The Man with the Compound Eyes by Wu Ming-Yi, translated from the Chinese by Darryl Sterk, reviewed by Michael Andre-Driussi

This Taiwanese novel is a slipstream tale about a slow-rolling ecological disaster, a floating island of garbage heading for Taiwan, and how it affects Alice Shih, a suicidal writer in Taiwan, and Atile’i, an islander who washes up on shore when the islands collide. Mysterious Atile’i is not the subject alluded to in the title, nor is he native to the garbage isle; he was only resting there after being exiled from his natural Polynesian home. In fact, his experience on the garbage island is a reversed “Robinson Crusoe” sort of thing, being about a nontechnological man trying to survive in an environment entirely made of technological artifacts.

In genre terms, this novel is like John Brunner’s eco-disaster epic The Sheep Look Up (1972) subjected to the fragmentation strategy of Tom Disch’s 334 (1972). Or something like a mash-up of Philip Wylie’s The End of the Dream (1972) with John Crowley’s Engine Summer (1979). In terms of East Asian Lit, it starts off with wry humor and semi-satire in the mode of Yasutaka Tsutsui, but by stages it turns dark and “bleeding out” in the style of Haruki Murakami.

The novel shows contrast between a cosmopolitan poly-culture (represented by Alice and others on Taiwan) and a strict monoculture (represented by Atile’i with his perhaps mythical island). The poly-culture is made up of East (Han Chinese and Japanese), West (European and American), and aborigine (several autochthonous groups of Taiwan). The character list includes a German, some Han Chinese, a Dane, a Bunun (mountain aborigine), a Pangcah (coastal aborigine), and a Norwegian. The text makes reference to New Zealand ethnologist Stephenson Percy Smith, French composer Claude Debussy, Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund, and American author Paul Auster. And clearly the floating garbage island is also made up of international elements.

The novel’s fragmentary nature is somewhat challenging. Think of its thirty-one chapters as being segments on different TV channels. In the beginning it seems as if the two characters, Alice and Atile’i, form poles of difference such that there is an “Alice” channel and an “Atile’i” channel. There are also other channels, different characters of the poly-culture who contribute to the “Alice” thread, and different characters of the monoculture who add to the “Atile’i” thread.

This multichannel experience points toward the enigmatic “Man with the Compound Eyes” of the title. Imaging having multiple eyes like a fly, and then suppose that each eye is seeing a different movie at the same time. That is the effect the novel aims for. As a result, it is nonlinear. In addition to that, after the halfway point it seems like the two threads further expand into four threads.

Despite the diversity of the poly-culture, there is a hypnotic repetition: one character stands out for being an aboriginal massage girl/prostitute, then there is another, then there are many. The Han Chinese woman Alice is a suicidal writer whose spouse died in an accident; then there is another Han Chinese writer who committed suicide after losing a spouse to an accident.

While only 300 pages long, the book is packed with details befitting a James Michener–style epic. Taiwanese flora, fauna, and aborigines; geology and massive engineering projects; et cetera. Add this to the large number of characters, each of whom has a backstory that unspools and tangles with others.

This novel is slipstream, occupying the mazy space between “genre” and “literature.” Thus it is a sprawl atop a place full of loss and discovery, hope and despair. It is an exploration of the human ecology of societies, and it sounds the alarm on oceanic ecology.

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Michael Andre-Driussi lives in Albany, California.