles the narrator also encounters people associated with them. Their stories take us through subjects as disparate as Taiwan’s butterfly industry, the rise of Shiseido cosmetics, bicycles, both Japanese and Taiwanese, and Western medicine in Taiwan, all written in dazzling, tangible prose.

“But every time she raised her head, she missed those days by the forest creek or in the wetland catching butterflies, when the humid valley wind would blow upstream…Her father’s sweat, the scent of male butterflies, and the smell of the rotten leaves and tender sprouts in the forest mingled together in her memory, thickening into an almost palpable miasma, until she was engulfed.”

Memories like these from different people are conveyed to us through diaries, emails, and verbal recollections. Wu does not leave himself out of this complex canvas either. There are long passages where he reflects on his own profession as a writer, the merits of being one, and the line between fiction and reality.

There were times when the book lost momentum due to the intricate detailing of so many topics. There were also times when I simply had to take a break from reading the book because of its multiple layering, which overwhelmed me. But I mostly relished the poignant family memories skilfully interspersed with economic, social, and historical facts about Taiwan. The narrator’s father “had a word for the art or skill a person carried around with him: kang hu…What was the difference between kang-hu and technique? Pa said that things made with kang-hu have soul.” And this book has loads of it.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me this copy for a review!

"Stories exist in the moment when you have no way of knowing how you got from the past to the present. We never know at first why they continue to survive, as if in hibernation, despite the erosive power of time. But as you listen to them, you feel like they have been woken up, and end up breathing them in. Needle-like, they poke along your spine into your brain before stinging you, hot and cold, in the heart."

This is an absolutely gorgeous novel, both graphically with the author's own hand-drawn illustrations of bicycles and hand-written Chinese writing opening and closing each of the History of the Bicycle chapters interspersed with the story, and with the prose which draws one in from the opening paragraph:

"I must describe that morning for you, because every time something is described anew it becomes meaningful anew. I must start by letting the dawn spread out, the morning light stroll over the land. I have to take the trees, the houses in the village, the local school, the fields with their medleys of colour, and the little fishing boats swaying with the wind at the seashore, and place them one by one like chess pieces in the landscape."

Wu Ming-yi (吳明益) wrote in a 2007 novel 睡眠的航線 (Route in a Dream, albeit as yet untranslated) about his family history and his father who "went to Japan at the age of thirteen to work in the naval weapons factory in Kanagawa Prefecture to make fighter planes". The narrator's father in the novel has a similar history, and, as with Wu's father, the novel ends with his disapperance. But then:

"Not long after it was published, a letter from a reader appeared in my inbox. This was out of the ordinary, because there weren’t too many readers writing me emails back then, and I’d never heard from this one before. The reader, who signed off as Meme, asked me something I’d never thought about: At the end of the novel, the narrator’s father, Saburo, rides his bicycle to the Chung-shan Hall and then just disappears into thin air. He doesn’t return to the market, doesn’t go home. Where does he go? A bit messy, isn’t it? Even if I could bring myself to leave the loose thread hanging and stop worrying at it, what about that bicycle? Why would Saburo just ride his bike to the Chung-shan Hall and leave it there? To me, that bicycle is a symbol. It has to be. Fine. But where does that bicycle end up?"

This led the author to ponder the difference between fiction and reality:

"I found out early in my career as a writer that fiction and reality are so closely intertwined that any textual element is suspect—but treating anything in a novel as true is dangerous. For instance, in the novel Meme wrote to ask me about, the narrator was the son of the owner of an electrical appliances store. But actually my family ran a tailor’s shop, and later sold jeans, too. The truth of a novel does not depend on facts. That’s something any novelist understands. But a novel’s overarching structure is supported by what might be called ‘pillars of truth’.
...
I often feel that a novelist uses three pillars of truth to get the reader to believe in seven pillars of fiction and enter the castle he or she has created in language, whether it is opulent, squalid, fantastical or unreal. In my novel, the Chung-hwa Market was real, and so were the young workers who went to make warplanes in Japan. And my father did have a bicycle that disappeared when he went missing. But many of the story’s details were invented. For instance, though I have sometimes suffered from troubled sleep in real life, I have never experienced the war in my dreams. I did not have a girlfriend called Alice. (My then-girlfriend was called Teresa.) And I have no idea if my father parked his bicycle for the last time at the Chung-shan Hall."

