A Quiet Life (Oe, Kenzaburo) - Softcover

Oe, Kenzaburo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802135463 ISBN 13: 9780802135469

Publisher: Grove Press, 1997

Synopsis

A Quiet Life is an uncanny blend of the real with the imagined, of memoir with fiction. A Quiet Life is narrated by Ma-chan, a twenty-year-old woman. Her father is a famous and fascinating novelist; her older brother, though severely brain damaged, possesses an almost magical gift for musical composition; and her mother's life is devoted to the care of them both. Ma-chan and her younger brother find themselves emotionally on the outside of this oddly constructed nuclear family. But when her father accepts a visiting professorship from an American university, Ma-chan finds herself suddenly the head of the household and at the center of family relationships that she must begin to redefine.

About this title

Review:

Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe has produced a quirky, introspective novel that uses autobiographical elements to tell the story of a writer's family and his rediscovery of his place therein. Written in the form of a diary, the story is told from the point of view of Ma-Chan, the daughter of a famous writer (identified only as "K") who has decamped to California as a university writer-in-residence. Ma-Chan is left in charge of her equally famous brother, an idiot savant who composes brilliant classical music. The mentally retarded brother, nicknamed Eeyore, has violent fits, periods of incontinence, and a troubling new sexual awareness. Like Faulkner's Benjy Compson, he is the moral center of the book, a touchstone and a catalyst for the muted events that carry the novel to its unpredictable close. Full of digressions on the cinema, modernist music, and the novels of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Oe's latest novel is a stylized, idiosyncratic confessional that only he could fashion.

About the Author:

Kenzaburo Oe begins a visiting professorship at Princeton University in the fall of 1996.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0802135463
• ISBN 13: 9780802135469
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256