Taipéi

by Tao Lin

Paul es un joven escritor de origen taiwanés abocado a la ruina personal. La mala relación con sus padres, a los que no visita muy a menudo; el fluctuante viaje sentimental en busca de novias potenciales; la irresponsabilidad para con su obra y sus editores –que tratan a duras penas de evitar su definitiva caída literaria por culpa de su adicción a los fármacos– y también la evasión contra el propio cuerpo, inhabitable, en la virtualidad de las redes sociales o en la ingesta obsesiva de comida basura con que colmar un vacío total son los diversos caminos sin salida a los que el protagonista se ve confinado a punto de cumplir veintisiete años, edad en la que murieron trágicamente los ídolos de una generación ciega, consumista y con muy pocos asideros fiables.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, American, Literature, Literary Fiction, The United States Of America

304 pages, Paperback

First published June 4, 2013

About the author

Tao Lin is the author of the novels Leave Society, Taipei, Richard Yates, and Eeeee Eee Eeee; the memoir Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change; and the novella Shoplifting from American Apparel, among other books. He posts on Substack and lives in Hawaii.

Reviews

[Megan Boyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Allow me to inteoduce my review: The past few times I've been on Molly or ecstasy I've wanted to review Taipei because I remember Tao encouraging people to review this book while peaking on MDMA or adderall

Here's what happened, introduction part 2: rememvwred the review in the bathtub (introduction part 3: I am peaking on ecstasy in a bathtub at a friend's house), decided 'the people in the next room don't need to know what I'm doing, they are talking to each other so maybe they won't notice,' wrapped towel around me, ran into room, grabbed phone, said 'I have some business to take care of' and ran back into bathtub

Just shouted 'business' to people in other room saying 'what are you doing'

This is a review of Taipei

Shit I forget it completely right now

There was a draft I read where monkfish was focused on more than in the final book I think

Peaking

I'm putting my mouth in the water and letting the water go in and out like a fish and t feels good

Taipei

I'm now accessing 'time period when I think the things in Taipei happened' and it feels very far away but beautiful and twinkly like a distant parade or sound of an ice cream truck

If Taipei was a food it would be a Bartlett pear

You don't need to know why

If Taipei were a person it'd be...shit....who...thought 'Adam Robinson' but that's completely inaccurate somehow

I am not currently authorized to decide what person it would be like

If Taipei were a country it would be a transparent cube about the size of Australia that floats right at the point where it stops being earth and becomes outer space

If it were something at 7-11 it would be...no I'm only authorized to say Bartlett pear and Australia cube

If it were a time zone it would be (too hard to say, it has its own time zone though)

Feel like I'm in a race to beat my brain from something

The most glowing review I can think of for Taipei is 'this water feels amazing right now'

Laurence Fishbourne should do the audio book

As I was typing Laurence Fishbourne I felt scolded by the thought 'Alex Trebek,' like he was angry at me for not saying him

This is my favorite book by Tao I think

Yeah

EAHEHATHAYEHAHAYYAHAH

Chewed gum faster when I thought about how it's my favorite

Someone asked if I was still in the bath

This is the most I've ever been asked about if I'm in a bathtub I think

Focus more on Taipei: the shiny cover

'Frameworky somethingness'

'Shawn Olive'

'Palatial,' 'melancholy,' 'color(less?) glow of unicorns,' 'Edward schissorhands,' 'buildings named Frank,' 'beseeching socially inhibited face,' 'a [something] Daniel,' 'eggplant,' 'I thought you said you were eating butter,' 'universe is a message to itself to not feel bad,' 'irreducible dot of himself,' 'soporific crying,' 'blanket,' 'opiates/long chord progression,' 'eternal sunshine of the spotless mind,' 'another word for computer,' 'waiting for bathroom on airplane/eat pray love thing,' 'Taiwan's first mcdonalds,' the thing about things looking darker, the thing about life losing narrative after college, the thing about reverse reverse psychology in emails to his mom, the thing about drums in high school, the thing about viewing hiimself as a dot in gmaps in a cab I think, the thing about thinking a romantic prospect was Auden mortenson, the thing about grey/brown cities

I'm thinking 'red dots' a lot I want to convey 'red dots on a quiet city skyline at night'

Just got mad at anyone who would demand more from me than this

Laurence Fishbourne's amazon review would be his face going full screen on your computer going 'blippbertybllupblupschniggles,' pausing with a stern face for 5 seconds, then winking

You would have no choice but to buy it

The conviction in his voice and his face and the wink at the end

There is always a choice to buy or not buy something but in this case the choice would be removed, I'm sorry

Your freedom of choice has been removed by Laurence Fishbourne (as usual)

One of those things of life you must accept

You should be used to it by now I feel

If you're not then here is your chance to start

Can I embed that on my review? No he wouldn't return my email I bet

I can embed it by typing it, pretend it's actually happening though, this review it binary code for the image of Laurence Fishbourne's facial review

I feel completely intensely focused on writing this review and completely intensely like I can't remember it at all

Seems like I'm expected to leave bathtub at some point

Part in Taipei I am relating to currently: when Paul fell asleep at parties and another party on a roof where he thought something about how death is irrelevant to life but he knew he could fall off the roof and I think he was walking recklessly in circles

It's not fair that you can't sleep or go in circles in the bath

What else can I say about Taipei

THE SHINY COVER

THINK ABOUT THE SHININESS

WOULD BE GOOD IF THEY HAD MADE SCRATCH AND SNIFF STYLE PAGES SO YOU COULD BE ON THE DRUGS THE CHARACTERS WERE ON ON WHATEVER PAGE YOU'RE ON

AMAZON DOT COM

I FEEL LIKE IM SUPPOSED TO BE AUTHORIZING ACCESS TO THINGS

I CAN'T ESCAPE THIS IPHONE NOTE THING SHIT

BATHTUB

TAIPEI

SOMEONE SEND IT INTO SPACE

IF IT GETS INTO SPACE ASTEROID STUFF WILL GET MAGNETIZED TO IT AND ITLL BE TEN TIMES THE SIZE OF EARTH ND IT WILL COME BACK TO EARTH AND BLOW IT UP BUT SADLY IT WILL NOT LAND ON TAO WHO WANTS AN ASTEROID TO HIT EARTH AND THEN HE'S THE ONLY PERSON ALIVE, HE JUST TRANSITIONS ONTO THE NEW ASTEROID/PLANET WITH TAIPEI AT THE CORE OF THE PLANET

SAD BUT TRUE

THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME AND CPNSIDERATOON IT IS TIME FOR ME TO LEAVE THE BATHTUB NOW IT IS VERY OBVIOUS BY NOW

[Keaven Fadness · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the longest Erowid report I've ever read.

[Matthew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Taipei – The Charlie Rose interview


Charlie Rose: When Tao Lin graduated New York University in 2005, he began a career which pumped new life into the world of contemporary letters. His terse, tongue-in-cheek prose style has attracted critics and imitators in equal numbers, and his books, with provocative titles like Eeeee Eee Eeee and Shoplifting from American Apparel, have garnered praise and sidelong glances in the same way. The new book is called Taipei; I’m here with Tao Lin.

Tao Lin: Thanks, Charlie.

CR: So, Tao, I finished the novel last night and, I have to say, it reminded me of a modern classic from some odd 10 years ago.

TL: Is it, um… Interpreter of Maladies?

CR: It made me think of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The way this main character, so evidently impaired, manages to function in the world at large in a way all his own is truly inspiring. I see you’re smiling, Tao, why is that?

TL: It’s just that the main character in Taipei is pretty much entirely based on me. As with, like, the main characters in all my other books. And I don’t think I’m, like, “evidently impaired” or anything like that.

CR: Oh, alright. Then that’s my mistake and I apologize. How would you say you fit into the English-language tradition of writers of autobiographical fiction, from Jack London to Hunter S. Thompson?

TL: Um. Well I don’t really look to those writers as any kind of inspiration. As far as influences go I like Don DeLillo and Lydia Davis, just sort of modern stuff like that.

CR: So, can you explain to me what moved you to write this new book?

TL: I started writing it when I divorced my wife, and I guess it was sort of inspired by the experience of that and the feeling of sort of going from person to person, especially in romantic relationships, and just wondering what the purpose of it is.

CR: The purpose of being in a romantic relationship?

TL: Yeah, and, like, what’s the purpose of being with people if you don’t like to be with them. And you prefer to be alone most of the time.

CR: Correct me if I’ve made a vast understatement about your work, but the impression I get is that the characters in this novel are drawn to each other because they prefer to be on drugs with other people than on drugs alone.

TL: Well, not really. I mean, that’s definitely part of it, but also it’s just nice to have someone next to you to hear what you have to say. And to touch, if you feel like it.

