A Personal Matter

By: Kenzaburo Oe, John Nathan - translator

Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer

Length: 7 hrs and 9 mins

Publisher's summary

Nobel Prize winner Oe's most important novel, A Personal Matter, has been called by The New York Times "close to a perfect novel". In A Personal Matter, Oe has chosen a difficult, complex though universal subject: how does one face and react to the birth of an abnormal child? Bird, the protagonist, is a young man of 27 with antisocial tendencies who, more than once in his life, when confronted with a critical problem, has cast himself adrift on a sea of whisky like a besotted Robinson Crusoe. But he has never faced a crisis as personal or grave as the prospect of life imprisonment in the cage of his newborn infant-monster. Should he keep it? Dare he kill it?

Before he makes his final decision, Bird's entire past seems to rise up before him, revealing itself to be a nightmare of self-deceit. The relentless honesty with which Oe portrays his hero or antihero makes Bird one of the most unforgettable characters in recent fiction.

©1964 Kenzaburo Oe (P)2011 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Oe's themes of abnormality, sexuality, and marginality are outside the tradition of Japanese equipose.... His work has a gritty, grotesque quality, which makes him seem more akin to Mailer, Grass, or Roth than to many Japanese novelists." ( The New Yorker)

Should have been better

(Slight spoiler below)

Everything the reviews on the product page say is true, so I won't repeat that the novel has more of an American "feel" than a Japanese one, etc. The key, to me, is in the quote from the New York Times calling this "a close to perfect novel". Why not perfect? Well, most of the book is indeed very good (though it was probably more shocking when first written than it is today). It is the story of a selfish, immature man who can't face the birth of his deformed son and just wants the baby to die. The character is well drawn, and his fear, anxiety and escapism are heart-wrenchingly realistic. But then comes the final chapter which to me felt tacked on. The ending is so optimistic, such a "happy ending" that I found it unbelievable, basically "and then he grew up and did the right thing and everything was Very Good." I felt cheated. That said, cut off this last chapter and I would have given the story five stars. As it is, I don't think I'd recommend it -- it's certainly not bad, but it should have been better.

The narrator, Eric Michael Summerer, does an excellent job.

Overwhelming

Seguramente será un clásico de la literatura universal. La búsqueda de los oscuros recovecos del yo genera una arrolladora vorágine de sentimientos y sensaciones. Desde lo más primitivo en la profundidad del sexo hasta lo más elaborado del pensamiento del filicida. No apto para suicidas, melodramáticos o tibios.

Brutally Powerful...

semi-autobiographical novel about the mental anguish of discovering one's child is mentally challenged. An amazing tour de force

Huh?

Is Kenzaburo Oe's real name Fyodor Kafka? I wish I had tons of smart friends with PhDs in literature and English so they could tell me that I'm either stupid or accurate. When it comes to these types of celebrated works (Dostoevsky's Karamazov, Kafka's Metamorphosis and The Trial, and even Citizen Kane in film), I ask myself what I'm missing. Perhaps these works were remarkable in how innovative they were at the time of publication or release?

There must be other gratuitous cr*p out there portraying sex as horrifically as in this novel. Did Oe have a purpose for portraying the sex in the way he did? Was he serious? Kenzaburo Oe must have thought of himself as some superstar in bed where he could make his women orgasm time and again, jeez & blech. What was the purpose? Maybe he had a sexual partner or two that made him think he was a superstar in the sack.

It seemed that A Personal Matter was a story cobbled together or reverse engineered to examine difficult philosophical issues in life, in essence a treatise on the value of human life. I've really enjoyed and appreciated Haruki Murakami's works (have read/listened to 15 of his novels) and not once did Murakami seem to devolve into pure philosophical treatises. I felt as though Oe was giving a lecture on ethics, yuk.

I think there are readers who will appreciate this novel. I also think some readers will find this book coarse and rough.

Captivating and interesting

A very interesting take on parenthood and disability, which is why I wanted to read it in the first place. Masterfully written and very well acted.

o fim não é muito bom

muito bom, mas no fim o cara começa um discurso moralista meio água com açúcar.

big themes treated with a sure touch

Set in '60s Japan, I found this story of a young father coming to terms with the birth of a disabled child totally involving and believable. I have no way of judging if the translation did the original justice, but it certainly sounded quite natural to me, the jarring bits more due to different attitudes five decades ago, and the brutally honest inner monologue at times. I enjoyed the narrator's delivery, too. Female voices will always be tricky for a male reader, and this one doesn't try to make them too squeaky or breathy, which is a relief.
The book contains some quite explicit passages, but they never feel gratuitous. Rather, like the scenes of heavy drinking and consequent vomiting, they make sense as Bird's escape attempts from reality.