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BJ's Reviews > House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories
House of the Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories
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Many years ago, I spent one dollar at a library book sale on a book I had never heard of, Snow Country, by an author I had never heard of, Yasunari Kawabata. I’m not sure what attracted me. Surprisingly, I read it. It lodged itself in my mind. It made me feel outside of the world. It did not occur to me to seek out more books by Kawabata. Why would it? Does a bittersweet vacation in Rome demand that you take your next vacation in Florence? I returned, I think—if I have the event rightly placed in my reading life—to Octavia Butler, then an obsession.
Last fall, House of the Sleeping Beauties came across my goodreads feed, and I thought: Snow Country! and took it out of the library. All winter, it waited patiently in a stack of library books. Now it is spring. Surprisingly, I read it.
It is an ugly, lovely, questionable book. I did not find it very disturbing—but that in itself is disturbing. It is convincingly enough about death that it is hard to get worked up about its failure to consider so much of life. I don’t know that I want to say much more. That is why I have written this review that is not a review, I guess.
Last fall, House of the Sleeping Beauties came across my goodreads feed, and I thought: Snow Country! and took it out of the library. All winter, it waited patiently in a stack of library books. Now it is spring. Surprisingly, I read it.
It is an ugly, lovely, questionable book. I did not find it very disturbing—but that in itself is disturbing. It is convincingly enough about death that it is hard to get worked up about its failure to consider so much of life. I don’t know that I want to say much more. That is why I have written this review that is not a review, I guess.
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Ilse
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rated it 4 stars
Apr 22, 2024 10:57AM
This was my first by Kawabata, reading it in the wake of the opera Kris Defoort based on it (some snippets of the opera are on YouTube). Like the discovery of a unknown world - magic.
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I agree, Ilse. He's really otherworldly. I don't know quite what to do with how he writes about women and violence against women... The stories are dream-like in a way that it feels pointless to construct some kind of critique... but also odd to write about at any length without addressing... But I want to read more of his stories!
