Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! - Softcover

Oe, Kenzaburo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080213968X ISBN 13: 9780802139689

Publisher: Grove Press, 2003

Synopsis

Wise and illuminating, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is a masterpiece from one of the world's finest writers, Kenzaburo Oe -- winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. K is a famous writer living in Tokyo with his wife and three children, one of whom is mentally disabled. K's wife confronts him with the information that this child, Eeyore, has been doing disturbing things -- behaving aggressively, asserting that he's dead, even brandishing a knife at his mother -- and K, given to retreating from reality into abstraction, looks for answers in his lifelong love of William Blake's poetry. As K struggles to understand his family and assess his responsibilities within it, he must also reevaluate himself -- his relationship with his own father, the political stances he has taken, the duty of artists and writers in society. A remarkable portrait of the inexpressible bond between this father and his damaged son, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! is the work of an unparalleled writer at his sparkling best.

About this title

About the Author:

Kenzaburo Oe was born in 1935 in the remote mountain village of Ose on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands. Oe is considered one of the most dynamic and revolutionary writers to have emerged in Japan since World War II, and is acknowledged as the first truly modern Japanese writer. Oe is known for his powerful accounts of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and his struggle to come to terms with a mentally handicapped son. His dark musings on moral failure came to symbolize an alienated generation in postwar Japan. Oe's influences and literary heroes are less Japanese than American and European, ranging from Henry Miller to Jean-Paul Sartre, from Blake to Camus. His prolific body of work has won almost every major international honor, including the 1989 Prix Europalia and the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature. His many translated works include A Personal Matter, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness, The Silent Cry, Hiroshima Notes, and Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids.

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
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About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 080213968X
• ISBN 13: 9780802139689
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272