Snakes And Earrings [Anglais] [Relié]

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 --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

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

An underground world.
A murder.
An international phenomenon.
Snakes and Earrings. . . .

Describing a world as amoral and fascinating as the landscapes of Less Than Zero and Trainspotting, this novel about a young woman living in the violent world of Japan’s underground youth culture is both shocking and strangely beautiful.

Enchanted by the snake-like tongue of a stranger called Ama, nineteen-year-old Lui takes a walk into another side of life. On the Tokyo streets, she finds a world where pain bleeds into pleasure. Where day fades into night. And where right turns into wrong.

An international bestseller.
Winner of the Akutagawa Prize.
Translated by David James Karashima.

A VINTAGE ORIGINAL
A shocking and explicit story about obsessive love and Japanese youth counter-culture that sold over a million copies in Japan. --Ce texte fait référence à l'édition Broché .

"Shocking, brutal, riveting, and best of all, well written."
—Marie Claire

"As unsettling and poetic as a fever dream."
—Elle

"A powerful portrait of [the] post-bubble generation."
—The New York Times

"Ever get the longing to conceal a video camera in a zone you’d never get a peek into otherwise? Hitomi Kanehara fearlessly takes us into the labyrinthine realm that makes up renegade Japanese youth culture."
—J.T. Leroy, author of Sarah --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.

Hitomi Kanehara won the Akutagawa Prize for debut fiction in 2004, and her novel Snakes and Earrings became a runaway Japanese bestseller. She lives in Tokyo.