SOURCE: Maristed, Kai. “Faith Tangled Up in Reality.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (20 April 2003): 7.

In the following review, Maristed argues that Somersault is an “extraordinarily dense novel,” noting that Ōe's detached authorial voice distinguishes the work from his previous novels.

A heraldic first line of jacket copy announces that Somersault is Kenzaburo Oe's “first new novel … since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature” and goes on to describe the novel's 570 extraordinarily dense pages as “a magnificent story of the charisma of leaders, the danger of zealotry, and the mystery of faith.” If this reviewer can't quite sign on to the thumbnail characterization, she can also hardly fault its anonymous writer. No significant concept in Somersault—and there are a great many—lets itself be caught for an instant resting in a single definition or attitude.

Earlier (and by the way, shorter) Oe novels such as The Silent Cry...