one of the best novels i've read in recent years. lin captures things about life in our century that no other author has, especially -- as almost all reviewers have mentioned -- the addictive boredom of the internet, which sometimes seems like a barrier or cocoon separating us from experience. for lin, technology isn't either "good or bad" to use a phrase he was once enamored with. in this book and also in a few essays, the author wonders if the internet, as a shared imaginative space, can help people feel less alone. more boldly, he suggests that the internet might be humanity's destiny, a pure realm of ideas far more conducive to our desire to share our inner lives than the physical world that still seems more familiar.it's hard to know how to take lin's techno-utopianism. in taipei, the internet certainly is not a cure for loneliness. neither are the drugs the characters take, which cause them to become obsessed with monitoring and managing their emotional states on a moment to moment basis. everything in this novel seems to work to pull the characters, and especially the main character paul, further inward, when the reader suspects that what he needs most is to get outside himself. this makes for a claustrophobic reading experience for sure, but also one that is very powerful and intimate. taipei isn't a pedantic novel, and it never tells us if the internet is the cause or the solution to paul's profound sense of anomie. as an environment controlled by marketers, surely it plays a role in promoting the gnawing dissatisfaction we all seem to feel but that doesn't necessarily override its utopian dimensions. drugs too, are neither praised nor condemned. while for the most part they work to draw the characters deeper inside, there are moments when this is not so. at the very end of the book, an initially bad drug experience leads paul to the surprising insight that he "was happy to be alive." unlike existentialists of the mid 20th century, lin holds out the possibility that there might, somehow, be a way to get outside the self. Read if you have feelings about..."feelings"drugscitiesapple productswomendepressionwritingdetachment macdonaldspartiesmomsTaiwanBrooklyn"Millenials"quotation marks suggesting some layer of "irony""social" mediait's like all those 80s books about rich people who do cocaine and hate themselves except now YouTube existsno one gets paranoid yet accurate analyses of social situations better than tao linTao Lin's twitter is better than this book tho
What do You think about Taipeh (2014)?
So pointless. No story line what so ever. Forced myself to finish it and was unimpressed.
—Annisa
