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
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A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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BOOK REVIEW
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