A Life

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Title: Snow Country
Author: Yasunari Kawabata
Publisher: Vintage
Num. of Pages: 175 pages
Published: January 1996

At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. She gives herself to him fully and without remorse, despite knowing that their passion cannot last and that the affair can have only one outcome. In chronicling the course of this doomed romance.

Review

Finally I got the time to write the review for this book :))

"Snow Country" is one of the three books that gave Kawabata his Nobel Literature Prize. His other two works were "Thousand Cranes" and "Old Capital". I have read his "Thousand Cranes" (you can read my review here) and I liked it. I also liked his other work, The Master of Go.

Unfortunately I only felt so-so with this book. I don't really like the characters. Both Shimamura and Komako sometimes irritate me. Especially when they started their "I better go/no, I wont' go" game. So undecided. Although, perhaps this undecidedness is one point of the novel.

Also the dialogues sometimes confused me, thanks to the continuos talk with no mention who is talking. Sometimes I could keep track of who is talking, but more often not.

One good thing about the novel is the words selection. I love the opening and closing sentences of this novel.

The opening: "The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The earth lay white under the night sky. The train pulled up at a signal stop.

The closing: "He tried to move toward that half-mad voice, but he was pushed aside by the men who had come up to take Yoko from her. As he caught his footing, his head fell back, and the Milky Way flowed down inside him with a roar.

This book is for the following reading challenges:
- 2013 Books in English Reading Challenge
- 2013 Monthly Key Words Reading Challenge


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