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A True Novel Online HYzW6 [Download] A True Novel Online [HYzW6.ebook] A True Novel Pdf Free Minae Mizumura ePub | *DOC | audiobook | ebooks | Download PDF Download Now Free Download Here Download eBook #412124 in eBooks 2013-11-12 2013-11-12File Name: B009MYB81A | File size: 73.Mb Minae Mizumura : A True Novel before purchasing it in order to gage whether or not it would be worth my time, and all praised A True Novel: 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. OutstandingBy RebeccaThis is an outstanding book with very rich character development and compelling story lines. In just a few words the author can paint a whole mood and visual image of a scene. This is the work of a master wordsmith. Easy to read even as the reader is taken from one person's story to another. Just a note, since it took me forever to figure this out: the title "A True Novel" refers to a style of Japanese literature, and does not imply this is a true story (which I thought it was for a while).1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. A beautifully written and addictive storyBy bdallmannSee more reviews at mybooklust.wordpress.comIt's no secret that I love Japanese literature. There's something about it that takes over my mind as I'm reading and creates an addiction. It began when I read Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. That wasn't so long ago, but it's become one of my favorite genres. This book I've just finished, A True Novel by Minae Mizumura, solidified it even more.A True Novel is a story within a story within another story. It revolves around one mysterious man with a tragic history. The book begins in New York with the narrator relating how she came to meet this man, Taro Azuma, and how she never quite stopped thinking about him, although their acquaintance was brief. By coincidence or by fate, she is approached by a young man who knows much more than she ever did about Taro, and he relates to her the story that was given to him back in Japan.For the first time in ages I found a book that keeps me awake at night; when I found myself closing my eyes and drifting off, I'd reach again for the book thinking, "Just a few more pages!" It reminded me of my time in high school, walking the hallways between classes with my head down and a book open because I wanted to spend every free moment reading it. When I picked it up from the library, I didn't realize that I only had Book I of a two-volume novel. When I saw that Book II wasn't immediately available from the library, I jumped on and ordered by own copy of the set. It came two days later - just in time for me to finish the first book.The first thing you'll hear about A True Novel from Goodreads or is that it's a remaking of Wuthering Heights. If you decide to read the book, forget about that. It has nothing to do with this story. A True Novel stands on its own. So while the book is part metafiction, part reimagining, it's really an engrossing story that will stay with you long after you've finished it.TL;DR: If you read no other fiction this year, read this one. I mean it.1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. Great novel. Great author.By Jack BettisMinae Mizumura has written one of the best- constructed and most interesting novels I have ever read. Her characters are memorable and her attention to detail of the Japanese culture, customs and landscape are mesmerizing. It points out very clearly the class system of Japan prior to WWII and after, and just how strong that system was only a short time ago. This truly is one of those I-don't-want-it- to-end books, all 800-odd pages of it. I have hopes of more like novels from her. I think I'll reread it. I may have missed some small bit. A remaking of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights set in postwar Japan A True Novel begins in New York in the 1960s, where we meet Taro, a relentlessly ambitious Japanese immigrant trying to make his fortune. Flashbacks and multilayered stories reveal his life: an impoverished upbringing as an orphan, his eventual rise to wealth and success—despite racial and class prejudice—and an obsession with a girl from an affluent family that has haunted him all his life. A True Novel then widens into an examination of Japan’s westernization and the emergence of a middle class. The winner of Japan’s prestigious Yomiuri Literature Prize, Mizumura has written a beautiful novel, with love at its core, that reveals, above all, the power of storytelling. From Publishers WeeklyStarred . The story-within-a-story-within-a-story at the heart of this novel features a doomed, Wuthering Heights romance set in postwar Japan, with the 20th-century Heathcliff riding the Japanese-American economic wave. Concentric narratives connect and transform into a critical appraisal of commercial expansion and cultural decline. Narrator-novelist Minae begins by recalling her younger days as the daughter of a Japanese businessman on Long Island, where