Dandelions
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- €6.99
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- €6.99
Publisher Description
The exquisite last novel from Nobel Prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata
Ineko has lost the ability to see things. At first it was a ping-pong ball, then it was her fiancé. The doctors call it 'body blindness', and she is placed in a psychiatric clinic to recover. As Ineko's mother and fiancé walk along the riverbank after visiting time, they wonder: is her condition a form of madness - or an expression of love? Exploring the distance between us, and what we say without words, Kawabata's transcendent final novel is the last word from a master of Japanese literature.
'Lusciously peculiar' Paris Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As much a philosophical dialogue as a work of fiction, this final, unfinished novel by the Nobel laureate Kawabata (1899 1972) is a gentle study of madness. Suffering from a condition called somagnosia that makes her unable to see the bodies of others, Ineko is committed to a provincial asylum described as "a pool where all the toxins of the human heart accumulate." Though both her mother and her lover, Kuno, trace Ineko's condition to her having witnessed her father's death, they cannot agree on a deeper reason for her suffering. Kuno ascribes the tragedy to fate, while Ineko's mother wonders whether "each of us carries inside of us the potential for madness." The pair talk in circles that draw them into an enchanting, if foreboding, past: Ineko's mother recalls her daughter being the type of child who "felt sorry for fallen flowers." Though Kawabata's vision for this novel was never fully realized, the beauty and wisdom seeping out of every sentence still infuse it with enormous emotional potency. As Kuno finally settles down to sleep, he asks Ineko's mother, "Life goes on, from a child to the child's child, but for how long?" In the case of the characters captured here, not nearly long enough.
