At the Edge of the Wood (Keshiki): 6

Brand: Strangers Press | Status: Còn hàng

330.000₫

"There’s a sense of creeping horror in Masatsugu Ono’s collection of linked short stories, ‘At the Edge of the Wood’. In these bizarre and Kafka-tinged fables, a father lives in a wooden house at the edge of an unnamed wood, waiting with his son for his wife’s return — she is pregnant and feels it would be safer to give birth at her parents’ house. Their lives flicker between the mundane, between trips to the supermarket, and the fairytale, dwarves who are refugees fleeing some unknown conflict and an old woman streaming water whom the boy adopts as a grandmother. Ono’s prose, deceptively complex in its elegant simplicity, walks a fine line. One side is the simple delight of a child running through an autumnal wood; the other side lie nightmares whose names cannot be spoken." - Amazon Reviewer

Số lượng:

When his wife returns to her parents house to have their second child, an unnamed narrator and his son are left to manage by themselves. Instead of absence, what the father and son begin to notice is a strange noise opening up between them, reverberating through their home, their television set, and the books they read at night. The wood outside their home hums with it, too: leaves fall from branches which are already naked, trees wriggle when walked past, and the hills on the horizon rise and fall in a building rhythm.

Ono's stories teeter on the edge of something unsayable, exploring repetition and contradiction to sketch compelling, otherworldly characters. The strange sound which hums through the twinned narratives is distilled in Carpenter's translation, which masterfully employs the rhythms and echoes of the English language to convey Ono's sense that something is coughing, laughing, turning under the words on the page.