Quicksand (Vintage International) - Softcover

Tanizaki, Junichiro

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679760229 ISBN 13: 9780679760221

Publisher: Vintage Books, 1995

Synopsis

Quicksand is a silkily nuanced novel of erotic gamesmanship and obsession. Sonoko Kakiuchi, an Osaka lady of a good family, married to a dully respected lawyer, tells a story of temptation and betrayal. Sonoko is infatuated with the beautiful art student and femme fatale Mitsuko, a woman so seductive and heartless she can even turn Sonoko's husband into her own accomplice. Filled with intrigue and treacherous romance, readers will be entranced by Tanizaki's seminal novel.

At once savagely funny and timorously exact in its portrayal of sexual enthrallment, Quicksand is "beautifully and mysteriously contrived."--Newsday

About this title

Review:

Tanizaki proffers a story that poses as a confession given to the author (with occasional interventions by the narrator) about a woman who becomes obsessed with the beautiful art student Mitsuko and gets lost in the lies the lovers weave to deceive themselves about love.

Love, like any narrative--Tanizaki seems to be saying--is multilayered, devious, mannered and obsessively self-referential. Love is an interrogation of the stories we tell each other, or a succumbing. It is a question about the veracity of our lies. The lesbian affair Mrs Kakiuchi has with Mitsuko, and Mitsuko's complicated arrangements with her fiancé and Mrs Kakiuchi's husband, do not allow for easy moralisms. This is a novel of observation, in which Tanazaki reserves comment and allows the characters to play out the fate they have chosen by denying their bourgeois concerns and buying into the danger of passion. As ever sex and death are linked, with the possibility of ritual suicides present at every turn. We are left wondering whether death is the height of orgiastic success, the failure of life in love, or the erotic commingling of the two. --Mark Thwaite

Review:

"Quicksand reads like a mixture of James Cain and Vladimir Nabokov [and] teases us with forbidden pleasures" (Washington Times)

"Beautifully and mysteriously contrived" (Newsday)

"A harrowing black comedy of love and death" (Chicago Tribune)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0679760229
• ISBN 13: 9780679760221
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240