Fracture
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Critically acclaimed, prize-winning author Andrés Neuman’s Fracture is an ambitious literary novel set against Japan’s 2011 nuclear accident in a cross-cultural story about how every society remembers and forgets its catastrophes.
Mr. Yoshie Watanabe, a former electronics company executive and a survivor of the atomic bomb, has always lived like a fugitive from his own memories. He’s spent decades traveling the world, making a life in different languages, only to find himself home again, living in Tokyo in his old age. On the afternoon of March 11, 2011, Watanabe, like millions of others, is stunned by powerful tremors. A massive earthquake has struck to the north, triggering the Fukushima nuclear disaster—and a stirring of the collective past. As the catastrophe unfolds, Watanabe’s mind, too, undergoes a tectonic shift. With his native land yet again under nuclear threat, he braces himself to make the most surprising decision of his nomadic life.
Meanwhile, four women who have known him intimately at various points in time narrate their stories to a strangely obsessive Argentinian journalist. Their memories, colored by their respective cultures and describing different ways of loving, trace sociopolitical maps of Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, and Madrid over the course of the twentieth century. The result is a metalingual, border-defying constellation of fractures in life and nature—proof that nothing happens in only one place, that every human event reverberates to the ends of the earth.
With unwavering empathy and bittersweet humor, and facing some of the most urgent environmental concerns of our time, Andrés Neuman’s Fracture is a powerful novel about the resilience of humankind, and the beauty that can emerge from broken things.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The stirring latest from Neuman (Traveler of the Century) opens just before an earthquake sparks the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster on Japan's east coast. Retiree Yoshie Watanabe, a survivor of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings that killed his family during WWII, watches in relative safety from his Tokyo neighborhood as the coastline braces for nuclear fallout. Yoshie, a former electronics executive, has lived in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires, and Madrid during his career, and in alternating chapters, Neuman fills in his protagonist's history via first-person recollections by Yoshie's past lovers. These stories occasionally pale in comparison to the immediacy of the 2011 narrative, as Yoshie travels to areas affected by the disaster, where he wrestles with the loss he carries from the atomic bombings and realizes that all the past phases of his life were ways to "shed his skin" and escape "from a previous somewhere." Now, Yoshie reflects on the odd symmetry between the aftermath of the atomic bombings and the current disaster. Neuman slowly builds meaning in the book's recursive structure and language ("he repeats silently the formula, part arithmetic, part nightmare, that hundreds of millions of people all over the planet have had to learn"). This weighty meditation on human interconnection is well worth a look.
