About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherNew Directions Publishing Corporation

ISBN-100811237788

ISBN-139780811237789

eBay Product ID (ePID)8068271406

Product Key Features

Book TitlePlace of Shells

Number of Pages160 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2025

TopicLinguistics / General

GenreLanguage Arts & Disciplines

AuthorMai Ishizawa

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.5 in

Item Weight6.2 Oz

Item Length8 in

Item Width5.2 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2024-043471

ReviewsThis book, translated from the Japanese with great elegance by Polly Barton, suggests a way into re-enchantment with the world... its central appeal lies in the author's extraordinary ability to convey impressions and sensations with great precision and beauty., A work of great delicacy and seriousness. Ishizawa anchors the temporal and the ghostly with a transfixing pragmatism, and the result is a shifting, tessellated kaleidoscope of memory, architecture, history and grief., The Place of Shells inhabits the crusted border between words and embodied experiences, particularly when registering mass trauma. Ishizawa--whose personal biography greatly mirrors the narrator's--traverses the boundary between public and private memory, enduring and letting go., Missing persons and dogs, the dead and the living, are all on an even footing, interacting with equality. The multilayered intertwining of their memories saw me several times losing my perspective and growing dizzy, and the next thing I knew, I had been dragged into even deeper territory than I was expecting. This attempt to imprint upon humanity the experiences of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in a way that only a novel can achieve deserves to be highly esteemed., ""The Place of Shells is a meditation on art, death, and belonging. It reads like an eerie, shimmering fever dream where the boundaries between past and present, reality and fantasy, life and death often shatter. A strange and beautiful memento mori of a novel"", The characters in Mai Ishizawa's The Place of Shells have all, it seems, come to understand that there is no 'regular' course of the world, that calamity and disaster are part of its recurrent processes, that we must constantly mourn and repair and make sense of that which lacks sense.

TitleLeadingThe

Dewey Edition23

Dewey Decimal895.636

SynopsisIn the summer of 2020, as Europe is beginning to open back up after the first phase of the pandemic, a young Japanese woman based in the German city of Göttingen is working on a PhD about the iconography of medieval saints. She waits at the train station to meet her old friend from graduate school, Nomiya, who died nine years earlier in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan, but has suddenly reemerged without any explanation. When Nomiya arrives, the narrator guides him through Göttingen's scale model of the solar system, talking about her studies, her roommate and their mutual friends. Yet it isn't long before his spectral presence in the city begins to fray the narrator's psyche and destabilize the world beyond: eerie discoveries are made in the forest, Pluto begins disappearing and reappearing, and snags run in time's fabric. The narrative continues to spiral and unfold to include the Japanese physicist Terada Torahiko, mysteriously sprouting teeth, Saint Lucia, all set against the ever-lingering presence of death. With a literary style reminiscent of W. G. Sebald, Yoko Tawada, and Yu Miri, The Place of Shells is a hypnotic, poetic novel that explores the ebbing and flowing of memory, its physical manifestations, its strange and sudden metaphors, and the overwhelming stranglehold of trauma., Winner of the Akutagawa Prize, a masterful novel about loss and memory in the aftermath of a horrifying ecological disaster

LC Classification NumberPL879.4.S55K3513