The Review of Contemporary Fiction, June 22nd, 2003
Trans. Philip Gabriel. Grove, 2003. 576 pp. $29.95.
In his first new novel since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Kenzaburo Oe offers an examination of the nature of faith when it is balanced against the potential for human self-annihilation in the twenty-first century. A complete departure from Oe's fiction concerning his retarded son, Somersault is a conventional narrative about a fictional religious cult, partly influenced by Aum Shinrikyo and their 1995 sarin attack on the Tokyo subway. Ten years before the novel begins, a religious group's two founding leaders, Patron and Guide,...
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