From AudioFile
If a 19-year-old woman's blog were narrated by her friend and that blog were laden with ennui, deviant sex, low self-esteem, and occasional flashes of poetry, you would be listening to something like SNAKES AND EARRINGS. Dana Shiraki's dispassionate voice plods through the prose while the story brings listeners ever deeper into a self-destructive, ugly, and self-indulgent life. Listeners may recoil or simply be bored by the lurid details. This is a lowbrow attempt at a modern STORY OF O, and it fails as an audiobook, except perhaps in titillating people too young to get their own tattoos, piercings, body mutilation, and random sex. Overall, an audio nightmare. D.J.B. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
Booklist
Offsetting its highly conformist, nose-to-the-grindstone image, Japan maintains a subgenre of rebellious youth stories in literature and film. Kanehara's short novel, a winner of Japan's foremost award to new fiction writers, stands firmly in the subgenre's literary line. It has stirred a lot of sand because it includes plenty of deadpan sex, Kanehara was only 20 when it won the prize, and it is one of the first novels about Japan's newest adults, who, growing up after the Japanese economic bubble burst in the 1980s, know only a society no longer able to promise that good jobs will be especially remunerative or even obtainable. Lui is a freeter, or independent young adult, living on part-time jobs and affectlessly clubbing, drinking, drugging, and screwing. She meets literally fork-tongued Ama. She decides to have her tongue done likewise and becomes Ama's noncommittal lover, boffing tattooist Shiba on the side and never learning Ama's real name. Violence, heavy drinking, and death eventually disrupt this drama of youthful degeneracy that steadfastly rejects romanticism. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
