buttercup — notes for a forthcoming review of 'taipei'

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

by buttercup

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

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