Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age: A Novel - Hardcover

Kenzaburo Oe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802117104 ISBN 13: 9780802117106

Publisher: Grove Pr, 2002

Synopsis

K, a renowned writer living in Tokyo who often retreats from reality, must come to terms with his mentally disabled son Eeyore, his family, his relationship with his own father, his own political beliefs, and his responsibility as an artist and writer insociety.

About this title

About the Author

Kenzaburo Oe has won the Prix Europalia and the Nobel Prize for Literature, among many other awards. His translated works include Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, A Quiet Life, Hiroshima Notes and A Personal Matter. He lives in Tokyo with his wife and three children

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Each of the seven chapters of Oe's 1986 novel, here translated into English for the first time, is entitled with a phrase from William Blake, beginning with "Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience" and concluding with the triumphant phrase that the last chapter shares with the entire book, a commandment from Blake's prophetic poem Milton that in this context announces the resolution of the family and fatherly crisis with which the novel begins. As in many Oe novels, the family here is his, and he is the father. Returning from weeks in Europe speaking against nuclear weapons and for peace, as Oe in fact does, the father encounters a tense household. Seemingly convinced that his father is dead, the brain-damaged elder son has been intractable and even violent. The large and perforce powerful 19-year-old remains agitated even when the father stands before him. At last, the family grasps that the son, whom they call Eeyore, has been terrified by his first realization that his father will die. This powerful opening, which coincides with the father's beginning to reread Blake, launches weeks of study, recollection, and everyday domesticity that Oe portrays as constituting a web of mutually reinforcing meanings. The father's interpretations of Blake and examinations of the past, including episodes from his World War II childhood and early university days as well as the more recent deaths of friends, enable him to understand Eeyore's crisis and its resolution as the work of the ultimately redemptive human imagination. On the one hand an intellectual treatise and on the other a moving family memoir, this is Nobel laureate Oe at his best. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Pr
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0802117104
• ISBN 13: 9780802117106
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240