CR: And this physical, visceral connection is a recurring motif in Taipei. The characters have an intense desire to, if you will, consume, or ingest, as you have put it in your book, not only the drugs but also the social interactions. And oftentimes it seems like the social scene and the drugs are unsatisfactory, or that they offer more pain than reward. What is it that keeps pulling these characters back into their world of cheap thrills? I see you’re sweating.

TL: Um. It’s just. I’m not sure I understand the question.

CR: This Paul character, for example. He often feels bad on the drugs, or the drugs negatively affect his time spent sober. Why does he keep at it? Is he simply an addict?

TL: Uh… can we talk about something else. Like, ask me another question.

CR: Certainly. You use some colorful metaphors in the novel that I quite enjoyed. For example, at one point Paul’s young friend Maggie does some sit-ups, which you suggest make her look like a “notorious, performing snail.” Where do you get the ideas for these off-beat descriptions? Now, hold on Tao, please put the pill bottle down.

TL: This isn’t live. Can’t you just turn off the camera for a minute?

CR: We’ll be right back, folks.

[Michael Seidlinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ultimately, because of what it explores, Taipei is not a pleasant novel to swallow. It pulls you in and places you in the same back-and-forth conversations and awkward strolls through scenarios that have progressed past the point of being anything but awkward.

Awkwardness and confusion seep through every sentence and, as a result, Taipei becomes the novel you initially might not want it to become. In the same way a person develops expectations for a person they just met, the reader begins to expect and assume the novel’s trajectory, or lack of one. A lot of readers will judge, and subsequently dismiss, the book long before it pulls you in for its final, sixth chapter, but for those that are fearless enough to continue reading, will discover a novel that outlines and reveals how it might be that no one, no matter how confident or outgoing, can ever truly master the act of relating to another.

Everyone is different and, in turn, no one can be perfect or completely, exclusively content. But we can try, and that’s why turning the page matters more in Taipei than a dozen other novels: With every turn of the page, you get closer to the sense that there might be something for you in this. You just might relate to Paul’s situation. He at least wants you to understand.

I mean, why wouldn’t you want to understand? In understanding someone else’s situation, you might just understand something about yourself.

[Nate · Rating 1 out of 5]

A great part of this review is in dialogue with the recent interview Tao had with Michael Silverblatt at Bookworm. Usually the books that I have given one star to have been books that made me mad or infuriated me. Books that were just a waste. This book is just a simple and definitive "did not like." My main point being is that, while I have literary reservations with this novel, I mostly didn't like it because of my taste preference.

Starting off, I think this book has a lot of similarity to Bret Easton Ellis' work and it didn't surprise me at all to discover that Bret Easton Ellis endorsed/blurbed it. Copious amounts of drugs "ingested," characters very lonely and despondent, often unskilled in communication. For every criticism I can give I can think of a rebuttal. Although not every reader is fixed on LSD, Ritalin and shrooms, the dialogue of the drugs can be more about the desire to use buffers or disengage from the natural awkwardness. While it annoys me that characters are borderline autistic in actions, it's not like I haven't had or heard certain conversations like this and if these conversations were characters or lived lives then it's not a totally unfaithul representation to what these characters are. And the thing is, I love the book "Less Than Zero," whose characters are so much like Paul and Erin.

I've mentioned previously in my reviews that, with everything I read, I'm influenced greatly by Wallace's (and to a minor degree Vollmann's) outlined criteria for what good fiction is and ought to be, at least going forward. So, I suppose my main obstacle in reading this book is that I'm trying to not let those voices creep in my head and wag my high and mighty finger like a literary Dikembe Mutombo.

What I can certainly say frustrates me is that I hate the thinly veiled author-as-protagonist. If your name is Tao Lin and your novel is called Taipei and your main character is a novelist who makes yearly trips to Taipei, I'm going to make some connections and end up not trusting you, because I inherently distrust writers who seem to want to make their books about themselves, or writers who don't step away from the world of themselves (the 20 something writer doing drugs and surfing the Internet) and make the novel feel like a new experience. Writing novels about writers of novels is played out.

What also frustrates me is the aforementioned similarities with Ellis. I mean, I can imitate Ellis and write a book about a whole bunch of people taking drugs casually and wandering aimlessly through life. I'll admit, I've written short stories similarly like that and I've tried to get them published. But, again, it feels played out. Along the same lines there feels to be a sense of transgressiveness for transgressiveness' sake. Look, that's a viable market. Guys from Edgar Allen Poe to Chuck Palahniuk have made successful oeuvres out of it, but that doesn't make Tao Lin a hallmark voice of this generation (generation of course being a cumbersome word/idea as it is).

If I were to talk to Paul, I don't get the feeling he would care if I would like him. But if I were to ask, and get a coherent, firm statement from Mr. Lin, I think he would admit he wants me to like Paul. Nay, he would want me to care about Paul. And it's probably got something to do with the fact that I understand loneliness and alienation and awkward social situations. I also understand that there are people that let these factors affect how they live each day. But in response to many other critics, that is not how normal young people walk through life. Not even really a little bit. And that's perhaps what's most frustrating to me. That people read this book and think that the values of Paul are not just mine, but some kind of significant portion of the population below 30.

And that's the greatest barrier of reading this book; is that there is an implicit argument, whether the author intends it or not (the critics certainly mean it to be), that this kind of stunted behavior and communication is typical of the Millenials; that somehow this is a "real" book. Paul and Tao may very well be on other sides of the mirror, but the problem is that Tao continues to look in the mirror and not out the window which make him feel lonely and alienated, but it doesn't explain why I feel that way.

[Stephen Durrant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plenty of good and bad has been written about the Taiwanese-American author Tao Lin and his recent novel "Taipei," and I had read enough of such criticism to suspect that this relatively conservative reader "of a certain age" would have real difficulty entering Tao's avant-garde world. I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, as others have noted, Tao Lin, insofar as this novel can be read as thinly disguised autobiography, is maddeningly self-obsessed. If, for example, you pick up this book thinking you might learn something about Taipei, you will be disappointed--that is, unless you are so benighted as to not suspect that might be McDonalds there! Moreover, the novel is strikingly "flat." Not only does the narrator avoid psychological and intellectual depth (anti-Proust and anti-Mann, to allude to two of my recent readings), common enough in so much modern fiction, but the world of this novel is one where the computer screen and the cell phone are the "realities" and the "real," or what I continue to think of as the "real," is only a shadow seeking form, a kind of eternal form, in media: "Let's film ourselves talking about our relationship" becomes about the only way to talk about a relationship, for example. In this world, characters are sometimes eager to part so they can get down to the more real business of sending text messages to one another. Is this really the world in which the young now live? I suspect it is as I sit in a sidewalk cafe in Paris and watch four young people sitting at a table next to me all texting (gee, I always assumed they were texting friends not there, but now I wonder if they are texting each other, giving form to communication that is constantly disappearing if they speak). But there is another side to the characters in this novel--they are completely lost in a world of drugs, mostly prescription drugs. Stories about obsessively addicted characters are nothing new, think for just two examples of Dostoevsky's "The Gambler" or De Quincy's "Confessions of an English Opium Eater." What is startling here is the complacence about such a thoroughly addicted life. Yes, the narrator's Taiwanese mother knows about her son's drug-soaked existence, but she also knows that if she complains, she will suffer the ultimate punishment: no email messages from him for a whole month! Yes, "complacence" on one level, perhaps, but on another level maybe not so complacent: a terrible sadness and search for some meaning lies at the core of this novel . . . and it is a powerful core. I can't say I exactly enjoyed entering Tao's world, but it is a deeply disturbing one, and his narrator will certainly haunt me long after most other fictional characters have faded from my mind.

[Dany Salvatierra · Rating 1 out of 5]

When I arrived in New York City in late June, it was almost impossible not to stumble onto articles regarding Tao Lin's latest effort, or to see its glossy cover in every single bookstore display. A couple of weeks later, when I finally bought "Taipei" at Urban Outfitters (of all places), I read the first pages on the line to the register, thinking that maybe it would get better on the next chapters. I was wrong.

The whole novel can be resumed like this: a bunch of kids doing drugs in a perfect world where you indiscriminately pop prescription pills to your mouth combining them with X, downers and heroin at the same time for months without feeling any side effects or OD'ing, yada yada yada; going to a McDonald's to shot a documentary with a MacBook, yada yada yada; staying up all night updating Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or posting on 4chan while trying to make elaborated metaphors about existence and ennui or to rationalize endlessly about relationships, yada yada yada; living in Brooklyn with absolutely no financial trouble, yada yada YADA. At some point before the first half of the book you realize that, utterly, there is no appeal to its unesixtant story and that it all sounds like a collection of blog entries written by a hipster with a swollen ego, a major in Poetry and too much time in his hands.

