Scandal (Peter Owen Modern Classics) - Softcover

Shusaku, Endo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0720612411 ISBN 13: 9780720612417

Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers, 2006

Synopsis

Suguro is an eminent Catholic novelist, about to receive a major literary award. So when a drunk woman he has never met before approaches him at the award ceremony, claiming she knows him well from his regular visits to Tokyo s red-light district, she must surely be mistaken? But with a scurrilous press campaign damaging Suguro s reputation, his sleazy doppelgänger appears more and more, as if deliberately trying to discredit him. He is sighted touring the love hotels and brothels of Shinjuku; a leering portrait of him appears in an exhibition and Suguro is forced to undertake a journey into Tokyo s seedy heart in order to discover the dreadful truth. Well known for his novel Silence, which is to be filmed by Martin Scorsese, Endo here abandons his characteristic understated style in order to write a dark metaphysical and psychological thriller that is reckoned to be one of his best and most original works.

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Review

'Endo's Catholicism and tireless grappling with the nature of guilt, sin, love and redemption, as well as the effortlessly luminous quality of his prose, meant that the writer he was most routinely compared with in the west was Graham Greene. But with its unsettling, dreamlike mood, playful self-referentiality and ingeniously engineered plot mechanics - Suguro is shown at his writing desk "hunched like a watchmaker" - Scandal might more usefully be compared to one of Paul Auster's metaphysical detective stories. ' Independent on Sunday --Independent on Sunday

However, Suguro's dreamlike wanderings through a Tokyo shrouded in snow and fog lend the novel an eerie beauty, which is matched by the chilly clarity of Endo's prose in Damian Flanagan's translation. At once a sinister thriller and an elegant disquisition on identity and the nature of evil, Scandal represents Endo's determination to turn the novelist's gaze inwards. It is not enough, he suggests, to look fiercely into the outer world; if the writer fails to recognize his own capacity for evil, he is ultimately a fraud. Olivia Laing, TLS --Times Literary Supplement

Scandal is a subtle, eerie and fascinating book by a writer of rare perception and disquieting honesty. John Walsh, London Evening Standard --London Evening Standard

Synopsis

Suguro is an eminent Catholic novelist, respectably married and on the cusp of old age. So when a drunken woman approaches him at an awards ceremony claiming to know him from his regular visits to Tokyo's red-light district, she must surely be mistaken. Yet with more sightings reported and a malicious journalist trying to expose him as a fraud, Suguro is forced to take a terrible journey into the city's seedy heart - and to confront his own long repressed desires. The Peter Owen Modern Classics makes available the finest work from an unrivalled international fiction backlist which includes Jean Cocteau, Shusaku Endo, Anna Kavan, Hermann Hesse and other stellar names of twentieth century literature.

About this edition

• Publisher: Peter Owen Publishers
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0720612411
• ISBN 13: 9780720612417
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256