A revealing portrait of a writer who deserves a new audience.
A biography of one of the most celebrated writers of modern Japan.
Novelist Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) is beloved in his homeland but not very well known beyond. Nathan (Japanese Cultural Studies/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Living Carelessly in Tokyo and Elsewhere, 2008, etc.), an Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker, hopes to change that with this comprehensive and discerning biography. Adopted twice as a child, Soseki’s early years were difficult, and Nathan suggests that this contributed to the “misanthropy that darkens his writings.” A bright student, he did well in school and began teaching English after college. In 1900, his success earned him a position to study in England, where he immersed himself in reading all the English writers of the time, especially Henry James. Soseki then replaced the fired American writer Lafcadio Hearn at Tokyo Imperial University and began a prolific writing career. At 38, despite severe physical and mental illness suffered throughout his life, Soseki struck out on his own to fashion a new kind of literature, one that bears comparison to the works of Balzac, Dickens, and Proust in its scope and attention to the human condition. His first novel, I Am a Cat (1904), a “self-lacerating portrait of the author,” was serialized in a newspaper, a common practice in Japan. Nathan argues that this “mordantly comic,” satirical, featuring a cat as narrator, clearly shows the influence of Tristram Shandy. In 1907, The Poppy was serialized in Japan’s largest newspaper, with “a potential audience of 500,000 readers.” Newsboys would press papers into people’s hands and shout, “Soseki’s Poppy in these pages!” The 700-page Light and Dark, his final, unfinished novel, about “urban life among the emergent bourgeoisie on the eve of World War I,” is a “landmark in twentieth-century Japanese fiction.” The book features all-new translations by Nathan.
A revealing portrait of a writer who deserves a new audience.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-231-17142-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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