Am I suppose to believe that Paul, the protagonist, experiences only one single bad trip during his spiral of addiction, before the very end of the novel? Let's be realistic. Tao Lin is probably a master on internet research, but he did failed to read on Wikipedia (in order make the whole novel at least a bit realistic) that the human body doesn't remain untouched throughout substance abuse. God knows, maybe he was too busy updating his Facebook while submitting the first draft to his publisher.

This is probably the most boring and overhyped novel of 2013. I want my money back.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sorry, I can't finish it. I had it on my device for a month and would dip in and out, hoping it would start capturing me, and did make it halfway through before abandoning it. I really wanted to like it the way the Publishers Weekly reviewer did, but I found it self-indulgent and far too specific/repetitive about drug dosages to be halfway interesting. After one chapter, the routine of new city + drugs + new girl to sleep with + new book reading with warning e-mails from publisher and/or parent just wasn't interesting anymore. Someone really interested in casual drug use and ennui would probably devour it. I'll keep clinging tightly to the belief that there is more to life.

[Antonomasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

How convenient it would be to hate this. I didn't...
It's complicated.

Nonetheless, Lydia Kiesling's hatchet job on this in The Millions is still the best book review I've read all year. I don't really want to hear about new American fiction at the moment but I still look at the site sometimes to see if she's written anything new; this might be the first time I've been a fan of a literary critic* the way I liked some music critics in my teens.

Tao Lin's style here is much improved on the banal bits and pieces I'd read before; way better than all the imitators on Thought Catalog. One press review mentioned he'd rewritten and revised it many times, and this writing does feel scientifically precise, sharpened to a point. I wondered if he'd been reading Proust or some of the more approachable work of Gertrude Stein: here are those multi-clause sentences which look laborious on the page until you realise they replicate the cadences of speech - they work when you hear them. It was a very odd reading experience made of banality and brilliance.

This is one of those 3s that's the average of really good stuff + really bad stuff in one book, rather than generalised 'meh'. As I've said in other reviews, I love good metaphors and similes: any writer that can create so many comparisons which are original, apt and perfectly founded in the character's world gets a little bit of awe from me. There are also long paragraphs and pages which make washing machine instructions look exciting and emotive, and it was impossible to resist skimming all of them all of the time. I don't quite know how he does it, to describe interaction, action and reaction with such precision, yet evince so little feeling. The first day I read it, it was a little boring. The boringness of it was interesting, not so much the story itself. Then I had a break and read Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body which could hardly be more different in its emotional intensity. Back to Taipei after that and the contrast was quite restful. The exact, unforced observation of minutiae - and often, though not constant - Paul, the Mary-Sue protagonist's awareness of his own subjectivity, sparked the offhand imagining that he must have been one of those kids who had mindfulness programmes in primary school. (No, wrong, they're still quite a bit younger than TL who is now 30.)

The characters' culture seems so remote from the world of ever having had day jobs that I kept thinking of them as students although Paul, and some of the others were actually getting on for ten years older than the average new undergrad. The early chapters, before Paul's book tour weren't quite so OTT in their antics. I used to know a bunch of people who, whilst they did have 9-5 jobs outside the arts and preferred drugs-drugs to all the prescription stuff the characters are into here, had social lives that were incredibly similar, right down to the same kinds of food and music and patterns of staying in and going out. Incidentally, also, the same age as Lin, younger than I am.

The idea of named generations is arguably marketing guff, yet I do feel clear differences from people who are that bit younger which, I don't quite see with those are slightly older than myself; I definitely feel like a late Gen-X'er. There are qualities I recognise as Millenial among people I've met: really throwing oneself into things and believing in them - uncynically, unquestioningly in a way I remember few of my peers ever doing - alongside having been online well before university and having the internet much more woven into oneself, less extraneous - and they are joiners of things. Enthusiasm is what I've usually seen in [middle class] "millenials" first hand; although Lin's alt-lit crowd express themselves in flat tones, they are so into their project, they seem like a branch of the same tendency.

And they are so into it, it seems as if they can't see beyond it and that's what makes its products so far of limited interest. I saw a review somewhere that said Taipei was basically about hipsters bumming around and doing loads of drugs: can't really argue with that TBH. Though there is the diversion of a spectacularly apathetic Las Vegas wedding. (Also, is Vegas an HST reference?) There's a heck of a lot of people in their twenties who won't be able to relate to this lifestyle - who've never been able to afford to relate to this lifestyle. Though there are things expressed incredibly well here - feeling states, bits and bobs relating to the web - which I've never seen described before and which seem very well done. I don't relate to that many of them but some I've witnessed in others - especially the gradations of mood relating to drugs and their aftermath. But for people who do relate I can see why Lin may be important. (I imagine them experiencing it as I did the first 60 pages of Idiopathy by Sam Byers. [Not read further so far.] Whilst there were very few explicit cultural references in Byers' book there was an overwhelming sense that these characters and this writer had grown up reading and watching the same stuff I had, that they had many of the same foundations and heard much the same background noise in their heads; a black comedy of cynical, irritable, knackered , media-overdosed white middle-class Brits in their mid 30s. Which, judging from the press and reader reviews, seems, like Taipei, to be of interest mostly just to people similar to the writer and characters, and annoying to others.)

One plus point to all this dull detail about New Yorkers taking Xanax whilst on their Macbooks: it makes a change from all those bloody cooking scenes in mainstream litfic.

There's a moment of crashing crassness here; it's not quite Jack Kerouac wishing he'd been "born a Negro in the antebellum South" because life would have been simpler. But here's Paul saying he doesn't mind if he gets caught with drugs at the airport because: "If I go to jail I'll just write Infinite Witz", he said, referencing two very long novels... he would be relieved, to be removed from the confusing, omnidirectional hierarchy of his life. Tao Lin: the prison novel. But he shouldn't have to go to Riker's Island writers' retreat to find a different setting. Intentional or not, the paragraph made me realise that conceptually, this writing is too interesting for the characters and milieu: its concern with the mundane, with anomie and how people feel in contemporary society and all the rest of it could seem a lot more important if it were attached to something more urgent than these healthy, mostly wealthy hipsters bumming around doing drugs and filming it, with their only worries being comedown symptoms and a few minor childhood neuroses exaggerated by them, not, like, rent or food or safety or anything desperate. (The shiny stuff on the cover is like something from 1980s children's stationery, surely no accident. Shining light on it from different angles was sometimes more fun than reading the book.) Antonioni's trilogy already did the existential alienation of the privileged a long time ago, and more elegantly.

Even though I like the "slice of life" story with no neat conclusion, and the existential works the keener critics have compared this to - e.g. Knut Hamsun's Hunger, Sartre's Nausea - and can understand there is meaning underlying the banality, in the end, same as Kiesling I simply didn't like. I find film a more interesting medium for extended mundane detail (e.g. Jeanne Dielmann)- in the novel it's too easy for genuine boredom to be generated in the reader if the writing style is not consistently suberb - and even then I just aesthetically prefer different stuff to the recent US hipster mumblecore movies of which Taipei is an analogue. When I read the last page and put the book down, I had to pick it up again a minute later as I couldn't remember a thing about the end. Re-read it, still couldn't. The effect was like having eaten a rice-cake, the feeling of having consumed nothing. It was unsatisfying: which could be intentionally unsatisfying and/or appropriately unsatisfying.


* I think I would have been a fan of Elizabeth Young (90s critic for the Guardian) if I'd connected all those pieces to one person and known about the person behind the pieces - but didn't until her collection Pandora's Handbag appeared in my newsfeed twice within a few months on here.

[The first three likes below were for an earlier, much shorter version which just linked the Millions review.]

[Ana WJ]

Thots on the tube!!!

[Ruby Tombstone Lives! · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interior monologue. There. That's the one piece of information I think you need to know before going into Teipei. If you understand that, you understand where the author's coming from.


Is it honest? Yes. There's no denying that if you transcribed your own inner monologue word for word, it probably wouldn't be too different from this, in style if not substance (abuse).
Is it self-indulgent? Fuck yeah. It's an interior monologue. That's what they are - the self. Indulging.
Is it good.....? That really depends on what you look for in a piece of literary fiction.


My initial thought on Teipei was that it reads as if written by The Onion News Network's Autistic Reporter, Michael Faulk. The book's central character, Paul, is jarringly disconnected from the people around him. He's oddly specific about small details, and lacking in emotion or empathy. This is eventually explained, somewhat perfunctorily, through a two page potted history of the main character, (the sole piece of exposition anywhere in the novel), explaining more or less that, yes, Paul does indeed have "issues". This stands out to me as something Tao Lin may have been required to add by his editors, to give some sort of context to the main character.



As I read on, I found my own internal monologue synching up with Paul's. At times, I would even catch myself daydreaming in ways that could have been lifted straight from the novel. I think that's this novel's great strength - the interior monologue device gives an instantly deep connection to a novel where very little of emotional import takes place. If it weren't for that aspect, there really would be very little appeal to reading the neurotic ramblings of a self-indulgent, drug-addled, twenty-something, even if those ramblings have the ring of absolute authenticity.



