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Title: Sound of snoring
Review: Kawabata's writing style, no doubt made worse by poor translation, is slow and plodding. The descriptions of scenery and trivial movements is overdone and detract from the final story. There were many points throughout the book that I just couldn't figure out what was going on because the writing was so muddled and the primary thread was simply not continuous.The book reads like a puzzle. The story is thin, and Kawabata attempts to weave every scene, every action into some over-arching theme (old ways good, but new ways may have good points too) that simply left me cold. However, there are many who like this kind of storytelling, so my experience should be taken with an appropriate amount of salt grains.Not having read the book in its original language, I can't say whether the translation helped or hurt the book. The words and sentences were certainly poetic, but ultimately empty. The poetry simply couldn't carry the poor plot, if anything it hindered it all the more.
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