The Floating World
by Cynthia Kadohata (1956- )
- Used
- near fine
- Hardcover
- first
- Condition
- Near Fine/Fine
- ISBN 10
- 0670826804
- ISBN 13
- 9780670826803
- Seller
-
Fort Worth, Texas, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
196 pages. Octavo (8 3/4" x 5 3/4") bound in original publisher's quarter beige cloth with gilt lettering to spine over red boards in original pictorial jacket. First edition. In her first book, Kadohata works wonders in evoking the mysterious balance, imperfectly held, of a Japanese-American family drifting apprehensively during the 1950s in ``ukiyo ,'' a ``floating world'' of menial jobs and humble yet hopeful upward mobility pursued at the edges of an enchanted but exclusive American normalcy. Twelve-year-old Olivia, the first-person narrator, is a storyteller by temperament and heredity: her sharp-tongued, hot-tempered grandmother, who in her heyday had three husbands and seven lovers, ``owned a valise in which she carried all her possessions, but the stories she told were also possessions.'' Intelligent, impish, perpetually dislocated--``I wanted to stay where we were--where I didn't know anyone and no one knew me''--Olivia soon comes into possession of tales of her own: ``I sort of salivated inside whenever I met someone new. I was nosy, and I thought new people might tell me interesting things.'' Her shrewd roadside appraisals as the family travels from the Pacific Northwest to Arkansas in search of employment (hard to come by for Japanese at that time), and, years later, when Olivia sets out on her own for Los Angeles, range from a delicate appreciation of the American landscape to a frank appetite for the crasser curios of a foreign culture. With equal sympathy, Olivia turns her eye inward on her own family, offering an artless, prescient running commentary that never strains in the pursuit. In striking and keeping the tone of Olivia's voice, a bewitching composite of American brashness and expatriate otherness, Kadohata achieves perfect pitch inconspicuously, telling of the lonely and comic immigrant experience of "moving from the hard life just past to the life, maybe harder, to come." Condition: Remainder mark at head end pages else a near fine copy in a fine jacket.
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Details
- Bookseller
- The Book Collector ABAA, ILAB, TBA (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- BOOKS001575
- Title
- The Floating World
- Author
- Cynthia Kadohata (1956- )
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- Used - Near Fine
- Jacket Condition
- Fine
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Edition
- First
- ISBN 10
- 0670826804
- ISBN 13
- 9780670826803
- Publisher
- Viking Press
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 1989
- Keywords
- JAPANESE-AMERICANA
- Bookseller catalogs
- Literature;
- Size
- Octavo
Terms of Sale
The Book Collector ABAA, ILAB, TBA
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About the Seller
The Book Collector ABAA, ILAB, TBA
Biblio member since 2005
Fort Worth, Texas
About The Book Collector ABAA, ILAB, TBA
The Book Collector specializes in the finest collections of Chess, Anthropology, Americana and American Literature. Visit our website at www.bookcollectorshop.com
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Gilt
- The decorative application of gold or gold coloring to a portion of a book on the spine, edges of the text block, or an inlay in...
- Spine
- The outer portion of a book which covers the actual binding. The spine usually faces outward when a book is placed on a shelf....
- Jacket
- Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
- Remainder Mark
- Usually an ink marking of some sort which indicates that the book was designated a remainder. In most cases, it can be found on...
- Octavo
- Another of the terms referring to page or book size, octavo refers to a standard printer's sheet folded four times, producing...
- First Edition
- In book collecting, the first edition is the earliest published form of a book. A book may have more than one first edition in...
- Edges
- The collective of the top, fore and bottom edges of the text block of the book, being that part of the edges of the pages of a...
- New
- A new book is a book previously not circulated to a buyer. Although a new book is typically free of any faults or defects, "new"...
- Fine
- A book in fine condition exhibits no flaws. A fine condition book closely approaches As New condition, but may lack the...
- Cloth
- "Cloth-bound" generally refers to a hardcover book with cloth covering the outside of the book covers. The cloth is stretched...