The face of another shows yet kobo abe’s capability in transforming the experience of living in modern time (and also: radically modernized cum capitalized) Japan.
Yeah, people’s saying that capitalistic life makes people alienated is brought to its farthest intrepretation in this pocket-friendly novel. A scientist loses his face due to a chemical accident in his lab. At the beginning, he doesn’t find any trouble with it. But later, as his relation with his wife gets colder and worsens by the day, he decides to invent a man-face looking mask. Things get reasonably easy for him since he’s a scientist and knows the basic laws of chemistry (well, fyi, kobo abe himself was a doctor [who refused to open a clinic], remember?)
At this point, readers will find our narrator in a dilemma since he decides not to make a face-mask resembling other than his very own face. A study of the relation between complexion and character is presented quite elegantly here. And in the name of shockability (:d), I refuse to tell you the whole story, hehehe…
Still more, this book is presented in a quasi-scientific way, but it’s a good teacher for those of you wannabe writers: it teaches us to write a very emotional topic in a controlled pace. Well, if you often hear reviewers judge certain books whose endings are written in a rush, this time you’ll find how a writer can end (and even tell the whole) his/her story very patiently and with a controlled pace (mind the repetition, okay? Its just I can’t help re-typing the three words).
It’s time now to talk about thrillers. As a first-effort in novel writing, the brotherhood of the holy shroud shows Julia Navarro’s agility in making up conflicts and events. Her good command on the structure of this novel shows how, contrary to being first-novel writer, Julia Navarro is not a newbie in literary (or, more precisely, genre literary) reading.
Its structure (by this, i mean making a certain paragraph tell about ancient events and then telling present events in a subsequent chapter, which will be followed by another ancient event—the continuation of the ancient event told two chapters before—and then presenting the conclusion of the book in the last chapter where the answer of the present’s conflict is in the last event in the chain of ancient events) shows how she knows exactly how to make readers’ fingers so badly stuck on the book pages that they wouldn’t leave the book (or even hold it tighter when they go to the john. Hahaha…
Well, for me, a moslem who didn’t know nothing (previously) about the (magical?) history of the holy shroud, this book doesn’t even a bit make me lost in the history of the shroud. I could just enjoy it as an adventure story. As a thriller, it just is, it is!
I just feel that this very novel of Yukio Mishima is quite different from his other works. While the others, in my opinion, pensively tell gloomy brains of adults, this small and cute novel tells about the multi-layered thoughts of naively serious young kid.
The kid sees his mother sleeping with a sailor a few times and breaks his heart. Is he jealous because someone ’steals’ his mom? No. To him, a sailor is an ideal being on earth, and seeing a sailor sleeping with his mom and later deciding to get married with her, and therefore planning to stay away from the sea, the grand symbol of freedom, this kid–oh sorry I forgot to tell you, his name is Noboru–feels displeased.
So distressed as noboru might be, he and his gang planned to do some harm to the sailor. like what? In the name of shockability, I hold myself from telling it.
The point is, this time, Mishima is quite different from the mishima of the tetralogy the sea of fertility. He’s just being different, and difference, in this case, is not bad, indeed.
Besides being productive, James Patterson is among the breakthrough-going thrillists. Up to this day, he has produced not less than 30 novels most of which are his own thinking and typing and some of which are written in collaboration with other writers. For the women’s murder club, especially, he has worked with andrew gross and maxine paetro. hey, don’t forget those cool sequence-titling: 1st to die, 2nd chance, 3rd degree, and the newest one, which i’m gonna review in no time, 4th of july. well, those names are cliches, but James puts greatest efforts to come up with the thrilling contents.
4th of July tells about a female lieutenant, Lindsay Boxer, who has a new case now. there’ve been two murders in town. Both the victims are teenagers. they’re whipped at the bottom and slashed to death. she solves the problem with her friend, Jacobi. They find the black sedan suspected to be the murderer’s car. There’s a hollywood (scripted)scene with a police car and a bad guy’s car roaming the busy street of san fransisco before it ends with a crash. Later, we’ll find that the driver of this car got a fatal accident from boxer’s shot and sues back. a trial follows. Boxer gets a leave and live for some moment in her sister’s house in half moon bay where, again, she’s faced to a chain murder with similar signanture—whipping and slashing.
All in all, this book shows James’ mastery in thrilling people. The language is very fluid and the plot is far-from-boring: what else can excite people than a story with branched plot, there’re two cases, the chain murder and boxer’s fight at the trial. You’ll find your fingers stuck to the book, and your eyes get charmed by the chain of freshly colloquial dialogue that James, i believe, has bleed to devise.
When we hear about The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, there surely will flash in our mind the image of a bugman, a bug as big as an adult. yeah, that’s first, especially for those who have never read it but have many times heard people touching on it in literary essays and all. The Metamorphosis will surely sound x-menly to them. But if you have read it, you’ll find something way more reflective than an x-men world.
Yeah, The Metamorphosis is a gloomy kind of novella. It begins with a marvel-comic-like-for-us-in-this-age scene, a man waking up to find that he has transformed into a vermin. As the pages get turned, you’ll find a gloomy, grey-dominated world of industrialization era. It’s set in a world where people begin to be alienated by their day job. Responsibility, money, family’s welfare are all in people’s thought. There’s no more time for fun, for quality time with family, and all.and the protagonist of this novel, the newly-verminized gregor samsa, is the observing agent. Through his transformation, and thus his isolation a.k.a. ostracism, he has more time to ponder about his surrounding. with gregor’s isolation he becomes someone who can enjoy himself. And his family, who has depended on him as the breadwinner, and has been passive people with unexplored energy and skills, now turns into a group of people who would bleed themselves to take the most advantage of themselves for the sake of family.Yeah, that’s it. That’s what to expect when you read the metamorphosis. It’s far from scientific fiction. It’s novel of wisdom clad in a unique story.