And although he wrote back to the reader pointing out the fictional nature of the story, he did in practice become, as a person, obsessed with the antique bicycles and what might have happened to his father's bike, and as an author, wrote this novel, 單車失竊記 (The Stolen Bicycle) published in the original 2015, fictionalising his quest.

One of the early readers of this novel was Darryl Sterk, translator into English of one of Wu Ming-yi's books, and he does a wonderful job with the translation here.

In terms of the fictionalised story, the narrator (not to be confused 100% with the author) explains:

"Twenty years ago, when Father first went missing, it occurred to us that if we could find his bicycle, we might find him. Only then did we discover that his bicycle was gone, too—that Father and his iron steed had left us together.
...
Pa’s last bicycle was a Lucky. The only thing I remember about that bike is that it was unisex: you could adjust the top tube, turning a man’s bike into a woman’s. From then on, wherever this early Lucky unisex model turned up, I would go take a look. And that was how it started: my obsession with antique bicycles flowed from my missing father."

Taiwan is, of course, today known as home of the largest cycle manufacturer in the world, the appropriately named Giant, but the first large scale domestic manufacturer, competiting with the Fuji bikes from Japan and Raleigh from the UK, was Lucky (福) with their slogan: 騎幸福牌腳踏車，踏上幸福之路

"Ride Your Way to Luck—that was their slogan. It didn’t matter if you were starting a family or a business, if you were getting hitched or trying to get rich—first you needed a bicycle.
....
Lí Tsìn-ki had a good head for business. He advertised on billboards at train stations island-wide. He commissioned a radio jingle and booked airtime to get the word out. Even more radically, he organised a club that went on weekly rides he led himself. And he did it sixty years before the chairman of Giant Bicycles did."

And incidents involving stolen and lost bicycles are keen to the (fictional) family history, particularly as seen by his mother. Note also the use of Mandarin vs. Taiwanese language in the following, another key to the novel, as are Japanese and also indigenous language (what the author refers to in his afterword as Taiwan’s linguistic polyphony)

"‘Iron horses have influenced the fate of our entire family,’ my mother used to say. I would describe my mother as a New Historicist: to her, there are no Great Men, no heroes, no bombing of Pearl Harbor. She only remembers seemingly trivial—but to her fateful—matters like bicycles going missing. The word for fate in Mandarin is ming-yun, literally ‘life-luck’ or ‘command-turn’. But ‘fate’ in my mother’s native tongue of Taiwanese is the other way round: ūn-miā. It belies fatalism, putting luck in front of life, suggesting you can turn the wheel of fate yourself instead of awaiting the commands of Heaven."

Even the term used for a bicycle itself matters - Ma's 'iron horses' being one such word:

"In the world I grew up in, the word a person used for ‘bicycle’ told you a lot about them. Jiten-sha (‘self-turn vehicle’) indicated a person had received a Japanese education. Thih-bé (‘iron horse’) meant he was a native speaker of Taiwanese, as did Khóng-bîng-tshia (‘Kung-ming vehicle’), named for an ancient Chinese inventor. Tan-ch’e (‘solo vehicle’), chiao-t’a-ch’e (‘foot-pedalled vehicle’) or tsuhsing-ch’e (‘auto-mobile vehicle’) told you they were from the south of China."

As the narrator becomes an expert on antique bicycles , searching for one type in particular, the bike his father rose, he encounters others, e.g. A-pu:

"A-pu was somewhere between an aficionado, a collector and a dealer.

At the end of that cul-de-sac, we talked about all aspects of classic bicycle design, just like literary types talk about Milan Kundera and Italo Calvino or modern art buffs talk about Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.

