Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe, John Nathan

From the Publisher

A Personal Matter is the story of Bird, a frustrated intellectual in a failing marriage whose utopian dream is shattered when his wife gives birth to a brain-damaged child.

Life

"Oe Writes like a new American realist.... His prose is as direct and frank as an ice pick."

The New Yorker

"Oe's themes of abnormality, sexuality, and marginality are outside the tradition of Japanese equipoise... His work has a gritty, grotesque quality, which makes him seem more akin to Mailer, Grass, or Roth than to many Japanese novelist."

What People Are Saying

Masao Miyoshi
Without doubt Oe's awesome learning, frightening memory, complex ideas, unbridled imagination, resiliant political will, and indiscriminate modesty tempered by absolute self-assurance make him the most formidable figure in the literary world of Japan today.

Kazuo Ishiguro
In Oe's books, everything has a peculiar sense of humor that is always on the verge of tragedy -- a very dark humor.

Masao Miyoshi
"Without doubt Oe's awesome learning, frightening memory, complex ideas, unbridled imagination, resilient political will, and indiscriminate modesty tempered by absolute self-assurance make him the most formidable figure in the literary world of Japan now." -- Masao Miyoshi, author of Off Center: Power and Culture Relations between Japan and the United States

Kazuo Ishiguro
"In Oe's books, everything has a peculiar sense of humor that is always on the verge of tragedy - a very dark humor." -- Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day

Details from Seller

• ISBN: 0802150616
• Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
• Pub. Date: January 1994
• Condition:

Comments from the Seller: New York, New York, U.S.A. 1994 Trade Paperback Near-Fine 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. Near-fine condition. NO remainder marks or clippings. Tight spine, bright pages. NO writing, marks or tears inside book. 165 pages. Winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature. Synopsis Oe's most important novel, A Personal Matter, has been called by The New York Times close to a perfect novel. In A Personal Matter, Oe has chosen a difficult, complex though universal subject: how does one face and react to the birth of an abnormal child? Bird, the protagonist, is a young man of 27 with antisocial tendencies who more than once in his life, when confronted with a critical problem, has cast himself adrift on a sea of whisky like a besotted Robinson Crusoe. But he has never faced a crisis as personal or grave as the prospect of life imprisonment in the cage of his newborn infant-monster. Should he keep it? Dare he kill it? Before he makes his final decision, Bird's entire past seems to rise up before him, revealing itself to be