The Man With The Bound Eyes Critical Analysis

Can what is lost ever be recovered? Wing Ming-Yi’s “The Man with the Compound Eyes” translated into English by Darryl Stark is an exploration into the tidal nature of grief. Set in a near future, the novel an earth where global warming has irreparably changed the world’s weather patterns and the strange and untouched Island of Wayo Wayo, where every second son is given to the sea to appease and give thanks to the Sea God. As a result of the worlds changed weather patterns, a trash vortex has formed in the middle of the ocean and crashes into the coast of Taiwan. Drawn together by the trash vortex, loss and grief, “The Man with the Compound Eyes” tells the stories of Alice, a woman preparing for her suicide after her son and husband vanish in the Taiwanese mountains, and Atile’i, a second son from the Wayo Wayo Islands whose destiny is that of a human sacrifice for the Sea God. At face value the story is just that, on the morning that the trash vortex slams into the coast of Taiwan Alice after years of wrestling with the idea that her son and husband are gone, plans to take her own life. Meanwhile on the Island of Wayo Wayo Atile’i is cast out into the sea, however Atile’i fights back against the sea and eventually swims towards the trash vortex, creating a makeshift home there.
The Man with the Compound Eyes, is a bizarre and wonderful mix of a novel within a novel, nothing is as it seems and Ming-Yi weaves an invocative tale where the mountains and environment of the earth are just as much main character as Alice and
Atile’i.
Grief and loss in all its facets is explored within the pages of “The man with the Compound eyes”, yet the true strength of the novel is how it does not comparing the different aspects of heartache. Who can say that the damage done to the earth’s environment is greater than that felt by a mother whose son has vanished without a trace or the pain felt when your memories twist and turn inside of you and you can longer remember what was real and what was the work of a fantastical imagination. The question of memory and reality plays an important role, with the third act of the book devolving into a literary rabbit hole, wherein the reader has to sift through our own memories of the story and characters to find the truth at the heart of the story.
With the chapters alternating between perspectives one flaw of the novel is that it is hard to immerse fully in the story, as there is a struggle to find context between the characters and how their chapters slot into the plot. The story for such a short novel, is quite a slow moving one and because of that some readers might find it a tedious read or at the very least extremely difficult to get into the rhythm of the writing.
It is a hauntingly melancholic read, nature and its inherent fragility is on full display as Ming-Yi manages to make me long for a Taiwan which I have never visited and I am not sure even exists outside of his mind and imaginations. It is science fiction at its best, whilst the universe at play in the novel is a large and complex one, the characters aren’t lost within the pages, even the flapping of a butterfly’s wings or the feeling of grass between your toes isn’t lost, and the smallness of humanity is at the forefront of Wing Ming-Yi’s writing.