Beauty and Sadness, Yasunari Kawabata - Book Review
Вставка
- Опубліковано 3 лип 2024
- Highly recommend this one, especially if you are curious about Japanese literature and don't know where to get started, this is the perfect book!
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0:00 - Intro
0:58 - Plot Synopsis
3:55 - small spoiler warning
4:20 - Japanese literature
5:45 - Kawabata Yasunari
Omg I think I need this one! You also mentioned Russian books and a good part of my 6 shelves are Russian classics. I’ve not read a lot of Japanese literature except Endo. This one here sounds interesting!
Hello Nikki, Nice to hear from you again! I think this is a great place to start if you just want to start with something easy to read, not very long, but still has a complex story with some deep impact on the characters.
I've been keeping my distance from those Russian novels recently, I'm not sure why.
Hope you are well. Let me know what you think of Kawabata when you get round to it!
I love this novel,. my favorite Kawabata. I love his oblique prose and how in a rather melancholic meditation on love & aging there's a gnarly noir thriller about a disturbed young woman seeking revenge for an ideal only she understands.
Hello Tim, Yeah, this very short novel is really full of some amazing twists and turns. I think this is the one that really made me a lover of Japanese literature. There is something so magically subtle in Japanese writing, I think they must have some of the most amazing translators.
Donald Keane translated both Kawabata & Mishima and a book called the Prose Poem in Japan that I really dug. I discovered Kawabata more recently than Mishima, I love how an interior emotional states are described alongside an observation about plum trees or some other visual. This book especially captured me. @@grantlovesbooks
Keiko is not getting revenge "for what he did to her" (4:04 approx) but for what he, Oki, did to Otoko.
That's what I meant, I guess it wasn't so clear. I suppose that can be confusing for anyone who hasn't read the book. Hopefully people won't remember that when they have the book in their hands. I've got to be a bit more careful with my editing. Sometimes those little things slip by me. Thanks for pointing it out.
On the TBR list. Though I'll probably read it in Swedish.
You might as well, since it comes from Japanese. I do have to say that the English translation is excellent. Just the first page alone really captured my attention immediately.
@@grantlovesbooks A few of the Kawabata books that have been translated into Swedish were translated from German or English and not from the original Japanese. In those cases I would rather read the German or English version, tbh.