The toolkit on the table, which he’d had since he was an apprentice, included a double-headed spanner, a spoke wrench, a set of Torx-type hex wrenches, a pedal spanner and a chain tool, though the master had always referred to them in Japanese: ryōguchi supana, supōku renchi, Torx renchi, pedaru supana, chēn kiri. These tools had been with him for decades. Each was pitted and scarred, and had a distinctive gleam. The master said that of all his tools, these were the handiest. He never seemed to get used to the new tools the sales reps gave him and had carried on using his own instead. A-pu felt the heft of a cast-iron wrench, examined the serial number stamped on its handle, and imagined how bright and shiny it must have been when the young master first picked it up, confident that with it there was no bolt he could not turn."

There is a Seiobo There Below-like element to these and similar passages, the reverence of an expert for their tools and their trade, expressed later on in his father's love for making suits:

"Pa had a word for the art or skill a person carried around with him: kang-hu, a homophone in Taiwanese for kung-fu.

Choosing materials was kang-hu, taking measurements was kang-hu, pick-stitching collars by hand was kang-hu, mark-stitching the tailor’s monogram in white thread was kang-hu, pressing with the iron to create line was kang-hu, even serging and buttoning was kang-hu, and not just technique. What was the difference between kang-hu and technique? Pa said that things made with kang-hu have soul.

Kang-hu was consummate technique matched with unusual resolve, and had nothing to do with ethics or morality."

Taiwan was, of course, under Japanese rule from 1895-1945, leading to a complicated history, particularly in the Second World War where people seem to have ended up on both sides - some working or even fighting for the Japanese (as with the narrator's father) and others against them, neither group really fighting for themselves:

"During the war, a battle to the death had been fought in the jungle Gunung Yong Belar overlooks to the west—a battle between a strategic force, hungry for the natural resources needed to establish the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and a defending force, made up of men who had gone willingly east to colonise an ancient empire and the colonised peoples they had drafted. No individual fought in that battle, master of his own fate. Everything—the gun in his hand, the clothes on his back, the boots on his feet, his puttees, even his fingernails, brain and blood—all belonged to the Imperial Army or the British Empire."

Even bicycles can tell us about history:

"People who haven’t actually confronted an old iron horse can hardly understand how rust can reveal an era, a geographical environment, the owner’s habits and the industrial artistry that went into its creation."

And in the novel, Wu Ming-yi manages to inform us not just about the Second World War, but also Taiwan's once booming butterfly handicraft industry, zoos, elephants (and the role of elephants - again on both sides - in the War) and the key role played by Japan's fabled Silverwheel Squad of cycle-based soldiers in the campaign in Burma and in the invasion of Singapore.

The story that results can get quite tangled - one point I found myself trying to work out exactly why the narrator is pushing an elderly lady around a zoo while she tells him an involved story of a Japanese bird-watching friend of hers who became lost in the Taiwanese mountains - but never less than fascinating.

As mentioned, language is key to the novel - as the author explains in an afterword:

"The first of these was the way I handled . I didn’t want the language to make it difficult for the reader to get into the story, but I also wanted to convey how a specific character thought and talked. To that end, after rendering the sense in Chinese characters, I also often supplied the sound in phonetic symbols or Romanisation—for the reader to linger over, or even, like an incantation, read aloud. I’ve always believed that language is not just a means of communication—that it is fundamentally poetic. Languages are not mere casks for wine; the cask makes the wine. This is a principle I hope you will keep in mind when you drink at the cup of this novel."

How much of this could be preserved in translation is difficult to say - this interview with both author and translator is illuminating http://lindsaymagazine.co/capturing-taiwan-translating-it/.- but what one can say is that Sterk has done a wonderful job and the resulting work in English is a truly beautiful read.

Highly recommended and thanks to the MBI jury for a wonderful discovery. (less)

The Stolen Bicycle by Wu Ming-yi, is one of the long listed titles for the Man Booker International 2018.

