Sidharth Vardhan's Reviews > The Stolen Bicycle

Narrator's parents wanting a male child named their fifth daughter A-muáh (enough! enough!!) - that kind of names, I thought, were an Indian specialty. Kafi (enough - same implication), Mafi (forgiveness - to god for having given the parents another daughter) etc.

That is almost the only striking thing I discovered in this book. Wu Ming-Yi's novel has a very loose plot and prose, though beautiful in beginning, falls mostly short of stimulating for the most part. It is about narrator's quest for his father's stolen bicycle (who also went missing at the same time, but the narrator doesn't hold the same kind of curiosity for whereabouts of his father) while telling stories of each person who happened to be in possession of the bicycle. And thus we hear stories about a war-torn Korea, the importance of bicycle in it (both in war logistics and as a luxury for people); bicycle collectors and their values, lives of elephants and mahouts, war photographers, industries using butterfly wings for ornamentation of clothes etc. It is a lot of Discovery channel and National Geography Channel stuff which is beautiful in its own way; just not my kink.