On the subject of authenticity, I've since spent some time skimming interviews etc online which could easily be read as extensions to the novel. Taipei's "Paul" is obviously Tao Lin, and some of Tao Lin's own well-documented exploits match up to those cited in the book. If you don't enjoy Tao Lin in these interviews, I suspect you'll dislike the book.
[NSFW] Interview with VICE




My favourite parts of Teipei were the convoluted analogies, like:
"Cleveland's three tallest buildings, each with a different shape and style of architecture and lighting, were spaced oddly far apart, like siblings in their thirties, in a zany sitcom. After spending their lives "hating" one another, in a small town, they moved to different cities and were happy, but then got coincidentally transferred by their employers to the same medium-size city. They were all named Frank."
The book needs that sense of whimsy to balance out what can sometimes be excruciatingly specific and banal details.



Overall, this is an experiment akin to recording yourself narrating your own internal monologue over a trashy weekend, then having the whole lot transcribed. Which is essentially what Tao Lin has done. I enjoyed it, but many won't.

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ever wonder what it's like to be a Brooklyn hipster who has nothing better to do than pop pills and sample pretty much every drug one can get their hands on, in an effort overcome one's social anxieties and find substance in a world whose meaning seems lost to them?

If so, then perhaps you'd like this book!

I, however, found Lin's thinly-veiled autobiographical "novel" to be a tiresome Bret Easton Ellis knock-off. This type of thing has been done before...many, many times.

The 240 or so pages couldn't go by fast enough. I'm not even sure any type of drug would have made this book tolerable to read.

[Ben Loory · Rating 4 out of 5]

wow. kind of a quantum leap beyond his last book. it's completely serious, non-cutesy... not hilarious (which was the last book's strong point), but also never boring... just totally hypnotic and unsettling... really not what i expected at all. even lives up to the cover!

[Stephen McDowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

notes for a forthcoming review of 'taipei' by tao lin:

awareness that the majority of events in this book occurred immediately after i first met tao is, i think, causing me to perceive events between the present version of my life and the version of my life that existed preceding, in a fluid, almost saddening manner, as if orchestrated, or an intentional, extensive distortion of a linear, retroactively clear universal necessity to transport me from one state of near-debilitating depression, to another



[something about my feeling an urge to actively attempt imitating tao's 'voice' after reading something he wrote that i've felt affected by and my perceived intention to employ less stylistic restrictions wrt this piece]

read some reviews of the uncorrected proof and consistently reacted to them as seeming inadequate and upsetting or 'juvenile'

the blurbs on the reverse of the book seem either too detached or too emotionally attached in a way i dislike to seem 'satisfying'

am vaguely discerning an earnest desire to write a 'more competent' review of this book than i think any reviewer who felt 'surprise' or 'vague, varying, periodic emotions but mostly detachment' while reading this novel could, while feeling extremely unaware what that desire, to convey something as comparatively 'more competent', is an attempt to delineate between, based on my conveyed understanding of [anything] when compared to anyone else's conveyed understanding of [the same thing] including this book

i feel curious what the person the character 'charles' is based on will say in their review, since they are mentioned frequently

realized while reading the word 'peeing' on page 94, that there are no curse words in the book, which continued to seem accurate until the phrase 'fuck you' appeared on page 152

felt difficult to discern my emotions after about halfway through the book due to awareness of experiencing my own continuous, vague but somehow frequently debilitating/consistently unrequited romantic interest in the person the character 'erin' is based on, since the day the main character, 'paul' mentioned meeting her in the book was the same day i met her

having followed tao's writing somewhat closely, and definitely more closely than i followed any other writer the past four years, a lot of the book seemed redundant and bordered on annoying, due to awareness that many events in the book have been transcribed into other pieces of fiction, articles for vice, or because i had witnessed them as they happened, however, stylistically it seems, to me, tao succeeded at combining his 'temporal hyper-awareness' and 'accrued literary and philosophical perspective' into consumable and nearly uncanny, fluidly paced prose, which i felt consistently fascinated by and which, ultimately, prevented active loss of interest, which resulted in me reading the book in its entirety in under 36 hours

something about [something]

i felt consistently distracted trying to discern who 'shawn olive' was and conceited to the assumption i am aware of the person but will have to endure somewhere around three seconds of embarrassment, surprise, and confusion once someone tells me at some point in the future, who they are

felt benign awareness that zero characters based on me are present in the book for what i consistently resolved by concluding the 'reasons', if discernible, seemed 'somewhat obvious'

it seems apparent via some 'scenes' in the novel that tao caused his friends to do more drugs than they would have had they not met him and i want to discern/'coin' something called 'toxic realism' that i want to immediately negate the concept of by comparing (what might be misinterpreted as an 'accusation') to [other works of 'fiction'] introducing/exposing a person to a website, person, food, activity, or perplexing philosophical question they subsequently become debilitatingly preoccupied by and feel guilt engaging in

i encountered tao about three times while he was in the process of editing, (he had a physical print-out of the manuscript on his person each time) and remember a mutual friend saying tao had said something about hating editing it while almost constantly on adderall

i feel uncertain what tao has been doing the last couple months re [something about vague updates via internet/awareness he went back to taipei after completing the current edition of the book]

felt surprised at my immediate, active lack of enthusiasm re/awareness of/interest in the novel, like an encounter with the 'silent' characters in the sixth season of 'doctor who', during which any non-'silent' character was only aware they existed while looking directly at them, re the book when not reading, but feeling the sudden onset of 'pavlovian' urges to read upon viewing the cover resting in a chair, on my kitchen table, or becoming aware i had been carrying it with me somewhere

vaguely remember laughing loudly, periodically, and especially at things paul discerned thinking negatively about erin, but felt aware the feeling that the phrasing seemed humorous was isolated to the concluded idea and in no way 'about erin'

felt intense empathy during the first two chapters reading 'flashbacks' to paul's childhood, and, after completing the book, concluded that tao conveyed—by recounting paul's early childhood, high school, and imagined mid-life experiences, juxtaposed nonlinearly against fragmenting series of preoccupations re a failing relationship and nearly coincidental, 'fucked-seeming', brief romantic entanglement—a narrative 'set-up' for the events of the novel in a way i felt previously unaware was possible to accomplish to a 'fulfilling'/successful degree

my experience of almost involuntarily attributing the book 'structure' (as documented in the previous paragraph) combined with the fact that the entire second half of the book documents one relationship, with a 'climax' in a mcdonald's in taiwan and closing 'scene', which seems like a competent, clear 'end scene' evokes what i consider a 'discernible structure' to the narrative that most reviewers seem completely unaware of, disinterested in communicating or, due to the narrator's persistent recounting of minutia, as opposed to clear, rhetorical 'rising, climaxing, and falling arcs', were unable to discern as devices

felt emotionally affected by the narrator's candid tone and openness re paul's fluctuating sureness/satisfaction, in a way that undermined, or maybe 'resolved', for me, a preconception i developed and subsequently had forgotten having intuited, between ages 20 and 21, that tao has an ongoing, rapid, calculating, omniscient awareness of his own psychological nuance, similar-in-manner to an ability i previously believed jesus had, which now seems universally impossible, but seems evocatively achievable through rigorous editing

one 'character' i felt aware of was given their actual name: dudu, tao's father's pet toy poodle appears in the book once and is mentioned a previous time

the use of referencing parents, as a narrative device, one i've recently discouraged my friend mar from overusing in conversation, is manipulated to the point of potential annoyance, then completely avoided, which seems well-dispersed

instead of thinking about the style in a consistent, critical manner, discovered myself discerning small epiphanies in later parts of the book after misreading, misunderstanding, or disliking a sentence structure or phrasing, i immediately became aware of a vaguely related motif in a near non-sequitur-like manner

[Luna Miguel · Rating 5 out of 5]

[...]
Puedo decir, entonces, que esta es la mejor novela de Tao Lin hasta la fecha, puedo señalar que lo que aquí encontramos es un canto a la vida, o puedo incluso aseguraros que de este libro se hablará y se hablará y se hablará. De lo que estoy igualmente segura es de que Taipei supone una continuación lógica en la trayectoria de su autor, pero también una ruptura clara y necesaria no solo para su literatura, sino también para quienes lo leemos. Para los que como él, envejecemos (el dos de julio cumplirá 30 años), y sabemos que difícilmente volveremos a retener en nuestros brazos días como los que hace no tanto se sucedían con demasiadas drogas, con demasiada locura, con demasiada intensidad.

Porque la vida y la literatura iban en serio, y eso es cuanto reclama (con el fin de salvarnos) la novela de los 50.000 dólares.




