Sign-In
Cart
Death by Water
Paperback
General FictionHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $20.00
ISBN13: 9780802125538
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: Oct 4 2016
Pages: 432
Weight: 0.95
Height: 1.30 Width: 5.60 Depth: 8.20
Language: English
Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe's pensive novel, at once autobiographical and philosophical is a finely woven masterpiece about a writer who searches for the truth behind his father's death and discovers a new family legacy to impart to his own son. (Kirkus Reviews)
Kenzaburo Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for creating an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today. In Death by Water, his recurring protagonist and literary alter-ego returns to his hometown village in search of a red suitcase rumored to hold documents revealing the details of his father's death during World War II, details that will serve as the foundation for his new, and final, novel.
Since his youth, renowned novelist Kogito Choko planned to fictionalize his father's fatal drowning in order to fully process the loss. Stricken with guilt and regret over his failure to rescue his father, Choko has long been driven to discover why his father was boating on the river in a torrential storm. Though he remembers overhearing his father and a group of soldiers discussing an insurgent scheme to stage a suicide attack on Emperor Mikado, Choko cannot separate his memories from imagination and his family is hesitant to reveal the entire story. When the contents of the trunk turn out to offer little clarity, Choko abandons the novel in creative despair. Floundering as an artist, he's haunted by fear that he may never write his tour de force. But when he collaborates with an avant-garde theater troupe dramatizing his early novels, Choko is revitalized by revisiting his formative work and he finds the will to continue investigating his father's demise.
Diving into the turbulent depths of legacy and mortality, Death by Water is an exquisite examination of resurfacing national and personal trauma, and the ways that storytelling can mend political, social, and familial rifts.
1 different editions
Also available
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales Vol. 1 (Loa #26): The Pioneers / The Last of the Mohicans / The Prairie
Cooper, James Fenimore
Hardcover
The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I: American Tabloid, the Cold Six Thousand; Introduction by Thomas Mallon
Ellroy, James
Hardcover
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback