Inoue writes with remarkable clarity and disarming simplicity about feelings and concepts usually too intricate and...
This newly translated volume includes the novella of the title plus two midlength stories by Inoue (The Hunting Gun, 2014, etc.), a major Japanese author less known in the U.S.
In 1942, the novella's narrator, a journalist, was hired by the family of recently deceased artist Onuki Keigaku to write his biography, but the war intervened, and 10 years later, the book remains unfinished. As the narrator begins to refocus on his work, the true subject becomes not the famous painter but his former friend Shinozaki, who made his living counterfeiting Keigaku’s work under the name Hara Hosen. After reading Shinozaki’s name in the famous artist’s diary, he remembers his own random encounters with the forger’s work and stories he has heard from Keigaku’s son and others about Hosen/Shinozaki, who spent his last years making artistic fireworks he was too busy to enjoy. The narrator finds himself struck by the coincidental intersections between his and Hosen/Shinozaki’s lives and ultimately finds the counterfeiter’s failed life represents “the peculiar sadness of our karma.” In “Reeds,” the same narrator re-examines fragmentary childhood memories, each fraught with undefined emotion. His most developed memory concerns riding in a boat with a young couple who were making love. Even after learning the woman’s possible identity, the narrator is not sure what really happened, although “as times goes by, this supposition is slowly being transformed in my heart into a matter of unquestionable fact.” The unreliability of memory and perception also lies at the heart of “Mr. Goodall’s Gloves,” which takes place in postwar Nagasaki and revolves around a character introduced in “Reeds”: Grandma Kano, who raised the narrator through elementary school and was actually not his relative but his great-grandfather’s mistress. The narrator’s ruminations on his life and relationships add up to a new appreciation of memory, however flawed, as “sacred.”
Inoue writes with remarkable clarity and disarming simplicity about feelings and concepts usually too intricate and ambiguous to pin down.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78227-002-7
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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