(Leer más:
http://www.jotdown.es/2013/05/la-nove...)

[Emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

I apologize to my friends who loved this (and loaned me the book), but I absolutely hated every minute of it. I was so happy to be finished with it! Reading about the vapid lives of privileged hipsters in Williamsburg is not my idea of a good time. I didn't care about the characters, their thoughts, their various drugs of choice - any of it. I thought the writing was repetitive and boring (I will never use the words grin or grinning again!), and there basically was no story. I'm looking for more of an escape in my books (one that I couldn't get by simply jumping on the L train) than this gave me.

[Rayroy · Rating 1 out of 5]

A few thoughts just because a book is well written or brings something new to the table doesn't mean that it's good or worth your time. To sum it up some this the most self-centered , self-involved writing I have come across, if anything positive can be said about this book is that it hits the nail in the head in it's portrait of NYC Hipsters/Yuppies a whole generation or so called subculture that is totally disconnected to anything that's not an electronic device, the type of people who seem to like things only in a self-loathing ironic way who are always quick to make a punch line and who seem to lack a genuine bone and belief in nothing but their cut-off, closed-off niche circle of jag-off friends! Perhaps Tao Lin is making a statement about a part of a generation. A cause for alarm. It seems a number of people loved this book but if I had to bet it was in an ironic way. Don't waste your time there are far too many books ,that matter and have a soul. What is sad is just how many people are like Tao Lin and what is amazing is more people ( I hope) are not.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

i expected to hate this given my experiences of tao lin at readings and lit events; but found it captivating, if at times maddening. appropriate that bret easton ellis blurbed it -- this book reminds me of nothing more than Less than Zero - or maybe The Rules of Attraction, they kind of blur together for me -- except here the bleakness and interpersonal alienation are countered by and in tension with not so much an earnest desire for connection as an earnest desire for an earnest desire for connection.

[Rachael Wehrle]

Very boring. I felt nothing towards the characters and I didnt like how Whole Foods was mentioned repeatedly. I’m sorry but it annoyed me. This book was not for me

[Erik Evenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a scene about 80 pages into Taipei that summed this book up for me. Here it is:

"We had a specific goal, I remember," said Paul. "What was it?"
"I don't know," said Daniel after a few seconds.
"We were just talking about it."
"I remember something," Daniel said absently.
"Oh yeah, selling books," Paul said.
"Let's do that," said Daniel.
"We just actually forgot our purpose, then regained it," said Paul grinning. "We still kept moving at the same speed, when we had no goal."
"Jesus," said Daniel quietly.

There was something truthful and unsettling in this exchange, something that seemed to encapsulate everything that was great and infuriating about recently being in my twenties and not having to be really responsible for anything. The tedium of getting through that vacuum of a decade was definitely present in this book, which, in a weird way, is a huge compliment to Lin: he made a book about being twenty-something interesting and he did it by embracing the boredom of it all. Most writers or want-to-be writers who write in their twenties (I include myself here) do the opposite when writing about their personal experiences, they try to spice up something that is intrinsically uninteresting simply because it is new and interesting to the twenty-something writing it.

Many people really hate this book, or the author, or the blurred line between the two (more on that later). I didn't. That being said, the writing didn't knock my socks off all the time, either. I have used this analogy before, but this book was a case of having a good highlight reel vs playing a good game. The brightest spots were the scenes like the aforementioned that bore witness to the drudgery of being in your twenties and not having to make any life decisions (a prospect that is a fairly recent phenomenon--most people born after 1981 don't have to go to war, they can have jobs without careers, sex without relationships, and access to material stuff that was once only accessible to people who had the career to afford it--who would've ever imagined a big screen TV with hundreds of channels, two or three gaming systems, a couple of personal computers, mobile phones, and state-of-the-art music devices in a college dorm room in the '80s? Now, they come standard in almost every bachelor's pad, even if the bachelor has no idea how to balance a checkbook).

Lin looks the plight of the twenty-somethings straight in the face and documents the numbing boredom that it is due with great, funny little scenes. In one, the main character Paul texts his roommate to turn the lights off in his apartment instead of getting up himself. Paul gets married to a girlfriend with the same mindset as someone making a late night Taco Bell run. Everyone does drugs and chats on their computers, the biggest concern being how they look if they like a band that they don't think they should, because, you know, they suck now. Although it makes for some great scenes, it makes for some slogging through, as well. The prose is stiff and adverb-heavy, with sentences taking up more space than their meaning merits. It does justice to the tedium, but it doesn't necessarily make for enjoyable reading. Whether this monotony in the style is a conscious decision or whether it's just Lin thinly fictionalizing his life the only way he knows how (from how I interpret it, I suspect it's a little bit of both), it makes for some polarizing opinions about his writing. I've heard people call him a hack, saying he's pulled a con, fooled us all with his bad writing. I've heard he's a genius and this is the book that defines a generation. I don't think there has been this much simultaneous outcry against and gushing about a book since Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which is interesting, because I think a similar phenomenon is happening to Tao Lin as what happened to Dave Eggers.

I read Eggers' memoir-with-fiction-bits when I was 23. It changed my literary life. All I wanted to do was to write and start a lit journal and do all the amazing things that Dave Eggers did in AHWOSG. I owe him and that book a huge debt of gratitude for that. However, reading it now in my thirties, the memoir doesn't roil the emotion in me that it did some ten years ago. In fact, I don't like a lot of the book now. And the reason, I suppose, is that I didn't originally fall in love with the writing per se. I fell in love with the attitude, the lifestyle, all the great things Dave Eggers did when he was not much older than I was. I suspect the same thing is happening with Lin. The people who are firmly in the Lin camp to an extent love the personality, the attitude, the lifestyle (the guy pranks Gawker! He spoofs Franzen on the cover of The Stranger! He's vegan!) just as much as the writing. And I can't blame them. Like Eggers' memoir, Lin's actual life and writing blur into each other. I'd be willing to bet the average age of the people who think Tao Lin is a genius hovers around 23-29. Older readers and writers hear the noise being made, read the book, get disappointed that it's not their vision of genius, become resentful and say he's a hack. For me, it falls somewhere in the middle: the writing is both solid and boring, which is not a critique. I love some of the scenes, but I don't love the book.

[Emma Alice Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A New Kind Of Drug Narrative

Yeah, Internet, blah blah blah... What struck me about this book is how there's no shoehorning in of drug-related danger as the pathetic narrator scores all sorts of drugs and freely uses them in the most unexciting ways possible. Just straight boring drug use. It's realistic. The danger present in William S. Burrough's and Hubert Selby Jr.'s stories just isn't there anymore, or at least not like it presumably was then (yeah, I know goofing around with prescription drugs is different than getting addicted to heroin, but that's not the point).

It's refreshing to see a modern writer making the casualness of all of it just so in-your-face, instead of trying to get gritty. Seriously this is the most compelling book filled with people engaged in utterly boring activities and thought processes that I have ever read.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

The last line of this book is “Grateful to be alive”, which made me spit take, because the entire time I was reading this book my brain was repeating the mantra “THIS BOOK IS DISRESPECTFUL TO LIFE!”. Idk if I’ve ever read a final line so directly ironic! You might say oh the character learned and grew it’s the hero's journey he starts apathetic but learns to appreciate life in the end. I guess! Kinda! But that catharsis/lesson happens literally on the last 3 pages so it doesn’t feel like it!

Ok I must back up. This is an account of Tao Lin’s life in about 2009-2011. I’ve never read any autofiction written in the third person before. This made for a colder, more distant feel, and I questioned the decision for a while because usually autofiction is like reading someone's narrativized diary. But I think that this dissociative distance is something that Lin feels for himself. Paul, (Lin’s booksona) regularly views himself from above as a tiny dot. He’s always zoomed out, but despite the zooming out he’s always looking down at himself and not out at the world. That sums up the tone of the whole book, it’s solipsistic but there’s no self searching introspection, it’s very outside of himself but still ONLY looking at himself, no thoughts head empty!

The first half of the book consists of an account of a period of Paul’s life in which he lounges around and goes to parties. He seems like the absolute worst party guest and I don’t understand how he maintains this social life and gets invited to these events. His MO is to go to a party, not talk to anyone, take some percs and sleep on the couch next to the dance floor. He does this like 3 times in the course of 5 pages! The way he conducts relationships and friendships is bizarre to me. Paul spends a lot of time hanging out in people’s bedrooms, which is strange to me because I’m the same age and rarely spend time in friend’s bedrooms anymore. But that could be because I live in a smaller city and people in their late 20s can afford to have apartments with pleasant common areas. When he starts dating Laura they don’t really do anything together other than take downers and sleep next to each other and look at the computer. It’s behavior that seems more normal for a couple that’s been together a long time, not people who are getting to know one another. And it’s not like a drug fueled manic obsessive relationship. Sleeping, spending time in bedrooms seem to demonstrate intimacy but the friendships are alarmingly shallow.

