Description: "The Lake is the history of an obsession. It traces a man's sad pursuit of an unattainable perfection, a beauty out of reach, admired from a distance, unconsummated. Homeless, a fugitive from an ambiguous crime, his is an incurable longing that drives him to shadow nameless women in the street and hide in ditches as they pass above him, beautiful and aloof. For their beauty is not of this world, but of a dream--the voice of a girl he meets in a Turkish bath is "an angel's," the figures of two students he follows seem to "glide over the green grass that hid their knees." Reality is the durable ugliness that is his constant companion and is symbolized in the grotesque deformity of the hero's feet. And it is the irreconcilable nature of these worlds that explains the strangely dehumanized, shadowy quality of the eroticism that pervades this novel. In a sense The Lake is a formless novel, a "happening," making it one of the most modern of all Kawabata's works. Just as the hero's interest might be caught by some passing stranger, so the course of the novel swerves abruptly from present to past, memory shades into hallucination, dreams break suddenly into daylight. It is an extraordinary performance of free association, made all the more astonishing for the skill with which these fragments are resolved within the completed tapestry." Thank you for shopping my eBay bookstore! Your purchase helps our homeschooling, book loving, homesteading, Midwest living, family of 6, make ends meet. You can also be our partner in saving good books from the trash!
Price: 29.97 USD
Location: Harrisonville, Missouri
End Time: 2024-12-28T13:15:10.000Z
Shipping Cost: 6.5 USD
Product Images
Item Specifics
Return shipping will be paid by: Seller
All returns accepted: Returns Accepted
Item must be returned within: 30 Days
Refund will be given as: Money Back
Return policy details:
Publication Year: 1990
Format: Trade Paperback
Language: English
Book Title: The Lake
Author: Yusunari Kawabata
Publisher: Kodansha
Genre: World literature & Classics
Original Language: Japanese
Topic: Literature, Japan
Vintage: Yes