The Great Passage

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If you love books (and I think you do!) then you definitely love words.The Great Passage (trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter) is a novel for such people, and also about such heroes – who loved words above all.

It is a story about a group of editors and scientists who have devoted their professional lives to building a “book about words” – a dictionary of the Japanese language. It is a large-scale undertaking and not a very spectacular one. Collecting a set of words, writing it down on small pieces of paper, specifying the strictest, but still complete definition. Checking, checking and yet again checking. The whole process takes years, and during this time life goes on as normal – employees come and leave, get promoted, get married, get sick. And when the dictionary manages to be printed and released into the world after all these years, they have to start collecting materials for the next edition almost immediately. Because the language – like the sea – never stands still.

Shion Miura received the Japan Booksellers’ Award (Hon’ya Taishō) for her novel – the same one that years earlier Yōko Ogawa received for The Housekeeper and the Professor. There is something similar in these two books – calmness, intimacy, and the beauty we learn to notice together with the characters of the book.

"A dictionary is a ship that crosses the sea of words," said Araki, with a sense that he was laying bare his innermost soul. "People travel on it and gather the small point of light floating on the dark surface of the waves. They do this in order to tell someone their thoughts accurately, using the best possible words. Without dictionaries, all any of us could do is linger before the vastness of the deep."

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ISBN

9781477823071

Language

Country

Original title

舟を編む

Pages

222

Publisher

Year

2017

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Najniższa cena od 30 dni: May 2, 2023 , 59,00  Categories: , Tags: ,

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