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(3 in 1) A Personal Matter, The Silent Cry, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness
A Personal Matter The Silent Cry Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness - 3 in 1 Author:Kenzaburo Oe Kenzaburo Oe, awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in literature, is in a real sense Japan's first modern writer, both in the sense of having come of age in the postwar era, and also in the sense of dealing with contemporary, and deeply personal, issues in a direct and sometimes violent way uncharacteristic of most Japanese writing even today. Unlike ea... more »rlier Japanese novelists who took European authors as their models, Oe considers Huckleberry Finn to be his inspiration. Twain's novel, which Oe first read as a child, has colored his imagination ever since, and his subsequent encounters with radical political movements and French Existentialism only intensify Oe's identification with Huck's individualism, his willingness to defy society even at the price of damnation. Oe's personal commitment to individual action is evident in his work, and contributes to its power even in translation.
From his most famous story, "Prize Stock" -- about a country boy's involvement with a black airman taken prisoner by townspeople after his plane crashes -- to his extraordinary novel A Personal Matter, written after the birth of his autistic son, to The Silent Cry, with its almost Dostoyevskyan account of the troubled relationship between two brothers in a rural village, Oe's writing centers on how an individual deals with life on his own terms. The resulting confrontation is often self-destructive, even tragic, but the theme, like all the works in this collection, is eloquently, powerfully, universal.« less