Stolen Bicycle

It was a time when you couldn't mourn properly, you couldn't love properly.
◎ Following his wins of the French Island Literature Prize for Novel, Time Out Beijing's Best Chinese Novel of the Century for "The Man with Compound Eyes", Books.com.tw's annual Chinese novel "The Magician on the Bridge", and Kingstone's Top Ten Most Influential Books of the Year for "Floating Light", this is the latest novel by novelist Wu Mingyi, who has won the Open Book of the Year Award for the fifth time. His works have been published in many countries and have received international critical acclaim.
The novel explores the history of islands through the history of things. It can be considered a series with "Sleep Route," which was selected as one of Asia Weekly's top ten Chinese novels of the year.
◎The book's "Iron Horse Chronicles," written by the novel's protagonist, tells the history of bicycles and is accompanied by exquisite hand-drawn illustrations of the iron horse; it is both a novel and a display of popular history.
◎ Comes with a foldout poster drawn by the author - "Comparison Chart of Historical Events and Fictional Events".
Winner of the 2015 Taiwan Literature Museum's Golden Novel Award, the Eslite Bookstore Reader's Award (Most Anticipated Taiwanese Writer), Books.com.tw's Book of the Year, the China Times Book of the Year (Chinese Creative Writing), and one of the Ministry of Culture's 30 Best Taiwanese Novels of 2001-2015. Includes a captivating preface by renowned critic and Harvard University professor David Wang (download online: https://goo.gl/1jg81h)
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Those bicycles abandoned on the streets, in recycling plants, and in ruins, every part and every crevice still holds a story...
A reader's letter, a photograph, the basement of an abandoned house in an old military dependents' village, a mysterious silver wheel unit during World War II, an elephant convoy in the forests of northern Myanmar, Yuanshan Zoo, and a battle of trees...it all started with a forgotten bicycle in a novel.
The story begins with a father who has been missing for twenty years and a Happy brand bicycle.
My father disappeared the day after the demolition of the Chung Hwa Shopping Center in 1993. One day, while flipping through family photo albums, a photo of a stranger and a familiar bicycle sparked my determination to track down my father and the long-lost Happiness brand bicycle. A letter from a reader then brought the bicycle from fiction into reality...
Through the opportunity to collect various Xingfu brand bicycles, I got to know Abu, who loves collecting second-hand items, Xiaoxia, who loves antique bicycles, and Abasi, a young Tsou ethnic group photographer and owner of a coffee shop where a Xingfu brand bicycle that looks just like his father's is placed.
Through the tapes of Abbas's father, a war that harmed people, animals, and forests reappears before our eyes...
The book revolves around the bicycle, which we are all most familiar with. By searching for a missing father and his bicycle, the author weaves together stories of reality and memory through the island landscape. Reading this novel is like taking a sentimental journey about life and death, fate and destiny, and the cruelty of the times.
One day, humans would learn that elephants understood the night, the rainy season, the stars, and sadness just as they did. When the elder mother elephant collapsed, the others stopped dead and surrounded her. They rubbed their trunks against each other's backs, emitting an uncanny, soft hum. The temperature inverted at night, creating a better sound transmission layer near the ground, allowed the hum to travel to the distant valleys and then echo back to the camp. The amplified, multi-layered sound filled the soldiers nearby with a mixture of melancholy and warmth. They felt the elephants' grief, and so did their own. They thought of lovers and relatives far away, of fallen comrades, of the severed arms that once held penises and guns, and of the eyes that would never grow back.
- The Stolen Bicycle
Wu Mingyi says, "I wrote this novel not out of nostalgia, but out of respect for an era I never experienced and a tribute to the irreversible experiences of life. Through this story, about a person searching for a bicycle and accidentally entering a certain timeline, I hope that the reader and the characters can feel each other's emotions, the rhythm of their pedaling, the smell of sweat and the uncoordinated breathing, the sorrow of tears and the absence of tears. Yet no one stops, no need to call out or kiss, just to pedal silently, arduously, hungry, and calmly."

2016-05-01

麥田

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