| Seasons of Sacred Lust Contributor(s): Shiraishi, Kazuko (Author) |
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ISBN: 0811206785 ISBN-13: 9780811206785 Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation OUR PRICE: $11.66 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: January 1978 Annotation: The Melancholy of Resistance, Laszlo Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumors. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find -- music, cosmology, fascism. The novel's characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender center of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found. Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, "is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type." And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of The Guardian, lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds." |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Poetry | Asian - Japanese |
| Dewey: 895.615 |
| LCCN: 77014936 |
| Physical Information: 0.3" H x 5.29" W x 7.98" (0.25 lbs) 86 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Asian |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Seasons of Sacred Lust is Kazuko Shiraishi's challenge to the conventions of Japanese erotic poetry. Born in Vancouver, Canada, Shiraishi was taken to Japan by her family just prior to World War II, and her first poetry (written at age seventeen, published at twenty) emerged from the violence and ugliness of postwar Tokyo. Her earliest work, associated with the avant-garde magazine Vou, shows her talent for vivid, bizarre, almost surrealistic imagery. Her later writing, coming out of her deepening involvement in the world of modern jazz and her increasing emphasis on the performance of her poetry, dramatizes a society of estrangement and alienation where music and poetry provide the only values, and sex the only solace, in a disintegrating world. This selection is translated by a group of Japanese and American poets: Iluko Atsumi, John Solt, Carol Tinker, Yasuyo Morita, and Kenneth Rexroth who provided an informative, perceptive introduction. |
Contributor Bio(s): Shiraishi, Kazuko: - Kazuko Shiraishi has received the Purple Ribbon Medal from the Emperor of Japan, the prestigious Yomiuri Literary Prize (twice), for her thirty books of poetry. |