bookshelf

SOSEKI

Name: SOSEKI
Author: John Nathan
ISBN: 978-0-231-17142-7

MODERN JAPAN'S GREATEST NOVELIST

by John Nathan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 2018

A revealing portrait of a writer who deserves a new audience.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | WORLD

- BOOK REVIEW
A BINTEL BRIF
by John Nathan

- BOOK REVIEW
LIVING CARELESSLY IN TOKYO AND ELSEWHERE
by John Nathan

- BOOK REVIEW
JAPAN UNBOUND
by John Nathan

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

bookshelf

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)