A Personal Matter
by Kenzaburo Oë, John Nathan
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Book Summary Information
Author: John Nathan, Kenzaburo OëEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1994-01-13
ISBN: 0802150616
Number of pages: 165
Publisher: Grove Press
Book Reviews of A Personal Matter
Book Review: "Bird, Fly": Oe's superb complement to Updike's classic
Summary: 5 Stars
Oe's masterpiece unites personal experience with literary inspiration in the most extraordinary way. The most immediate source for the novel is Oe's own personal experience, the birth of a son with brain damage, a seeming misfortune that ultimately became a source of considerable happiness. In the novel, Bird's failing marriage is exacerbated by such a birth, which causes him to wish for his newborn's death (and to even attempt subversively lethal measures) and to fly to the arms of another woman while his seriously ill wife is recovering in the hospital. His efforts to escape his self-absorbed misery founders: "The baby continued to live, and it was oppressing Bird, even beginning to attack him."
Throughout, the novel recalls an extraordinary number of literary antecedents. I can only speak to the American influences, but "A Personal Matter" most obviously--and intentionally--resembles "Rabbit, Run" (which I happened to have read only weeks before). There are the surface resemblances (Rabbit = Bird); the plot parallels (each man escapes his familial duties by fleeing to the arms of a "sexual adventuress who had broken out of conventional orbit"); the thematic similarities (the lure of freedom versus the manacles of responsibility).
In fact, Oe was an avid and thorough reader of American fiction, from Mark Twain to Saul Bellow. (His American translator John Nathan met Oe shortly after "A Personal Matter" was published and "tried to confront him with things he didn't know": specifically, "Rabbit, Run." Oe, who was already quite familiar with the novel, in turn introduced Nathan to Updike's poems on basketball.) The many literary echoes enhance the work largely because Oe transforms Updike's cynicism into his own message of "hope." For all their similarities, the two novels are assertively different--in tone, in style, in their characters--and, together, they bookend the conflicting themes of expectation and disillusionment so prevalent in twentieth-century literature.
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