\n<\/a>BY RACHEL ARONS AND ANDREA DENHOED<\/p>\n
Notes from the book closet on forthcoming titles that caught our eye.<\/p>\n
For detail please visit here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" AUGUST 1, 2014 BY RACHEL ARONS AND ANDRE … Continue reading ![\"0814books_01-Colorless-Tsukuru-Tazaki-1542\"](\"http:\/\/www.chinesepen.org\/english\/files\/2014\/08\/0814books_02-Moscow-in-the-Plague-Year-154.jpg\")
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\n\u201cColorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage\u201d (Knopf), by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel, out August 12th. Haruki Murakami\u2019s latest novel sold more than a million copies in its first week on sale in Japan and, like the English translation of his previous novel, \u201c1Q84,\u201d is likely to have a blockbuster d\u00e9but in the United States as well. (Also like \u201c1Q84,\u201d this compact little volume has been given a notably handsome design treatment.) Tsukuru Tazaki is a thirty-six-year-old railway-station engineer, but when we meet him, in the book\u2019s opening pages, he is twenty, in college, and suffering from debilitating depression, because his four best friends have, without explanation, \u201cannounced that they did not want to see him, or talk to him, ever again.\u201d In high school, the group of five were inseparable\u2014though while each of the other four had an outstanding talent or trait, Tsukuru was always unsure of what he brought to the group. \u201cThere was not one single quality he possessed that was worth bragging about or showing off to others,\u201d writes Murakami. \u201cAt least that was how he viewed himself. Everything about him was middling, pallid, lacking in color.\u201d At the age of thirty-six he meets a woman named Sara, who becomes his girlfriend and encourages him to get in touch with his old friends and find out why they abandoned him. Tsukuru\u2019s journey takes him to familiar haunts and new places as he learns to move forward.\u2014A.D.
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\n\u201cMoscow in the Plague Year: Poems\u201d (Archipelago), by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Christopher Whyte, out August 12th. In an article about Marina Tsvetaeva that appeared in The New Yorker in 1994, Claudia Roth Pierpont wrote that the poet had \u201cthe most peculiarly excitable and brilliant and perhaps the most individual style in twentieth-century Russian poetry.\u201d Although little known in the United States, in her home country Tsvetaeva is considered one of the major poets to have witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution, and her work was deeply admired by writers such as Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Nabokov, and Joseph Brodsky. This new collection brings together all of Tsvetaeva\u2019s poems from the years 1917 to 1921\u2014\u201cverses varying from the outstanding to the only moderately successful,\u201d according to the afterword. During those years, the poet was living in privation in Moscow while her husband fought in the anti-Communist White Army. Tsvetaeva referred to 1919, in particular, as \u201cthe plague year\u201d\u2014this was when conditions in the city reached a low point. One of Tsvetaeva\u2019s daughters contracted malaria, and the other died of starvation in a children\u2019s home outside of the city. (From a poem addressed to the first child: \u201cAlthough you still have both father and mother,\/you nonetheless remain one of Christ\u2019s orphans.\/Though you were born in a whirlpool of wars\/you too will make your way unto the Jordan.\u201d). This period of hardship was one of the most productive of Tsvetaeva\u2019s career. Poems about the suffering in Moscow appear alongside verses full of passion and guilt about the affairs the poet engaged in while her husband was away. A number of the poems in this book are appearing in English for the first time.\u2014A.D.<\/p>\n