Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Oe reads and writes...with a grace that comes not through religion but through imagination and understanding." Heller McAlpin, San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"Oe's Dostoyevskian themes should fill his story with thunder, but the pace is slow, and Patron doesn't have the depth of a Myshkin or a Karamazov he seems anything but charismatic....Oe has attempted to create a sprawling masterpiece, but American readers might decide there's more sprawl than masterpiece here." Publishers Weekly
Review
"A power story about fanaticism and faith....[Somersault] shows a Nobel master at work in a huge new novel that takes on great themes and does so in a persuasive...fashion....Giants still do stride around. And Kenzaburo Oe is one of them." Alan Cheuse, The Chicago Tribune
Review
"Although Oe's usual literary and sexual interests rewardingly figure into the massive novel, many may feel that it consists more of contrived melodrama than Oe's customary profound psychodrama." Ray Olson, Booklist
Review
"Everything, it seems, is here: religion, art, sex (straight and gay), terrorism, the fate of the Earth, even close analysis of Welsh poetry." Stephen Mitchelmore, The Washington Post
Review
"An intriguing but enormously overinflated 1999 novel....Patron's interminable 'sermons' articulating his cults' history and aims...[drain] the life out of the narrative. Other characters, too, talk much more than they act....Oe is a deeply flawed great writer, and Somersault, alas, is not one of his triumphs." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Ambitious....Perhaps the best-known living Japanese writer, Oe offers an invaluable vision of post-War Japan. Gone are sake, sushi, the Shinto shrine, haiku and Mt. Fuji. Instead we find beer-and-whisky, ham-and-eggs, future shock, repetition and the superstore....A timely [read]." Kenneth Champeon, BookPage
Review
"This hefty work...reads like a social/spiritual/religious commentary....Oe delves deeply into the psyche of his characters....This highly literate piece is not likely to hold the interest of the casual reader browsing the new book section." Library Journal
Review
"Intricate and intriguing....A work of creative philosophy in the Kierkegaardian tradition....A provocative exploration of spiritual emptiness and religious yearning by one of the worlds most important authors." Kay Chubbuck, The New York Sun
Review
"Oe's prose has always had an intentional roughness, but here the characters speak like robots and move as if they had screws for joints....Oe explores the struggle of contemporary Japanese to situate themselves between a traditional culture and the bullet-train pace of the boom years, but this dynamic is lost amid exhaustive explanations of the new church's dogma." The New Yorker
Synopsis
In the first new novel Oe has published since winning the Nobel Prize, he makes an immense departure from the autobiographical fiction he is most known for, in a magnificent story of the charisma of leaders, the danger of zealotry, and the mystery of faith.