Amazon.com
Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe has produced a quirky, introspective novel that uses autobiographical elements to tell the story of a writer's family and his rediscovery of his place therein. Written in the form of a diary, the story is told from the point of view of Ma-Chan, the daughter of a famous writer (identified only as "K") who has decamped to California as a university writer-in-residence. Ma-Chan is left in charge of her equally famous brother, an idiot savant who composes brilliant classical music. The mentally retarded brother, nicknamed Eeyore, has violent fits, periods of incontinence, and a troubling new sexual awareness. Like Faulkner's Benjy Compson, he is the moral center of the book, a touchstone and a catalyst for the muted events that carry the novel to its unpredictable close. Full of digressions on the cinema, modernist music, and the novels of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Oe's latest novel is a stylized, idiosyncratic confessional that only he could fashion.
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From Publishers Weekly
Like Oe, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, K-Chan, the character at the heart of this novel, is an internationally renowned Japanese novelist. His story pits the quest for individual identity against the measure of selflessness necessary for healthy family life. Wisecracking and often emotionally insensitive, K-Chan suffers a spiritual breakdown that impels him to leave his young adult children in Japan while he and his wife take up residence at a college in California-and where, in peace, he might answer the daunting question: "how is a faithless person to cope with life?" Thus, it is up to his 20-year-old daughter, the narrator Ma-Chan, who describes herself as a "withdrawn coward," to care for her older, mentally handicapped but musically brilliant brother, nicknamed Eeyore, and her younger, independent and intelligent brother, O-Chan. The narrative traces the quotidian challenges Ma-Chan faces, shuttling Eeyore to and from work at a vocational welfare center and attending to his epileptic seizures. Meanwhile, supporting characters, all friends or family of K-Chan, wonder aloud to Ma-Chan about her father's abandonment of his children, and discuss with her episodes from his past that might have led to his nervous breakdown. Unfortunately, Oe employs stilted dialogue (made worse, no doubt, by a lifeless translation) between characters on topics that include Tarkovsky's film Stalker and a novel by Aitmatov about the Crucifixion. These discussions are clumsy and lack the grace and whimsy apparent in other novels of ideas by writers like Milan Kundera (whom a character named Mr. Shigeto is said to translate). A dramatic climax in which Ma-Chan is nearly raped by Eeyore's swimming teacher lacks credibility. Eventually, the family-minus K-Chan-is reunited in a conclusion that, like the novel, makes more of a dry conceptual impact than an emotional one.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