He is one of Taiwan’s most well-known authors and this is his fifth novel, the second to be translated into English. It won rave reviews in Taiwan, and the Taiwan Literary Award, following its Chinese-language release in 2016.

The narrator is the second son of a family, who desperately wanted a boy and finally had one after 5 girls. When the first son was born, the father decided there were too many girls, and almost adopted one out to a family member, events that lead up to the theft of his first bicycle.

"With an extra mouth to feed, the family could barely scrape a living, and my father, who now had the son he’d always wanted, decided that five girls in the house was one too many, one more than had been allotted by fate."

However, it was a later Taiwanese ‘Lucky’ branded bike that would send the narrator off on a mission to follow all leads and meet all kinds of people, discovering many aspects of his culture and some of its history in trying track it down, the bike that disappeared along with its rider, his father. This obsession with antique bicycles takes the narrator and readers alike on a voyage deep into aspects of Taiwan’s 20th-century history and culture.

"And that was how it started: my obsession with antique bicycles flowed from my missing father."

Each new encounter takes us on a new journey, as that person reveals something of their past and their knowledge of these ‘iron horses’, in fact much of the book is written as Bike Notes 1, Bike Notes II, complete with illustrations of the different era bicycles, including the infamous Japanese war bike, the ‘Silverwheel’ and the notorious ‘Silverwheel Squad’.

"The worst headache was the Silverwheel Squad. The Silverwheels traced the upper reaches of rivers and rode down into the jungle to launch one surprise attack after another."

In this way, the story meanders and diverges and then hooks into a subject and follows it a long way down its tributary, only to return and take another turn, meet another collector, owner, person, and even a long-lived elephant, who knows or might have known the owner, whom the narrator will meet and solicit their story patiently awaiting the moment they might reveal the connection to the bike, that might lead to his father.

The author uses conversation, flash backs of memory, war diaries, memoir and voice recordings to create a network of literary tributaries in bringing together this ambitious, far-reaching narrative that touches so many unique aspects of Taiwan’s history, culture, development and influences.

In the beginning these diversions are interesting and promising and somewhat intriguing, they are indeed historically significant as they reveal something of the life and influences of the era in which they occurred, especially around the time of the war, seeing it from the perspective of Taiwan and Japan, especially as war involved bicycle strategy and elephants, and we learn something about the work habits of a woman creating butterfly handcrafts and how her father learned to lure butterflies en masse to capture them.

However, I admit I became somewhat fatigued by the never-ending meandering, the prolonged encounters and diversions, to the point where I began to lose interest, despite avidly not wishing to. That could have been due to the length of the book, or perhaps that it is indeed a book of obsession, not quite to the same degree as Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, but with something of a similar feel, in the way the reader is pulled along on the journey, not quite sure of the destination. Or perhaps it is because of how ambitious a book it is, in covering so much that is unfamiliar, opening so many threads.

It’s clear that the author very much enjoyed putting this novel together, so much so he shares some of his writing philosophy at the end of the book, and I find myself somewhat forgiving him for having drawn out his story so, although I understand how he has lost less patient readers along the way.

"For some, life experiences drive the writing process. But for me writing novels is a way of getting to know, and of thinking about, human existence. I’m just a regular guy who has, through writing, come to understand things I couldn’t have before, concerning human nature and emotion. I write because I don’t see the world clearly. I write out of my own unease and ignorance. The ancient Greek historian Polybius put it thus: ‘The most instructive thing is remembering other people’s calamities. To stoically accept the vagaries of fate, this is the only way.’ I write novels to know how to stoically accept the vagaries of fate."

And his final words, appreciated all the more by this reader, having made it to the end.

"The only necessity is to keep pedalling – quietly, composedly, no matter how thirsty you are or how difficult it may be."

Wu Ming Yi, The Stolen Bicycle (Origin. Chinese 2015; English 2017)

You guys, this book… I’m not sure I should brag or be ashamed, but it took me 5 months to read it, and I have no idea what I read most of the time.

