Oe's (The Silent Cry, 1975, etc.) first new book since his 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature is a slender memoir returning to a familiar subject, his brain-injured son. The novelist has written about his first son Hikari's development on several occasions, in short stories, novels, and essays. Clearly, the experience of having a handicapped child is one that has marked his creative development, although that aspect of his life is covered only obliquely in this collection of essays about Hikari and the rest of the Oe family. The book's title carries a double meaning, repeatedly restated throughout its 15 essays (and in an afterword by Oe's wife, Yukari, who also provides the delicate line drawings at the head of each chapter). The Oe family has undergone a process of healing, achieving an acceptance of Hikari's limitations and a willingness, even eagerness, to let him test their boundaries. At the same time, their life with Hikari has left them better equipped to extend themselves to one another, to be a family that heals. This is nowhere more apparent than in Oe's many references to the strains caused by the presence of his 90-year-old mother-in-law, frail and quite senile, in the family home. Today Hikari is in his 30s, a serious and well-regarded composer of chamber music. Music, Oe says, has long provided Hikari's primary means of communication with an outside world that he often finds baffling. It is his music that occasions the book's most triumphant and moving moments, a musical tour of Europe in which Hikari gets to hear and meet many great European musicians in person. Oe's treatment of his family's struggle is always frank and shines with the quiet, unassuming intelligence and decency that has consistently been at the heart of his work. A lovely book, low-key, avoiding easy sentimentality, honest to a fault. (First printing of 50,000)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 4-7700-2048-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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