|
|
The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
|
You are here:
Home > Sports Books > Diving > Item
|
The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
|
by Yoko Ogawa and Stephen Snyder
Sales Rank : 244308
|
|
|
|
Paperback: 176 pages
Publisher: Picador; 1st edition January 22, 2008
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312426836
ISBN-13: 978-0312426835
Product Dimensions:
8.2 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
In this first book-length translation into English, Japanese author Ogawa's three polished tales demonstrate her knack for a crafty, suspenseful hook. Each is narrated in the listless, emotionally remote voice of a young woman, such as the high schooler of the title story whose infatuation with her foster brother, Jun, prompts her to obsessively observe his diving practice. As the daughter of religious parents who run an orphanage, Aya feels alienated from the workings of the so-called Light House and finds an outlet for her frustration in romantic fantasy about Jun as well as in tormenting—shockingly—an orphan baby. The underhandedly creepy Dormitory is narrated by a Tokyo wife who begins nursing the ailing, armless one-legged manager at her old college dormitory. The manager's increasingly alarming tale of love for one of the renters, now vanished, enthralls the wife. Pregnancy Diary offers a bit of levity, narrated by a young unmarried woman whose rage toward her pregnant sister take the form of cooking her grapefruit jam prepared from fruit treated with a chromosome-altering chemical. Ogawa's tales possess a gnawing, erotic edge. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post
These three quiet novellas, composing the first of Yoko Ogawa's books to be translated into English, share an eerie quality of nightmare, the precarious sense that beauty and distress are equally possible at any moment. Ogawa's fiction reflects like a funhouse mirror, skewing conventional responses, juxtaposing images weirdly. Depending on the viewer, it can induce wonder or a vague nausea.
In the title story, teenaged Aya is the only non-orphan in residence at the Light House, an orphanage run by her minister father. "I can never hear the words 'family' and 'home' without feeling that they sound strange, never simply hear them and let them go," she muses. Aya craves the freedom and purity epitomized by her foster brother, Jun, whom she watches obsessively at diving practice; and yet she is shockingly cruel to Rie, a toddler new to the Light House. Ogawa places the sublime alongside the repulsive, as if to prove how little may lie between them.
The single woman who narrates "Pregnancy Diary," winner of Japan's prestigious Akutagawa Award, is another remote observer, somehow detached from normal human interaction. Her sister is pregnant, but as the pregnancy progresses, the aunt-to-be feels not excitement but disgust: "Her whole body is swelling before my eyes," she thinks, "like a giant tumor." Discovering that her sister adores grapefruit jam, she makes it by the vat, while pondering recent reports of toxic pesticides used in citrus production. Suffused with ambiguity, the story is structured as a diary, which reduces nine months to a series of disconnected moments, the writer's attention repeatedly hooked by odd preoccupations: egg yolk dripping from a fork "like yellow blood," or the resemblance of her sister's chewing lips to "the thighs of a sprinter."
Though "Dormitory" follows a clearer narrative arc than the other two, it is also the most uninhibitedly bizarre. A young wife revisits her college dormitory, run by a courtly triple amputee. The crumbling building seems to pulse with a strange force, "a warm, rhythmic presence that seeped quietly into my skin." Returning repeatedly to care for the ailing Manager, she is transfixed by his account of a beloved student who has disappeared. Ogawa lets the story veer toward a conventionally sinister explanation, then swerves suddenly toward the outré.
Like her better known compatriot Haruki Murakami, Ogawa writes stories that float free of any specific culture, anchoring themselves instead in the landscape of the mind. Her hallucinatory, oddly barbed stories snag the imagination, and linger.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
|
|
|
|
