Pseudo-Couples

Fredric Jameson

• Somersault by Kenzaburo Oe, translated by Philip Gabriel
  Atlantic, 570 pp, £16.99, July 2003, ISBN 1 84354 080 0

It is necessary to study precisely how permanent collective wills are formed, and how such wills set themselves concrete short and long-term ends – i.e. a line of collective action.

Gramsci

Nobel Prize-winners seem to fall into two categories: those whom the prize honours, and those who honour the prize. And then there are those assumed to be in the first category, who turn out to have been in the second all along. Such was, for example, ‘the author of a dirty book called Sanctuary’, who proved unexpectedly to be the greatest novelist in the world. Such also, I believe, is Kenzaburo Oe, whose latest novel shows how mistaken American stereotypes of him were (and perhaps how mistaken his own stereotype of himself was).