Even at his happiest moment, Anton looks out of his apartment window ‘towards the Belvedere Gardens, where a group of armed policemen was moving purposefully along the pavement’. At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. As the narrative slides into the 1930s and the memory of war recedes, the terrible sense starts to build of yet greater horrors to come. Nobel Prize recipient Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer's masterpiece, a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan. Sebastian Faulks’s latest novel is beautifully written, shot through with a sense of the frailty of love that is at times reminiscent of William Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. When he arrives and sees Lena, she looks familiar, but he can’t work out why. Anton, back from the war and now a famous journalist, is working on a story about this clinic for the mentally afflicted. Lena eventually goes to Vienna, where she comes close to following her mother’s path, before finding work at a sanatorium near to where she grew up. Snow Country moves from this doomed love to post-war Vienna, and to Lena, the daughter of an alcoholic part-time call girl. Trump’s second act: he can still win, in spite of everything
0 kommentar(er)