I am no fan of bicycles (I don’t even know the technical words in English or French for the different parts of a bike – and I didn’t learn), but I have a personal connection to Taiwan that made me want to read that book as soon as I spotted it on Netgalley. It’s rare enough to find a Taiwanese novel, but when it’s a book that has collected so many literary awards in its home country, it doesn’t quite matter if it’s over 400 pages… (or does it?)

Highbrow it is, definitely, and deep, and experimental, and full of historical references that I was only vaguely aware of, so… It’s not my usual cup of tea, but I’m glad I tried it.

At first glance the story seems pretty straightforward… at least at the beginning. As his ageing mother is sent to hospital (presumably for her final days) and his siblings gather around to take care of her, the narrator wants to track his father and his bicycle, who both disappeared 20 years ago. The man is convinced that if he’s able to find the bicycle, he’ll understand the truth about his father.

Now, it’s only one story of this book, where many other characters and bikes and stories are intertwined. The bikes are just a tool to show how Taiwan was influenced by Japanese technology (the small island being colonized by Japan from 1895 to 1945), and how Taiwanese people were part of the WW2 conflict on the Japanese side. The island was bombed by the US, the men were conscripted into the Japanese armies (but at lesser ranks than “real” Japanese). Part of the book is set in the Malaysian jungles where a lot of fighting took place, and a lot of gruelling sufferings and deaths. Not only men did die, but also nature and animals, and the book shifts its focus towards elephants (another surprising turn), in a deeply moving way. Elephants were used and abused as war transports, and then some found their way into zoos.

Some parts of the book are really heartbreaking. Wu Ming-Yi is nostalgic, but his emotions show through mundane details of fixing a bike in the proper way, or showing up at a café to meet someone who might have an ancient bike. So if you’re tempted by an adventurous, unexpected read out of your usual range, look to further.

I would rather not rate this at all since I didn't finish it. I would have enjoyed reading some of this as separate stories, but because I found it so disjointed, running off on long targets about different topics, I didn’t finish it. The writing and translation are good, although I had trouble with the names, which is my problem not the author’s I hasten to say!

I admit to getting confused about whose story was whose and whether the author was speaking about himself or actually relating someone else’s story. This takes place in Taiwan, formerly Formosa, and having a bicycle was something a family saved for. It was also a status symbol and used for everything, work, freight, shopping, taking family to the doctor.

The narrator’s father left the family years ago and took the bicycle, so he gets a notion to track it down. When he thinks he has, he then considers tracing its history, maybe leading back to some explanation about his father’s disappearance.

“Maybe you can’t trace your way from a river back to the rain or reconstruct a house from a heap of rubble, but after seeing that bicycle I couldn’t help thinking that if it had a buyer, it must have had a seller. It must have had an owner, and a previous owner. This idea was like a tiny flame that flickered in the wind but did not go out.”

The characters he meets on his quest are interesting, and the descriptions of family life and relationships were very enjoyable. I also got some idea of what it must have been like coming out from under Japanese rule. Everything considered to be of quality, including bikes, is Japanese.

One of the main characters is Abbas, and we hear an amazing tale of his exploits with an old man called old Tsou, which is also the name of a region of Taiwan and also the name of a language. No wonder I got confused.

But there are so many lengthy, involved discussions about bicycle development and culture and others about butterflies and butterfly collage, that I started skimming. Some of these came from a long, peculiar email exchange with a woman. Then there were some older stories supposedly found and transcribed from old tapes that were recorded in a mix of languages.

All in all, it would be a treat for someone interested in Taiwan and the culture, and if they had a passion for old bikes, even better!

For me, it ended up as too much of a probably-good thing, but a Did Not Finish after reading about a third. I think NetGalley and Text Publishing for providing a review copy from which I’ve quoted.

This is an unusual, but fascinating story - a mix of fact and fiction beautifully woven together by the author as the search for his father, who disappeared 20 years ago, through the medium of the bicycle his father disappeared on. He thinks that if he can track down the bicycle, he might be able to find out why his father upped and left the family so long ago.