she meets 20-something Taro Azuma, then a chauffeur for an American. It's the 1960s, a time of opportunity. Years later, Minae meets Japanese émigré Yusuke who describes his encounter in the states with Azuma, now a wealthy man in mysterious seclusion. Yusuke also relates the life story of Fumiko, Azuma's friend. In a flashback to Japan, we see 17-year-old war orphan Fumiko working as a maid for a woman whose family, in 1956, takes the orphaned boy Azuma under its wing as part servant, part protégé. Azuma grows up hopelessly devoted to Yoko, the illness-prone daughter of Fumiko's employer. Yoko in turn loves but rejects Azuma, propelling him to America and prosperity, then back to Japan and to her. The Japanese tradition of burning fires for the dead suits the ghostly Brontë-esque finale, but far more notable are Minae's edgy insights into class distinctions, trans-Pacific cultures, and modernization's spiritual void. A transparent translation and the author's stylistic clarity smooth navigation between storylines. Photographs create the sense of browsing through an album—a nearly 900-page album encompassing two continents and several decades. (Nov.)From Booklist*Starred * Would Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff recognize Minae Mizumura’s Taro Azuma as his literary descendant? Mizumura launches this novel as a re-creation of Brontë’s classic Wuthering Heights set in twentieth-century Japan, and in Taro readers will see Heathcliff’s passionate intensity played out in a life trajectory that parallels Heathcliff’s in its defiant ascent from obscure origins and its obsessive but futile pursuit of an idealized woman who dies prematurely. But Taro confronts readers with complex questions totally outside Heathcliff’s world. For as he struggles to surmount obstacles in postwar Japan, Taro wrestles with the difficulties of preserving a rich cultural heritage in the aftermath of a crushing national defeat. Indeed, as Taro temporarily leaves Japan to pursue his fortunes in the land of the victors, readers see him jettisoning much of his heritage. (Sometimes Taro looks as much like Fitzgerald’s Gatsby as he does Brontë’s Heathcliff.) Above the perplexities besetting Taro, the readers see the daunting conundrums surrounding his creator, Mizumura, herself a character in her novel, grappling with the incompatibilities separating Japan’s own literary traditions from the potent innovations in Western styles of novelizing. Mizumura meets her literary challenge with impressive sophistication and irresistible emotional power, an accomplishment remarkably well conveyed to English-speaking readers by two gifted translators. --Bryce Christensen "A riveting tale of doomed lovers set against the backdrop of postwar Japan…Mizumura's ambitious literary and cultural preoccupations do not overwhelm the sheer force of her narrative or the beauty of her writing (in an evocative translation by Juliet Winters Carpenter)…A True Novel makes tangible the pain and the legacy of loss…[Its] psychological acuteness, fully realized characters and historical sweep push it out of the realm of pastiche and into something far more alluring and memorable." —New York Times Book "Concentric narratives connect and transform into a critical appraisal of commercial expansion and cultural decline...notable are Minae’s edgy insights into class distinctions, trans-Pacific cultures, and modernization’s spiritual void. A transparent translation and the author’s stylistic clarity smooth navigation between storylines. Photographs create the sense of browsing through an album—a nearly 900-page album encompassing two continents and several decades." —Publishers Weekly (Starred )"A smart, literate reimagining of Wuthering Heights...Mizumura’s book is an elegant construction, fully creating and inhabiting its fictional—its truly fictional—world." —Kirkus"[A] fascinating example of a cross-cultural adaptation...A True Novel suggests that it isn't only writers who are influenced by timeless novels but also the forces of history itself." —Wall Street Journal"Ambitious...[A True Novel raises] questions about where the line between fiction and remembrance lies." —Los Angeles Times"Mizumura meets her literary challenge with impressive sophistication and irresistible emotional power." —Booklist (Starred )"Imaginatively sets Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in postwar Japan... the narrative is colloquial, loose-limbed, and finely detailed; it’s anything but a slavish imitation of the original." —Library Journal"A mind-bending saga...[A True Novel] encompasses generations and continents, and Mizumura’s unfussy prose draws clear pictures of various shifting cultural patterns and behaviors." —Bookpage"[Deftly translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter…[A True Novel] is also an ambitious social critique." —Times Literary Supplement"Through the night, as wind and rain pummel the house, Minae enters a different reality.
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