Taipei

"This novel, which was published in 2013, is a great example of what we might call 21st-century modernism. Since the turn of the century, there has been a renewed interest in the novel as a means of conveying the mystery of conscious experience. A largely autobiographical work about a writer who moves between New York and Taiwan, Lin’s book does an especially wonderful job at capturing those perceptions that often feel too fragile and too trivial, to lodge in memory. For instance, consider this passage from early in the book: “Paul, walking self-consciously toward her, vaguely remembered a night, early in their relationship, when he somehow hadn’t expected her to enlarge in his vision as he approached where she’d stood (looking down at a flyer, one leg slightly bent), in Think Coffee. [He remembered] the comical, bewildering fear — equally calming and surprising, amusing and foreboding — he’d felt as she rapidly and sort of ominously increased in size.” The seriousness with which Lin details this unserious misperception signals his novel’s fascination with the moments of consciousness which create tiny fractures in reality—as in the sudden strange idea that someone in the distance might not get larger as one approaches. As these moments accumulate, the narrator’s perceptions—often distorted by social media and drugs—create one of the most powerful and disturbing images of the mind in contemporary literature. Lin’s break with consensus reality is less barbed or nihilistic than Celine’s. He follows the path of wonder out of the labyrinths of modern urban life, towards an escape that is perhaps the most total and complete of any of the writers surveyed here. The intensity and conviction of Lin’s desire to flee from our world might mean something bad about life, but good for literature."