Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids Audiobook By Kenzaburo Oe, Maki Sugiyama - translator, Paul St. John Mackintosh - translator cover art

Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

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Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

By: Kenzaburo Oe, Maki Sugiyama - translator, Paul St. John Mackintosh - translator
Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
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Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids recounts the exploits of 15 teenage reformatory boys evacuated to a remote mountain village in wartime. The boys are treated as delinquent outcasts - feared and detested by the local peasants. When plague breaks out, their hosts abandon them and flee, blockading them inside the empty village. The boys' brief and doomed attempt to build autonomous lives of self-respect, love, and tribal valour fails in the face of death and the adult nightmare of war.

©1958 Kenzaburo Oe (P)2011 Audible, Inc. Asian Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Literary History & Criticism World Literature

Critic reviews

"An angry, engrossing novel...It is an extraordinary first novel, an amazing achievement for a writer of any age. Myth-like and almost painfully suspenseful, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids has much in common with both Lord of the Flies and The Plague.... His uncompromising honesty is what gives the story its universality and what makes its grim ending such a persuasive warning." ( New York Times)
"Oe is considered by many to be Japan's greatest postwar novelist. It's easy to see why. Here, his writing is crisp and lovely and gruesomely perfect." ( Publishers Weekly)
“Available for the first time in English, this first novel by the winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature is assured an audience both among those who are familiar with Oe's work and eagerly await the translations that will inevitably follow the awarding of the prize and those who are newly aware of Oe as a major literary figure and wish to sample the range of his work.” ( Library Journal)
All stars
Most relevant
very good narration.
the story is very linear, which makes it very easy to follow. I was listening to it during my one hour evening commute on scooter, proud to say I haven't misheard the narrative nor misride the bike.

beautifully read, wonderful translation.

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but lacking the pathos of a dominant central character. It is told from the first person, but we never really connect with this narrator, and thus, a lot of what happens, tragic as it is, remains distant and the reader is not as moved as he might be, were the narrator a bit more real as a person

Well-Written

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There are many books that are this depressing and morbid, but they typically have some message about the strength of the human spirit. This is not one of them. It is merely a wonderfully written story about the degradation of a group of children abandoned to a plague- ridden, deserted village. If you are of fragile emotional health or low constitution, I would advise against this novel.

utterly depressing, but well-written

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Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

an excellent story but depressing

Who was your favorite character and why?

the child who took care of the dog

Which scene was your favorite?

when the main character refused to sell out.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

the killing of the dog

Any additional comments?

this book depressed me and made me lose faith in my fellow human beings.

Depressing

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Overall, this is a solid and well written book. Bleak, but solid.

The first chapter is problematic, and I'm not sure if it's a translation issue or an author issue, but words like "fagged out" feel jarring and wholly out of place. It's also hard to follow until the trip to the village. Give it a chapter or two.

Which raises my second issue with the book. There was a weird, creepy sexual undertone that was inconsistent but kept sneaking in every so often. I say weird and creepy because it didn't seem to fit in the larger context of the book. It couldn't decide what kind of tone it wanted to be. It alternated between homoerotic and homophobic with an healthy underlying dose of implied pedophilia thrown in for good measure.

Don't get me wrong all of those have an arguably valid place in literature, but they didn't fit here --at all. They did absolutely nothing to add to an otherwise solid story nor were they relevant to character development. Rather they felt like the author was either trying to personally work through something, or added in a bit of sexually socking ambiguity because -- you know-- literary fiction is more literary that way.

So 4 but with a huge star-sucking caveat.

Good, but. . .

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