A Personal Matter
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Narrated by:
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Eric Michael Summerer
About this listen
Nobel Prize winner Oe's most important novel, A Personal Matter, has been called by The New York Times "close to a perfect novel". In A Personal Matter, Oe has chosen a difficult, complex though universal subject: how does one face and react to the birth of an abnormal child? Bird, the protagonist, is a young man of 27 with antisocial tendencies who, more than once in his life, when confronted with a critical problem, has cast himself adrift on a sea of whisky like a besotted Robinson Crusoe. But he has never faced a crisis as personal or grave as the prospect of life imprisonment in the cage of his newborn infant-monster. Should he keep it? Dare he kill it?
Before he makes his final decision, Bird's entire past seems to rise up before him, revealing itself to be a nightmare of self-deceit. The relentless honesty with which Oe portrays his hero or antihero makes Bird one of the most unforgettable characters in recent fiction.
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Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules is a collection of short stories, some classic, others impending, selected and introduced by David Sedaris.
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Great stories but only 5 of 17 are included
- By Terri Kirk on 07-13-12
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An American Dream
- By: Norman Mailer
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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As Stephen Rojack, a decorated war hero and former congressman who murders his wife in a fashionable New York City high-rise, runs amok through the city in which he was once a privileged citizen, author Norman Mailer peels away the layers of our social norms to reveal a world of pure appetite and relentless cruelty. One part Nietzsche, one part de Sade, and one part Charlie Parker, An American Dream grabs the listener by the throat and refuses to let go.
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Mailers Immodest masterpiece
- By W C Woods on 07-02-20
By: Norman Mailer
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The Space Between Us
- By: Thrity Umrigar
- Narrated by: Purva Bedi
- Length: 12 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Best-selling author Thrity Umrigar won the Nieman Fellowship and earned a finalist spot for the PEN/Beyond Margins award with The Space Between Us. Set in modern-day India, this evocative novel follows upper-middle-class Parsi housewife Sera Dubash and 65-year-old illiterate household worker Bhima as they make their way through life. Though separated by their stations in life, the two women share bonds of womanhood that prove far stronger than the divisions of class or culture.
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A Story that stays with you
- By gardener97 on 04-25-15
By: Thrity Umrigar
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The Cider House Rules
- By: John Irving
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 24 hrs and 5 mins
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From one of America's most beloved and respected writers comes the classic story of Homer Wells, an orphan, and Wilbur Larch, a doctor without children of his own, who develop an extraordinary bond with one another.
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Wonderful
- By Patricia B Tripoli on 07-02-07
By: John Irving
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Moon
- By: James Herbert
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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The dark side. He had fled from the terrors of his past, finding refuge in the quietness of the island. And for a time he lived in peace. Until the 'sightings' began, visions of horror seeping into his mind like poisonous tendrils, violent acts that were hideously macabre, the thoughts becoming intense. He witnessed the grotesque acts of another, a thing that gloried in murder and mutilation, a monster that soon became aware of the observer within its own mind. And relished the contact.
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Moon by James Herbert
- By Joshua Kring on 12-18-14
By: James Herbert
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Stories
- All-New Tales
- By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, Al Sarrantonio - editor, Joe Hill, and others
- Narrated by: Anne Bobby, Jonathan Davis, Katherine Kellgren, and others
- Length: 18 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.
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Something for Everyone
- By Nicole on 05-24-17
By: Neil Gaiman - author/editor, and others
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Great & Secret Show
- By: Clive Barker
- Narrated by: Chet Williamson
- Length: 22 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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In the little town of Palomo Grove, two great armies are amassing; forces shaped from the hearts and souls of America. In this New York Times best-seller, Barker unveils one of the most ambitious imaginative landscapes in modern fiction, creating a new vocabulary for the age-old battle between good and evil. Carrying its readers from the first stirring of consciousness to a vision of the end of the world, The Great and Secret Show is a breathtaking journey in the company of a master storyteller.
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Horrific Dark Fantasy
- By Michael on 09-05-16
By: Clive Barker
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The Invisible Circus
- By: Jennifer Egan
- Narrated by: Madeleine Lambert
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In Pulitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Egan's highly acclaimed first novel, set in 1978, the political drama and familial tensions of the 1960s form a backdrop for the world of Phoebe O'Connor, age eighteen. Phoebe is obsessed with the memory and death of her sister Faith, a beautiful idealistic hippie who died in Italy in 1970. In order to find out the truth about Faith's life and death, Phoebe retraces her steps from San Francisco across Europe, a quest which yields both complex and disturbing revelations about family, love, and Faith's lost generation.
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Too bad zero was not a choice...
- By IVAL on 04-28-13
By: Jennifer Egan
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Great performance!
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A humble clerk and his loving wife scrape out a quiet existence on the margins of Tokyo. Resigned, following years of exile and misfortune, to the bitter consequences of having married without their families' consent, and unable to have children of their own, Sosuke and Oyone find the delicate equilibrium of their household upset by a new obligation to meet the educational expenses of Sosuke's brash younger brother. While an unlikely new friendship appears to offer a way out of this bind, it also soon threatens to dredge up a past that could once again force them to flee the capital.
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This story had no point.
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Mikage is an orphan raised by her grandmother, who has passed away. Grieving, Mikage is taken in by her friend, Yoichi, and his mother (who is really his cross-dressing father), Eriko. As the three of them form an improvised family that soon weathers its own tragic losses, Yoshimoto spins a lovely, evocative tale with the kitchen and the comforts of home at its heart.
