In my view, however, Kawabata's stance is less likely to have to do with the hardships of his childhood than with the tension he seemed to feel throughout his life between beauty and sadness, or more precisely between sexuality and a sense of loss. Although his work, like that of other Japanese writers of his generation, shows strong European influence (particularly, in Kawabatas case, from the French Symbolists), he is in many ways a traditionalist, closer in
When Kawabata was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the novel most often mentioned as his great work was
If you find yourself becoming a fan of Kawabata's work, I would suggest reading also one of his less-well-known novйis,
JORGE LUIS BORGES
In 1972 Kawabata became despondent over the grotesque public suicide of his friend and protйgй Mishima Yukio [131] and, far more quietly and decorously, committed suicide himself. Given the obsessive qualities of Kawabatas work, it is somehow difficult to imagine his life ending otherwise.
J.S.M.
121
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Since this book's first appearance, Latin American writers have been looming larger on our literary horizon (see also Gabriel Garcia Marquez [132]).
Borges, scion of an intellectual middle-class family, was born in Buenos Aires, where most of his life was lived. His ancestry was Spanish and English, with a small infusion of Portuguese-Jewish blood. Like Nabokov [122], he learned English prior to his native tongue. He was strongly influenced by English writers from Caedmon to Chesterton and H.G. Wells.
Following his partially European education Borges began his career as a poet. His fathers death and a near-fatal illness made 1938 a year of crisis for him. From this year dates the finest of his "fictions," a form peculiarly his own in which his genius is most clearly reflected. Slow in growth, his reputation became international with the publication in 1944 of his collec- tion
Although hardly a political man, Borges opposed the Perуn dictatorship and as a result was demoted from his post of librarian to that of poultry and rabbits inspector. After Perуn's fali in 1955 he was named director of the National Library of
JORGE LU IS BORGES
Argentina. By that time his always defective eyesight had wors- ened; from the age of fifty-six he was totally blind, this man who described himself as one "who imagined Paradise in the shape of a library."
Borges's vast and esoteric learning, which pervades his stories, makes his range of allusion somewhat forbidding to many readers and on occasion imparts to his work a bookish flavor. But these seeming hindrances are little more than a faзade of irony. Behind it works a mind of almost dismaying subtlety in which a metaphysician, a logician, and a visionary (but not a mystic) occupy continually shifting positions. His constant theme, whether he offers us science fiction, detective stories, tales of violence, or logical nightmares, is the "hallucinatory nature of the world." For him the universe is not something made. Rather it is dreamt. Or perhaps it is a great Book, whose tone is that of "irreality, one of aifs requisites."