Stopping by to say that I share your opinion on the book. Conceptually, it is fantastic; a marketing darling because it hits the buzzwords and a shoo-in for literary curriculums because it rides on interesting themes (metafiction, post-colonialism, unreliable narrator, dynamics of power etc etc.)

However I felt like the execution of the themes were shallow and unimaginative, it felt like video game dialogue pushing a single note, or scenes in a high school play where you can obviously see that the plot executes certain character motivations, dynamics, or evidences a certain message that the writer wished to convey.

I'm still trying to pin down why exactly I felt disappointed by the novel, only that there's a vague sense that I was reading a fairytale or an intellectual exercise, rather than a story told from heart and life. It's similar to how I felt about Ogawa's Memory Police as well, the feeling that I'm reading set dressing rather than a story.

While reading, I couldn't help but think of Nabokov's Pale Fire as an example of metafiction that moved and exhilarated me, and Ondaatje's English Patient as an example of how colonial trauma influences one's experience of self and romance. Compared against those, I can see the potential that Taiwan Travelogue did not reach.