The Man with the Compound Eyes
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
From the author of The Stolen Bicycle - longlisted for the International Man Booker Prize
On the island of Wayo Wayo, every second son must leave on the day he turns fifteen as a sacrifice to the Sea God. Atile’i however is determined to defy destiny and become the first to survive.
Across the sea, Alice Shih’s life is interrupted when a vast trash vortex comes crashing onto the shore of Taiwan, bringing Atile’i with it.
In the aftermath of the catastrophe, Atile’i and Alice retrace her late husband’s footsteps into the mountains, hoping to solve the mystery of her son’s disappearance. On their journey, memories will be challenged, an unusual bond formed, and a dark secret uncovered that will force Alice to question everything she thought she knew.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"There was often a fine line between proverbial wisdom and stating the obvious, between a truth and a truism." So thinks Alice Shih, the downbeat central character in Taiwanese author Ming-Yi's thinly plotted U.S. debut (he has previously published several novels in Taiwan). Alice's idea inadvertently describes a critical problem with the craft on display in the book itself. Ming-Yi offers an undercooked m lange of lazy magical realism (" sperm whales into which the spirits transformed during the day were pretty much the same as actual sperm whales") and shallow melodramatics among a cast of flat characters, such as golden-hearted Dahu and Hafay. The narrative oscillates between the travails of Alice, a grieving mother and widow succumbing to despair on the eastern coast of Taiwan, and Atile'i, an exiled youth from the fantastical Wayo Wayoan tribe who winds up marooned on an ephemeral mass in the Pacific Ocean. Ming-Yi attempts to unify these convergent narrative threads with the overarching theme of mounting ecological disaster, as an overdeveloped Taiwan is eaten by the ocean and a massive trash vortex threatens island communities, but this idea does not extend beyond the simple notion that humans are not living in harmony with nature.