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First Time is the Charm
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How to listen
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In this gloriously over-the-top tale, Aoyama, a widower who has lived alone with his son ever since his wife died seven years before, finally decides it is time to remarry. Since Aoyama is a bit rusty when it comes to dating, a filmmaker friend proposes that, in order to attract the perfect wife, they do a casting call for a movie they don't intend to produce. As the resumes pile up, only one of the applicants catches Aoyama's attention - Yamasaki Asami - a striking young former ballerina with a mysterious past. But she is a far cry from the innocent young woman he imagines her to be.
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Adequate?
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Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai’s NO LONGER HUMAN narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. His attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a “clown” to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness.
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Bad narrator
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The Travelling Cat Chronicles
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On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses - until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards.
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A Calm, Quiet Dystopian
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Sun and Steel
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In this fascinating document, one of Japan's best known - and controversial - writers created what might be termed a new literary form. It is new because it combines elements of many existing types of writing, yet in the end, fits into none of them. The road Mishima took to salvation is a highly personal one. Yet here, ultimately, one detects the unmistakable tones of a self transcending the particular and attaining to a poetic vision of the universal.
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SNOOZEFEST
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The Brothers Karamazov
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The murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for parricide; Ivan, the intellectual, driven to breakdown; the spiritual Alyosha, who tries to heal the family's rifts; and the shadowy figure of their bastard half-brother, Smerdyakov. Dostoyevsky's dark masterwork evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur and everyone's faith in humanity is tested.
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Fix an error near the end of chapter 7.
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Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop
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Yeongju did everything she was supposed to, go to university, marry a decent man, get a respectable job. Then it all fell apart. Burned out, Yeongju abandons her old life, quits her high-flying career, divorces her husband, and follows her dream. She opens a bookshop. In a quaint neighbourhood in Seoul, surrounded by books, Yeongju and her customers take refuge. From the lonely barista to the unhappily married housewife, and the writer who sees something special in Yeongju - they all have disappointments in their past.
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cozy contemplations on life
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2666
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Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border.
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The Best Book I Read or Listened to in 2009
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What listeners say about A Personal Matter
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Cliente de Amazon
- 03-15-23
Captivating and interesting
A very interesting take on parenthood and disability, which is why I wanted to read it in the first place. Masterfully written and very well acted.
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- Marcos
- 03-15-18
o fim não é muito bom
muito bom, mas no fim o cara começa um discurso moralista meio água com açúcar.
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- Douglas
- 05-31-16
Brutally Powerful...
semi-autobiographical novel about the mental anguish of discovering one's child is mentally challenged. An amazing tour de force
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2 people found this helpful
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- Erez
- 07-24-12
Should have been better
(Slight spoiler below)
Everything the reviews on the product page say is true, so I won't repeat that the novel has more of an American "feel" than a Japanese one, etc. The key, to me, is in the quote from the New York Times calling this "a close to perfect novel". Why not perfect? Well, most of the book is indeed very good (though it was probably more shocking when first written than it is today). It is the story of a selfish, immature man who can't face the birth of his deformed son and just wants the baby to die. The character is well drawn, and his fear, anxiety and escapism are heart-wrenchingly realistic. But then comes the final chapter which to me felt tacked on. The ending is so optimistic, such a "happy ending" that I found it unbelievable, basically "and then he grew up and did the right thing and everything was Very Good." I felt cheated. That said, cut off this last chapter and I would have given the story five stars. As it is, I don't think I'd recommend it -- it's certainly not bad, but it should have been better.
The narrator, Eric Michael Summerer, does an excellent job.
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- Salvador
- 09-21-16
Overwhelming
Seguramente será un clásico de la literatura universal. La búsqueda de los oscuros recovecos del yo genera una arrolladora vorágine de sentimientos y sensaciones. Desde lo más primitivo en la profundidad del sexo hasta lo más elaborado del pensamiento del filicida. No apto para suicidas, melodramáticos o tibios.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Hazy
- 06-17-21
Huh?
Is Kenzaburo Oe's real name Fyodor Kafka? I wish I had tons of smart friends with PhDs in literature and English so they could tell me that I'm either stupid or accurate. When it comes to these types of celebrated works (Dostoevsky's Karamazov, Kafka's Metamorphosis and The Trial, and even Citizen Kane in film), I ask myself what I'm missing. Perhaps these works were remarkable in how innovative they were at the time of publication or release?
There must be other gratuitous cr*p out there portraying sex as horrifically as in this novel. Did Oe have a purpose for portraying the sex in the way he did? Was he serious? Kenzaburo Oe must have thought of himself as some superstar in bed where he could make his women orgasm time and again, jeez & blech. What was the purpose? Maybe he had a sexual partner or two that made him think he was a superstar in the sack.
It seemed that A Personal Matter was a story cobbled together or reverse engineered to examine difficult philosophical issues in life, in essence a treatise on the value of human life. I've really enjoyed and appreciated Haruki Murakami's works (have read/listened to 15 of his novels) and not once did Murakami seem to devolve into pure philosophical treatises. I felt as though Oe was giving a lecture on ethics, yuk.
I think there are readers who will appreciate this novel. I also think some readers will find this book coarse and rough.
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1 person found this helpful