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DANDELIONS

Name: DANDELIONS
Author: Yasunari Kawabata
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2409-3

by Yasunari Kawabata ; translated by Michael Emmerich ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 12, 2017

World literature lost a fine voice with Kawabata’s death, to which this elegantly puzzling work stands as testimonial.

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Pensive last novel by Kawabata, unfinished at the time of the author’s 1972 suicide but still capable of standing on its own.

Flowers, bells, wounded trees: the natural and human worlds meet and mingle in this slender, sharply honed narrative. The title is also the first word: “Dandelions cover the banks of Ikuta River.” A renga could grow from that lyrical line, which instead sets the scene for the jolting follow-on: the river and the town that lies alongside it may be placid and lovely, but it is also the site of an asylum to which Kizaki Ineko has been exiled. Her illness, somagnosia, is the inability to perceive the bodies of others. The condition, naturally, affects her ability to relate to others as well: the fellow asylum inmate who writes, calligraphically, “To enter the Buddha world is easy; to enter the world of demons is difficult,” is to her simply a floating brush, while her boyfriend, Kuno, is a specter. Much of the novel is given over to back and forth between Ineko and her mother, who rather unhelpfully is a repository of oddments about Ineko and her condition, including the tragic story of a somagnosic mother who murdered her baby: “How is that possible? To be unable to see your own baby’s head, to wring a neck that isn’t even visible to you.” An extended metaphor about social distance and loneliness seems to be at play, but so, too, is Ineko’s quest for meaning, the origins of her illness unfolding in a tragedy involving her father. “Perhaps the origins of philosophy are there,” she says wisely, “in that period when infants start to become aware of their surroundings, when they start to see, to remember words.” Why she has chosen not to see may be a mystery, but then so is much about this enigmatic story.

World literature lost a fine voice with Kawabata’s death, to which this elegantly puzzling work stands as testimonial.

Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-8112-2409-3

Page Count: 128

Publisher: New Directions

Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FIRST SNOW ON FUJI
by Yasunari Kawabata & translated by Michael Emmerich

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.

Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946

ISBN: 0452277507

Page Count: 114

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
GEORGE ORWELL
by George Orwell ; edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
DIARIES
by George Orwell & edited by Peter Davison

- BOOK REVIEW
ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA
by George Orwell

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.