Taipei
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- USD 8.99
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- USD 8.99
Descripción editorial
At some point, maybe twenty minutes after he'd begun refreshing Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Gmail in a continuous cycle - with an ongoing, affectless, humorless realisation that his day 'was over' - he noticed with confusion, having thought it was early morning, that it was 4:46PM
Taipei is an ode - or lament - to the way we live now. Following Paul from New York, where he comically navigates Manhattan's art and literary scenes, to Taipei, Taiwan, where he confronts his family's roots, we see one relationship fail, while another is born on the internet and blooms into an unexpected wedding in Las Vegas.
From one of this generation's most talked-about and enigmatic writers comes a deeply personal and uncompromising novel about memory, love, and what it means to be alive.
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For all its straightforwardness, Lin's previous work with its flat, Internet-inspired prose issued by small presses has presented a stumbling stone for readers who fall outside his North Brooklyn contingent, for whom he is the standard bearer. This will change with the breakout Taipei, a novel about disaffection that's oddly affecting. The story of Paul with its book tours, Wikipedia binges, and on-again-off-again romances smacks of autobiography. Similarly, the specificity of the Brooklyn that Paul and his cohort of blithe, pill-popping ironists occupy the pop-cultural immediacy of the names of bands, books, and bars there blurs the distinction between fiction and reality. The thin plot follows Paul in and out of parties, drug trips, and relationships from August to December 2010 ("during the filming... of X-Men: First Class"). Everything about Taipei appears to run contrary to the standard idea of what constitutes art. And yet, the documentary precision captures the sleepwalking malaise of Lin's generation so completely, it's scary. Trips to Vegas with an Internet crush (they marry on a whim) and the Taiwan residence of his understandably worried parents underscore the profound dislocation of the information-fried urban hipsterati. Yet for all its emotional reality, Taipai is a book without an ounce of self-pity, melodrama, or posturing, making the glacial Lin (Richard Yates) the perfect poster child for a generation facing and failing to face maturity.