What follows is a highly detailed book describing the family, their upbringing and the importance of the humble bicycle 'the iron horse' to many families - how it helped in day to day life, the use of bikes during the war and the connection people attached to such items.

The author uses so many engrossing layers to his story, through people he meets on his search and how the stories they told showed connections to bikes and their own journeys. It looks back at life during wars, the power of photography, the importance of elephants to name a few - and my favourite being a focus on the Karen tribe! A lot of stories could have felt very 'wordy' or overdone with so many topics introduced throughout, but as this is such a gentle book the story never feels bogged down and flows beautifully.

It's a story of overcoming loss, of how we attach great importance to simple objects and looks back at some shocking childhood memories and how the quest in searching for his father allows him to start questioning so much he encounters and allows him to learn and fill that void that is missing.

It is no surprise to see how central the use of bicycles were and are to so many, especially in this part of the world and I loved reading the touching stories from the surrounding characters who would open up to him when he tried to trace a certain bike and showed the importance of connecting with people one on one to hear the stories which would have otherwise gone untold.

Definitely something a little out of the ordinary and a truly captivating story that I'm very glad to have read.

The book opens with Cheng deciding to track down his father who disappeared 20 years previously – along with his bicycle. He thinks that if he can find the bicycle he will be able to discover the truth about his father. This apparently simple premise is the starting point for a multi-layered and wide-ranging novel that takes in Taiwan’s history, the Japanese occupation, the war in Malaysia and Myanmar as well as in Taiwan itself, and a wealth of characters and their stories. From the present-day in Taiwan we jump backwards and forwards in time and from character to character but somehow the author manages to keep control of his material and weave it all together into a coherent narrative. The bicycle features prominently in the book, from the Taiwanese bicycle industry to the bicycle regiments of the Japanese army during the war to fanatical vintage bicycle collectors and the place of bicycles in social history. We learn too about the butterfly industry, butterfly handicrafts and the amazing butterfly collages that were famous in Taiwan and nearly wiped out the butterfly population. Then there’s the fate of the zoo animals during the war. And much more. So much to discover and learn about in this wonderfully compelling memoir/fictional narrative – which mirrors the author’s own life and feels very authentic, in spite of the occasional foray into a bit of magic. It’s an original and impressive novel which covers a lot of ground and opened up a world totally unfamiliar to me and for that alone I enjoyed it. But it’s also a story of love, loss, family and war – and, of course, bicycles. Highly recommended.

Full of stunning visuals, emotive writing, and a little bit of magic.

I'm not sure if this book is typically Taiwanese (Wikipedia is equally confused about whether Taiwan has its own culture or is a subset of Chinese culture - it has given us Ang Lee and bubble tea though) but it was certainly pretty unique in my experience. The story is partly a general history of Taiwan - which seems to be a series of occupations, European, Chinese, Japanese... - but then also something much more specific. Not just of one thing though - not a history of Taiwanese bicycles, or of one particular family or of the elephants in a Taipei zoo but a blend of all three. I'm not sure if this sounds as if it could be rather dry but I certainly didn't find it so - the writing (and the translation, obviously) is both lyrical and very human. Which is, for me, the true joy of reading - learning to understand the experiences of another person even if you have nothing (aside from humanity itself) in common.

A beautifully written, magical book that I didn’t want to end. I was totally enchanted by this story of iron horses, love, families, elephants and butterflies set in current day and WW2 South-East Asia.
A writer is searching for the much loved bike of his father, which vanished with him some years previously, in the hope that finding it will help solve the mystery of his father’s disappearance. Wu Ming-Yi intertwines magical stories as he puts together the pieces of the puzzle. Outstanding.
Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for allowing me to read the book in exchange for an honest review.

A history of bicycles in Taiwan and the interwoven stories of people who bought them, used them or stole them. I found this a entertaining an well written read. And i did think they would eventually get together.