Neige

By Maxence Fermine and Maksans Fermin

Book Overview

Yuko Akita had two passions. Haiku and snow. It is April 1884 and Yuko Akita has reached his seventeenth birthday on the Island of Hokkaid in the North of Japan. The time has come to choose his... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 074345684X
• ISBN13: 9780743456845
• Release Date: December 2002
• Publisher: Atria Books
• Length: 100 Pages
• Weight: 0.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 4.5" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

The finest book I ever read...

I read this book in french when it first came out and found it to be one of the most charming and delicately written books I know of till today. It is as simple as a haiku but with a touching and romantic story behind it... I loved it and recommend you to read it...it touched my heart.

A Haiku in Itself

Haiku are practically impossible to describe. A haiku has to convey an emotional state both succintly and artfully. SNOW is a novel about the transformation into a haijin, the living of haiku as a way of life and of love. In the beginning, the protagonist has the way of life and the obsession. But he cannot truly master his art without love which brings colour to the whitest of snow. Scientifically, white has all the colours of the visible light spectrum, so on another level, the novel explores the nature of whiteness and of light. SNOW is a guide for readers and writers of haiku in novel (and a novel!) form. Note: haiku no longer are required to have 17 syllables for various reasons available on a plethora of websites.

Snow

I have never read a more beautiful book. I could change not one word.

The beauty of a snowflake

Yuko Akita, seventeen and living in the south of Japan in 1884, is nearing the end of his boyhood. It's time for him to choose a vocation. Warrior or monk. He chooses to be a poet. Says his father, "Poetry is not a profession. It is a way of passing the time. Poems are like water. Like this river," and Yuko says, "That is just what I want to do. To learn to watch the passing of time." Each if Yuko's poems is pure and colorless, each one is about snow. The Emperor's Imperial Poet is not satisfied. They are too white for him. So he sends Yuko to study color with Soseki, a blind old artist who was once in love with a tightrope walker ... named Snow. As the book jacket states, SNOW reads like a long, intensely lucid poem. Not one word is wasted. Although the story itself is not all that remarkable and won't surprise the aware reader, the method used to tell it sets it apart from the ordinary. By the end I had tears in my eyes. There is even a touch of humor here, along with some profound statements about both life and art. Only 100 tiny pages long and readable in half an hour, SNOW is a remarkably beautiful, if simplistic, love story that I can highly recommend.