This part seems like it was written from memories, because there is very little specific dialogue. It says things like “paul and x talked about x” rather than any detail or dialogue. This is in contrast with the latter half of the book, which is exhaustively detailed and is almost entirely transcripts of meandering conversation. I was thinking of Drifts (you know for a book I said I didn’t like that much, I come back to it all the time. I think I will buy it next time I see it) where Zambreno’s goal was to write about her life in the present, and how difficult that is to do because you’re always smoothing your memories over in writing even if it’s the same day. The first half of the book feels more in the past, and the second half is more in the present because he was transcribing it from footage.

Halfway through the book I decided to look up Lin’s internet presence because it’s mentioned so much in the book. I typically don’t look up an author (I mean of course I’ve heard of Tao Lin, but hadn’t done a deep dive) until after I finish a book unless it’s like super old and I need to know the historical context of the author’s life in 1843 or whatever. I want the book to stand on its own without me inserting the author too much. But in this case, since Lin is the main character and so much of the book is tweets and tumblr, I looked it up. I watched Mumblecore right after Erin and Paul got married in the book, which was perfect timing because the movie ends with the wedding. That was just a coincidence! I watched Mumblecore on 2x speed on youtube, and because they talk so slow they sounded normal. I realized most of the conversations are just literal transcripts.

Before watching the movie, I had trouble feeling anything for any character. They’re never really described and we don’t know anything about them, they’re mostly just names. Michelle, Laura, Erin were all interchangeable until I watched the movie and could see Erin’s mannerisms and demeanor IRL. I found her endearing, but afterwards I knew I was just projecting thevideo Megan onto the written Erin.

All that Paul does with his friends and lovers is take various drugs and go to Whole Foods and Urban Outfitters. I wish I was joking. It’s mind numbingly tedious, and unbecoming of a 28 year old. This is the type of stuff I did back when I was a teenager, because all there is to do when you're a teen is take research chemicals and go to the Mall of America. I feel like the moment my frontal lobe developed I immediately stopped doing stuff like this. It’s just such a waste of life when you’re an adult who can do anything to spend literally all your time filming yourself taking a drug and going to the store. I just am floored at how they can’t think of anything else to do lmao! I guess it makes sense because many of his friends are actually teenagers who are fans of his online persona :/.

On one hand, there is something special about mundane things when you’re with someone you love. And I’m not going to pretend like I didn’t have an awesome time when I was a kid going to the mall on acid or whatever. But it’s just childish lmfao! And I am someone who hates the idea that you can’t have exuberant childlike fun as an adult and don’t think you should lose touch with your silly side etc but god this feels like a lobotomy.

Even when he’s in Taiwan with Erin, their idea of a good time is to go to McDonalds on ecstasy. I also have sympathy for wanting familiarity when you’re in an unfamiliar environment. When my ex and I were traveling in Thailand, sometimes we would just go to a mall and hang out for the day. Part of that was because it was free and air conditioned, but some of it was that it was a legible space in a place where everything was unfamiliar. I would hand wring over the fact that I went across the world just to eat McDonalds instead of some traditional cuisine, but tbh that’s just part of traveling and it’s not like you do it everyday. Though as far as I can tell that is all Paul and Erin did on their trip lol.

Another thing that pissed me off is that they always do the wrong drugs at the wrong time! I never understood the drugs they chose for different events, and they would be mixing adderall and xanax and LSD and MDMA at all random times with no rhyme or reason. I wondered how it was that they never felt bad or sick ingesting all that and sleeping any which way at erratic hours. I am too old for this behavior. I just found all of this embarrassing. There is a page in my journal from when I was 22 that I still think of gluing shut in case I ever die and people read my journals bc it is so embarrassing that I even did this. I was on a 12 hour flight and I made an elaborate pro-con list with different markers and sparkle gel pens etc of if I should take Xanax, Adderall, or Tramadol (all of which I was prescribed) for the flight. When I think about that I’m like that is so embarrassing to be still writing a druggy tumblresque post in my private journal, that is something a 16 year old would do, and yet Lin wrote a whole book like this without shame. I wish I could be so uninhibited.

It’s an old and tired critique to be like only the youthful and privileged can be so careless with life and say things like “I don’t care if I go to jail”. But yeah, nothing bad ever happens to Paul as a result of his drug use, he never misses professional opportunities, never faces physical or legal consequences. He doesn’t really destroy relationships due to drug use because he never really gets close to anyone in the first place. He self sabotages relationships due to lack of interest in maintaining them rather than blowing things up. Zero negative effects are mentioned until the last couple pages where Paul reveals that he spent some of their days vomiting constantly or otherwise in physical discomfort. It’s not that I think every drug memoir needs to focus on the vomiting and misery as a don’t do drugs PSA, but it’s just dishonest to show zero negative effects with this level of recklessness. It’s not until he has this bad trip in the last page where he shows any kind of humility, which leads to a revelation that he doesn’t actually want to die. In addition to disrespect for himself, his body, life itself etc, he doesn’t have any humility regarding the substances he’s ingesting.

This isn’t to be moralistic about drug users or addiction. Not every drug memoir has to be a downward spiral PSA, and I think responsible drug use is possible. The problem here was that it was both annoying and boring. It’s just a void and a waste. The lack of connection to others, to himself, and he isn’t even connected enough to bother feeling despair. I actually have a fairly high tolerance for depressed guy books. I recently read Submission by Houllebecq, so maybe I’m just hitting my limit for the month or something. However, Francois’ apathy came off as wry and comical, there were lines about not bothering to kill himself that made me laugh out loud. I’m okay with suicide jokes and being flippant usually but whenever Paul mentioned suicide, at one point comparing a suicide pact to trying out a new sushi restaurant, I just felt enraged. I have more sympathy and understanding for someone who is in despair or very edgy and angsty than this. He has such a lack of interest in the world, in other people, in himself. I get that the apathy & flatness is kinda the point of the whole book but god. At least when you’re very depressed you’re focused on that, he can’t even do that, it’s just nothing.

Occasionally, because I watched the movie, I found some of the dialogue endearing. I went back and watched all the videos on my phone, and realized I don’t have videos of mundane conversations because why would I. If I were to lose any of the loved ones in my life, simply hanging out is what I would miss most, and so I do think there is value in recording the mundane. My favorite thing about my relationship with my partner is how easy it is to talk to each other, how we have been talking constantly for 6 years and never run out of things to say, and I am sad that I don’t have any record of that. And it is fun to listen in on people’s mundane conversations, that is why podcasts are so popular.

I found Lin’s internet presence more interesting than Paul’s character, and realized I was projecting that onto the book. I think that made me enjoy it a little more, because I could sustain a tiny bit of interest, but I don’t think it would have been present had I not scrolled through his blog, instagram, twitter. Idk I feel like I’m sounding like some perky cheerleader life is beautiful find god etc but I feel that after experiencing a lot of difficulty and sadness I feel resentful of people treating their precious life so callously. Your life is your own, your body is your own to treat like shit, but this disrespect extends out to the rest of the world including the way he treats his parents and friends. It’s just proving how disrespect to the world is ultimately self harm. Again it’s just childish, this is how you see the world when you’re a teenager, and you should grow out of it.

It’s kinda interesting to compare my negative reaction to this with my envy and admiration for Cat Marnell’s memoir. I haven’t even touched the topic of the 2009-2012 internet landscape which is something else I was thinking a lot about while reading this. On that front it was very inspiring, the older internet seems so much more fun and I want to begin a blog so I can say all the unredacted things I leave in my google docs. All this being said I like when a book provokes me to have so many thoughts and I am somehow intrigued either despite or because of the tedium and will likely end up reading more Tao Lin down the line smh.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tao Lin is like a robot who is trying his hardest to understand human emotion. Or maybe a wooden puppet who yearns, more than anything, to turn into a real boy. Paul, the point of view character in Taipei, tries to feel, but he has a hard time pulling it off. He and his friends buy groceries, go to movies, have conversations, do drugs, have sex, get married, go on trips, and film themselves with their Macbooks. No matter what they’re doing, it’s all flat and bloodless. Dramatic emotions, Paul feels, are something you might read about in a book or see in a movie, but not something to expect from real life.

Paul is constantly taking his emotional temperature, trying to gauge how he feels. He’s never simply feeling, completely lost in the drama of his life; his emotions are “vague” (a word that must have appeared more than fifty times in the book), but still, he struggles to identify them:

. . . he calmly turned his head a little and asked if Erin was bored.
“I don’t know. Are you?”
“I can’t tell,” said Paul. “Are you?”
“Maybe a little. Do you want to go?”
“Yeah,” said Paul, and slowly stood.

