The Changeling: Summary and book reviews of The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe, plus links to an excerpt from The Changeling and a biography of Kenzaburo Oe.
The Changeling
by Kenzaburo Oe
Hardcover: Mar 2010,
480 pages.
Paperback: Feb 2011,
480 pages.
In The Changeling, Nobel Prize–winning author Kenzaburo Oe takes readers from the forests of southern Japan to the washed-out streets of Berlin as he investigates the impact our real and imagined pasts have on our lives.
Writer Kogito Choko is in his sixties when he rekindles a childhood friendship with his estranged brother-in-law, the renowned filmmaker Goro Hanawa. As part of their correspondence, Goro sends Kogito a trunk of tapes he has recorded of reflections about their friendship. But as Kogito is listening one night, he hears something odd. “I’m going to head over to the Other Side now,” Goro says, and then Kogito hears a loud thud. After a moment of silence, Goro’s voice continues, “But don’t worry, I’m not going to stop communicating with you.” Moments later, Kogito’s wife rushes in; Goro has jumped to his death from the roof of a building.
With that, Kogito begins a far-ranging search to understand what drove his brother-in-law to suicide. The quest takes him to Berlin, where he confronts ghosts from both his own past, and that of his lifelong, but departed, friend.
BOOK REVIEWS
BookBrowse The Changeling is probably a good book, but it is not for everyone, and it was not for me. The book is pulled along with a compelling plot that frequently startled me with its eerie twists and sharp revelations... I had to force myself through dense blocks of text... meant, in the words of one reviewer, to demonstrate "a conviction that literature has the power to transfigure and redeem reality." But they were often quite chronologically confusing, and they lacked the psychological realism that I have come to expect in contemporary literature... Ultimately, I suspect that The Changeling is rather more fun to write about than to read, though I defer to readers more familiar with Oe's body of work and schooled in his formal style of writing for the final analysis. (Reviewed by Amy Reading). Full Review (830 words).
Media Reviews
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A dazzling and elaborate maze of memories and meditations .... Oe's deft mix of high intellectual reflection and absurd slapstick scenarios is polished to a high gloss.
Booklist
Starred Review. As in previous novels and with comparable mastery, Oe deeply ponders love, sex, art, friendship, family, and death in a rich, psychologically acute rhapsody of narration anchored in personal calamities.
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. Once again introspection and autobiography are transmuted into compelling fiction in the latest from Japan's 1994 Nobel laureate.
Holly Silva
In a May 2008 article in The New York Times, Kenzaburo Oe dismissed his current manuscript as possibly his last because, "When I turn 75 years old, I expect I'll have nothing left to write as a novelist."
Instead, Oe, who turned 75 this year, gives us The Changeling, the substantial beginning of a planned trilogy concerning Kogito Choko, an aging novelist modeled on Oe. ... But the restraint and ease are deceptive. Painful human truths break through - or are created from - an accumulation of everyday musing. The Changeling is a top-tier existentialist work.
The Los Angeles Times
[A] richly imagined, complex story full of the oddity, irony and existential angst that have long been at the heart of Oe's writing, only here they are seen more often on the level of plot and structure than on that of sentence and image.
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(830 words).
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