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roxanamalinachirila 's review for:
Sanshiro
by Natsume Sōseki
"Sanshiro" didn't appeal to me as much as I'd expected - I'm a small fan of Natsume Soseki, so I naturally grabbed this volume the moment I saw it, expecting to devour it whole the moment I started it. It didn't really happen. Which doesn't make it bad.
In the first decade of the 20th century, Sanshiro, comes to the big city of Tokyo for the first time, in order to continue his studies. He's quiet and shy and doesn't know much about life, but he soon discovers new people and ideas at university, while you can feel his marriage being brewed up in the background by his mother, who really likes this girl he left back home and who keeps warning him to be careful about the treacherous people in the capital.
The atmosphere is interesting - this is a Japan in which trains are late and Sanshiro throws a lunch box out the window during his ride, in which Tokyo is built and rebuilt and things are still changing and nowhere near as clean, civilized and efficient as we've come to perceive it today. There's a university in which professors can be hard to understand, but in which all the book in the library seem to have been read and annotated by students before Sanshiro - and how much is Soseki poking fun at real life during his time and how much of it isn't is something left to people who do more research about this book than I.
It had subtlety - perhaps too much of it? I ended up googling to find out more about the meaning of "stray sheep", an idea which pops up a few times. And the characters had a few nice psychological touches - you could feel the clash between mentalities, the discrepancies between what one sets out to do and what one actually does instead.
It isn't precisely what I was hoping to read, but it was an interesting read nonetheless.
In the first decade of the 20th century, Sanshiro, comes to the big city of Tokyo for the first time, in order to continue his studies. He's quiet and shy and doesn't know much about life, but he soon discovers new people and ideas at university, while you can feel his marriage being brewed up in the background by his mother, who really likes this girl he left back home and who keeps warning him to be careful about the treacherous people in the capital.
The atmosphere is interesting - this is a Japan in which trains are late and Sanshiro throws a lunch box out the window during his ride, in which Tokyo is built and rebuilt and things are still changing and nowhere near as clean, civilized and efficient as we've come to perceive it today. There's a university in which professors can be hard to understand, but in which all the book in the library seem to have been read and annotated by students before Sanshiro - and how much is Soseki poking fun at real life during his time and how much of it isn't is something left to people who do more research about this book than I.
It had subtlety - perhaps too much of it? I ended up googling to find out more about the meaning of "stray sheep", an idea which pops up a few times. And the characters had a few nice psychological touches - you could feel the clash between mentalities, the discrepancies between what one sets out to do and what one actually does instead.
It isn't precisely what I was hoping to read, but it was an interesting read nonetheless.