Some might argue that writing is about finding the story: a good writer needs to take his observations of ordinary life and craft them into a narrative that allows us to make sense of the world around us. Tao Lin doesn’t subscribe to this idea. If his literary influences (the 1980s minimalists like Lorrie Moore, Anne Beattie, and Raymond Carver) taught him anything, it’s that life does not have narrative structure. Life is a series of moments, most of them mundane. (It’s funny and almost impossible to imagine his characters engaging in high-stakes drama: a car chase, a murder, an emergency tracheotomy with a ballpoint pen, a flash mob wedding proposal.)

Tabitha Blankenbiller, in her review of Taipei on Spectrum Culture, says, “In the end, I felt as though I had refreshed my Facebook wall for 260 pages, waiting for a real story to come along. But aside from some grainy selfies and viral videos, nothing ever quite shows up.” The pages of Taipei are bleak and empty, yes. But as repetitive and mind-numbing as it is to refresh that Facebook page all day long, you have to admit it’s addictive. It becomes a way to pass huge chunks of our time, a way to experience life. Unlike, say, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Super Sad True Love Story, or The Circle, Taipei doesn’t present us with a hazily dystopian future, where technology has replaced normal human emotions and interactions. Taipei is trying to show us how we live now. Tao Lin’s vision is depressing, sure. But not altogether inaccurate.

[Joe · Rating 1 out of 5]

Joe, 43, is lying on his side, at 11:30pm Saturday , “trying to get some sleep”, having drank three or four glasses of wine earlier, after which he collapsed into bed calling it a night, when he decides he would finish reading Taipei , the novel just released over the summer by “21st-century literary adventurer” Tao Lin, who, according to a favorite writer of Joe, is “the most interesting prose stylist of his generation.”

Joe found, whenever motionless “in bed falling asleep”, with eyes wide open, perched on the precipice of slumber, but not quite “falling over”, that reading Taipei brought on sleep faster than an irresponsible party goer overdosing on MDMA.

After getting up to fill his water bottle, Joe takes 5mg melatonin, just in case, returning to bed to lay on his side again, placing headphones on to listen to the new Boards of Canada mp3 lossless download he got in advance from bleep.com “but only the good songs because they’ve become so boring now”, he grabs his copy of Taipei off his nightstand and begins to read the final 30 pages while simultaneously listening to the track Palace Posy.

Joe found himself, when, during a silence, after turning the final page of Taipei, involuntarily hurtling the book across the room with a sense of revolted wonderment. He found, while pressing repeat to restart Boards of Canada, Lin’s prose a pretentious and presumptuous abuse of potential. It was then he realized, while beginning to feel the effects of the 5mg melatonin, but, more likely, the effects of, or rather the waste of time involved in, reading 248 pages of Taipei, that he no longer had the patience for, or probably just out grew, reading rambling bodies of prose populated by self-absorbed, nihilistic protagonists, who, while ingesting copious amounts of drugs, travel with friends from party to party, city to city, stopping to do more drugs, text and tweet, and go to another party.

Joe was startled, dimly aware that he had an epiphany, one that, for him, was as simple as realizing sometimes style does not trump substance, and that, Taipei, for all intents and purposes, suffered immensely because of that or, perhaps, it could be he was becoming a grumpy old man, out of touch with what passes as literature these days. He could feel his eyes getting heavy, knowing he would forget this when he woke up the next morning, but was recording himself with his MacBook, sideways, “just in case”, and he thought, thanks to the slumber inducing qualities of Taipei or maybe, but not likely, the 5mg melatonin, he felt “grateful to finally be falling asleep.”

[anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

dear tao lin: if u are reading this, thank u for writing this book

It’s been soooo long since i enjoyed a book this much, easily one of my favs of all time. Gave me life but suspiciously my depression also flared up so while i really enjoyed reading this i also couldn’t wait to finish reading this so i could become a functional and mentally stable human being again. Tao lin reminds me that the sheer force and desire to write is enough to write things sometimes. I felt really energised by his writing and inspired to write in a way i felt like i lost for a month or so. My favourite genre of books where technically u could say “nothing happens” but also it seems like so much happens. Cathartic ending. A perfect book for me. Thank u cat for lending this to me<3

[Amar Pai · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me, reading Taipei was much like reading Ulysses. Wait, come back! All I mean is: the reading experience itself was difficult and not particularly "fun," but nevertheless I'm glad I'm persevered to the end, and feel like it was worthwhile and that parts of it rang true in the way that great fiction does.

It's the whole question of "difficult literature," innit. I tend to quickly toss any book that feels like a slog, cos life is short and there are too many good books out there to waste time on ones you hate. There's no shame in abandoning a book. But at the same time, not everything worthwhile is immediately accessible or instantly fun. A book might be dense, slow-going, hard to understand, and yet at the end it stays with you and influences how you see the world. Taipei is like that... maybe.

ASPECTS OF TAIPEI THAT RESONATED W/ ME:

1) "looking at the internet" - this is what Tao calls it, and the phrase feels exactly right. it's not surfing the web, not browsing, what we spend so much of our days doing is just looking at the internet. (we meaning you, me and whoever else is in this book's "cohort")

2) the pathos (?) of opening your MacBook sideways and looking at the internet while lying down on your bed. e.g.

"In mid-June, one dark and rainy afternoon, Paul woke and rolled onto his side and opened his MacBook sideways. At some point, maybe twenty minutes after he'd begun refreshing Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Gmail in a continuous cycle-- with an ongoing, affectless, humorless realization that his day "was over"..."

3) [re cocaine] "They discussed, relative to Adderall, not liking cocaine, which was inferior in price, effect, length of effect, aftereffect, convenience, availability..." True dat. Relatedly resonant: I read somewhere that Adderall is Tao Lin's favorite drug.

ASPECTS OF TAIPEI THAT ANNOYED ME:

1) nothing really happens in this book

2) it's not a page turner AT ALL. I often had to struggle to maintain interest enough to keep reading

3) there's hardly ANY Taipei in the book. I think he just called it Taipei cos to be an Important Novel it helps to reference some foreign place. I think I actually heard Tao Lin say this in an interview!

CONCLUSION:

I guess I'm still processing. I kind of hated this book and kind of want to say it's terrible... but why do I get so obsessed with Tao Lin? This is basically an autobiographical novel-- at one point the protagonist Paul writes a poem about catching and eating a whale, and it's literally just a poem by Tao Lin... and Paul's girlfriend/wife is just Tao's (ex) wife Megan Boyle... I think if you're interested in Tao Lin you can't help but be interested in his barely veiled autobiography. (The voice in the back of my head is shouting, BUT THE BOOK SUCKS)

So I guess I lied, I don't really have a conclusion. But, I can provide some other fun Tao Lin links collected from two periods of Tao Lin obsession.

FUN TAO LINKS

1. The Levels of Greatness a Fiction Writer Can Achieve in America From Lowest to Highest, by Tao Lin - still cracks me up... I think Tao Lin's sense of humor is what attracts me to him the most... esp. since he will never, ever cop to trying to be funny

2. Drug Related Photoshop Art - a recurring thing he did for vice. fave might be dumbledore levitating adderall... or maybe the ecstasy 3 headed bear? there's a lot of good ones really.

3. Cooking the books - Tao Lin interviewed on Emily Gould's cooking show... must see if you want to properly visualize all the nervous "grinning" in Taipei. Also showcases Tao's weird food habits. Oh-- I totally related when he mentioned just biting off pieces of veggies and spitting them into his salad... it IS much faster than using a knife! I do the same thing (only when eating alone, of course)

4. Gchat Is a Noble Pursuit: Tao Lin’s Modernist Masterpiece (NY Observer profile on Tao Lin written in the style of Tao Lin)

5. Great American Novelist, by Tao Lin - profile of Tao Lin by Tao Lin (wait! come back!) in the Seattle Observer... it's really funny. Well I thought so anyway.

6. Facedown Generation - Tao Lin's photos from Taipei. Oddly affecting. I liked all of his photo sets from Tai Pei, I think he did one on food too

7. (sadly defunct) Tao Lin tweets ideas for American Psycho 2 @ Bret Easton Ellis - these were so good! They seem to have been scrubbed from the internet.

8. 5,000+ Word Unedited Interview With Tao Lin -- the quintessential Tao Lin interview. Features lots of awkward silences written out explicitly [pause], [trails off] hahaha Tao Lin in a nutshell: TL: Yeah that was just… [trails off]

ECSTASY BEAR



FIN

[S · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ll start with the negatives.

This is such an indulgent book. Tao Lin goes on several tangents in which the characters take copious amounts of drugs, mixing Xanax, Percs, MDMA, LSD, mushrooms, and most of all, Adderall. This would be fine if all the drug scenes weren’t the exact same in how they played out.

You can tell he’s read a lot of David Foster Wallace; he explains the psyche of Paul, the main character, in a very “infinite jest” way. He’s doing infinite jest in that regard, but not as good.

