3.5
A Personal Matter
ByPublisher Description
Internationally acclaimed as one of the world's most influential writers, Kenzaburō Ōe brings to the fore the post-WWII rage and anxiety of a decorous society in this "deathly black comedy . . . dripping with nuclear terror" (
).
Bird is an antisocial twenty-seven-year-old intellectual hanging on to a failing marriage with whiskey. He dreams of going to Africa where the sky sprawls with possibilities. Then, as though walloped by a massive invisible fist, Bird's Utopian fantasies are shattered when his wife gives birth to what he calls their "monster baby." Now, Bird is left with one question: How can he and his wife spend the rest of their lives with this damaged thing clinging to their backs?
As shameful, disgraceful, and unthinkable a desire as it is, Bird has an answer. Not sealed. Not just yet. Not before Bird flees on a bender of indiscriminate (and frustratingly impotent) sex, hard liquor, self-delusion, and most terrifying of all—self-discovery.
"Very close to a perfect contemporary novel." —
"An astonishing novel." —
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesA Personal Matter Reviews
3.5
“I found The Silent Cry (Football in the First Year of Man'nen) to be more compelling than this semi-autobiographical work. There's a twisted fairy-tale quality to Ooe's prose and characters that in my opinion worked better with a more mythical story. That said, Football's translation read as clunky to me and I finished that book wanting to reread it in Japanese. John Nathan's translation of A Personal Matter was masterful. Very rarely do I come across a translation from Japanese that isn't immediately apparent as such, but I felt that I got a glimpse of the beauty that won Ooe the Nobel Prize for Literature in this translation.”
BelievableChange and growMorally ambiguousMultilayeredStrong relationshipsUnforgettable protagonistAddictiveSatisfying conclusionSlow start, strong finishSuspensefulAtmosphericBleakEvocative imageryHarshRealisticVivid descriptionsDescriptiveTakes getting used toAbleismBigotryExplicit sexual contentHomophobiaMisogynySexual assaultSubstance abuse
About Kenzaburo Oe
Kenzaburo Oe was born in 1935 in the remote mountain village of Ose on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands. Oe is considered one of the most dynamic and revolutionary writers to have emerged in Japan since World War II, and is acknowledged as the first truly modern Japanese writer. Oe is known for his powerful accounts of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and his struggle to come to terms with a mentally handicapped son. His dark musings on moral failure came to symbolize an alienated generation in postwar Japan. Oe's influences and literary heroes are less Japanese than American and European, ranging from Henry Miller to Jean-Paul Sartre, from Blake to Camus. In 1960, Oe traveled to China where he met Mao Zedong, and the following year he traveled Paris where he met one of his influences, Jean-Paul Sartre. His prolific body of work has won almost every major international honor, including the 1989 Prix Europalia and the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature. His many translated works include
(1964),
(1969),
(1967),
(1965), and
(1958).
Other books by Kenzaburo Oe
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