That said these psychological bits can be really interesting and at times, laugh-out-loud funny. Plus, the dialogue is a joy to read; it’s essentially a few autistic characters who talk to each other like it’s their first day having friends, but they still manage to hold down relationships and have very social lives. It’s a very funny book. People have called Tao Lin the voice of a generation, but maybe he’s just the voice of *autistic* millennials.

So there were those boring indulgent parts punctuated by some genuinely thought-provoking mental processes from Paul, and Paul’s neurotic yet terse conversations with his girlfriend Erin are hilarious and illuminate the nature of romantic relationships in a very good way.

Overall, 3/5, because I didn’t go into a reading session particularly thrilled.

[Kasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the unusual rhythm through the book, it was veiled in a very relaxed manner, the drug use, the dating, the literary life that Paul leads; it was different from what I usually read but enjoyable. The ending was especially surprising in comparison to the tone of the story, it actually made me chuckle.

This is East meets West with Paul and his modern life being blended back with that of his parents in Taipei as Paul travels and talks about his work and his books while constantly high and on drugs. It truly reads like someone’s life, a stream of trippy consciousness. People seem to be shocked at the bits and pieces as if their own lives were spotless, sterile and boring. I don’t think that people should force themselves to read this, many seem to dislike it and that’s fine. We can’t all like the same thing but I had no trouble in my enjoyment, it was pretty fast moving and made me feel happy that this wasn’t my life since I don’t mind being awake and aware when I talk to people but I can see why someone like Paul would need meds and pills considering how most of our modern society sucks. Mental sleepwalkers who point fingers, just read the reviews.

- Kasia S.

[Thom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tao Lin’s Teipei could be a Trojan horse bringing alt-lit into the mainstream, or it could be a rejection of the form by its most acclaimed proponent. Even before its UK release, the novel has polarised opinion; appropriately for a piece of literature so concerned with social media use, the amount of internet-chat it has generated makes it extremely difficult to come to Taipei with an open mind. It is basically impossible to disassociate the author from the work - the novel’s protagonist Paul is a thinly-veiled figura for Tao Lin himself, and many of the situations will be familiar to followers of his blogs and Twitter feed. On this evidence, the death of the author was proclaimed too soon, failing to anticipate Facebook, youtube and all the other channels for online self-invention. If the cultural references of Taipei are ultra-modern, though, Tao Lin’s concerns are quite traditional. His narrator is a young man searching for a coherent identity. He has rejected the outmoded world of his parents, but the culture of his own generation is not yet fully-formed, and fails to satisfy.

Taipei is also rather traditional stylistically. There are none of the screenshots, tweets or text-speak that make up the alt-lit stereotype. Instead, Tao Lin brings the thoughtful qualities of his best poems to bear, infusing his ennui with a certain beauty. Early on, as Paul and his girlfriend walk down the street, people ‘pass unknowingly between them, like a slow, amorphous flickering’. The prose of the opening chapter is extremely dense with meaning. Whilst the milieu (magazine launch parties in Chelsea art galleries) is immediately obnoxious, and the first references to pop-culture icons (Michael Jackson and Che Guevara) appear early on, there is a richness to Tao Lin’s writing, and Paul’s search for something to ‘endure and overpower his negativity’.

Bret Easton Ellis is a common reference point for Tao Lin, but there is a significant difference in the characters they create. In Ellis’s best work, his subjects exemplify their cultures, and use this skill to exploit the lesser beings around them. Patrick Bateman, for example, took the greed and ruthlessness of his environment to its logical conclusion, whilst the protagonists of The Rules of Attraction display the same traits of dominance, albeit with less murderous intent. In Taipei, by contrast, the characters struggle to get to grips with the world they inhabit. At one point, Paul memorably realises that he is ‘three or four skill sets away from comprehension, like an amoeba trying to create a personal website using CSS’. If he is unable to cope with New York, he is equally out of place in his native Taiwan: he is ‘not fluent enough for conversations with strangers – and he wasn’t close to his relatives, with whom conversations were brief and non-advancing’.

Time is extremely important in Taipei. In his novel A Virtual Love, released earlier this year, Andrew Blackman used an inherited grandfather clock to differentiate between the speed of life in the analogue world and the digital. Here, you get a sense of life lived entirely on digital time: characters fall down internet holes on a regular basis, and this habit spills over into their physical interactions as well, giving their existence a sense of aimless drift. Early on, Paul is confronted by his girlfriend saying ‘I’m waiting for you. You said you wanted to leave an hour ago’. Later, Paul begins to check gmail, Twitter and Facebook on a cycle, before ‘he noticed with confusion, having thought it was am, that it was 4.46pm’. There is a strange mutation of existentialism at play. With a bloodstream which has become ‘a chemical system of klonopin and valium and alcohol’, Paul’s memory is blotted out, forcing him to live in the present. Thus, when he does make decisions, they are often rash and short term, as in his Vegas wedding to Erin, and rarely bear fruit in the long-term, as in his numerous abortive film projects.

Paul’s interactions are always mediated through drugs and technology. The characters in Taipei tweet and google chat to one another whilst in the same room, and Paul and Erin attempt to understand Taiwan by posing as documentary workers, making sarcastically anthropological comments about the staff and customers of fast food restaurants. The process of creating a public persona is laid bare, as Paul films himself on a variety of drugs, deciding which images of himself to release via social media. Paul’s mother belongs to a different culture, which values sober and unmediated contact with the physical world. She accesses memories Paul has shut himself off from, filling his room with childhood photographs, and trying to act as a conscience, warning him of the dangers of his drug use. You sense that she is fighting a losing battle, however. The Taipei that Paul and Erin encounter in the closing chapters is an Americanised culture, with strip malls, McDonalds and late-night shopping.

Throughout Taipei, there is a sense of the author playing games with his audience, constantly trying to provoke a reaction. As Paul’s sense of alienation deepens, Tao Lin ratchets up the alt-lit cultural references, cramming Rilo Kiley, the film Go, Fuck Buttons and Marina Abramovic into a couple of paragraphs, as if confronting his readers with the emotional and literary limitations of the genre. Later, as Paul gives a reading, he notes that ‘the audience laughed every time a drug was mentioned, like most of them were on drugs, which was probably true’. The use of cultural sign-posts is one of alt-lit’s most distinctive traits, so this sending-up seems designed to provoke howls of dismay from loyal readers. This playfulness is also shown in quirks like Tao Lin’s tabloid-esque character introductions (‘Lucie, 23, introduced herself and Amy, 23, and Daniel, 25').

It's possible that while Tao Lin refuses to probe beneath the surface of Pau's drug use, family relationships or work ethic, he does use him to explore the relationship between author and fan. The women in Paul's life pander to him, reduced to mumbled banalities in his presence; Laura 'meekly' exits the flat after being given some construction paper, Erin reassures him that he is 'good at everything'. Paul's ideas are rarely challenged by anyone other than his mother. Is it this level of hero-worship that leaves Paul feeling so distant from the world of normal human interaction? His response to criticism is to shut his mother off for specified periods of time, a punishment for intruding on his sheltered existance. Paul's money and cultural status remove him from the world of responsibility, to a point where laws no longer really apply to him, and he feels free to take ecstasy and cocaine with him on international flights. Is Taipei a means of courting criticism, to tear down the idea of Tao Lin as the alt-lit golden boy? Or a critique of the elevated status enjoyed by artists?

All in all, Taipei is a fascinating novel, if not always a satisfactory one. The barriers that Paul puts up between himself and his contempories also act as a barrier between character and reader; skilful writing about alienation can in itself be alienating. If you like to empathise with characters, or like them, this isn't a book for you. At times Taipei resembles Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, with its accounts of drug-addled book tours and private alienation, although it doesn’t possess the manic energy of Ellis’s book. The novel has been described as a bildungsroman, but Paul’s future is unclear at the end - the settings and cast change, but Paul’s sense of disconnection is constant, and as the narrative progresses, the level of medication required to maintain his zoned-out equilibrium increases. Globalisation, and the advance of technology, has left Paul out of touch with the world of his parents, but without providing a workable alternative. In the end, he is an impotent existentialist, living for the moment, yet unable to seize it.

[Fr. Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can understand how this book might be offputting to some, but I love this kind of close third-person storytelling, which I've always felt brings us closer to the character than a first-person telling does. I also find the detached filter through which Paul (the main character of Taipei) views his world, his experiences, and his own body to be very compelling and oddly appealing. Maybe that's because, even though I do not have experience with drugs, I can relate to that detachment. I guess I come to it naturally, rather than through drugs. But regardless, I found myself mesmerized by this perspective, and appreciated that this was not a plot-driven story. The structure? Not "protagonist takes a journey," but rather, "the journey takes the protagonist."

I loved this book.