BOOK CLUB IS MEETING LATER THAN USUAL THIS MONTH ON SUNDAY, MAY 21ST. Extra time to read! :) "Silence I regard as a masterpiece, a lucid and elegant drama." -The New York Review of Books For the month of May, Kwaidan Book Club will be reading and discussing "Silence" by Shūsaku Endō, a classic novel of enduring faith in dangerous times. "Silence" was recently made into a motion pictured directed by Martin Scorsese. We will be screening the movie immediately before the club meeting and book discussion. Movie Screening: 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM (movie running time is 2 hours and 41 minutes) Book Club Meeting: 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM *Please help support Tubby & Coo's Mid-City Book Shop by ordering your copy through them. Make sure to mention that it is for the Kwaidan Book Club (Japan Society of New Orleans's Book Club) for a special discount! ABOUT THE BOOK: Seventeenth-century Japan: Two Portuguese Jesuit priests travel to a country hostile to their religion, where feudal lords force the faithful to publicly renounce their beliefs. Eventually captured and forced to watch their Japanese Christian brothers lay down their lives for their faith, the priests bear witness to unimaginable cruelties that test their own beliefs. Shūsaku Endō is one of the most celebrated and well-known Japanese fiction writers of the twentieth century, and Silence is widely considered to be his great masterpiece. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Shūsaku Endō (March 27, 1923 – September 29, 1996) was a Japanese author who wrote from the rare perspective of a Japanese Roman Catholic. Born in Tokyo in 1923, Endō was raised by his mother and an aunt in Kobe where he converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of eleven. At Tokyo's Keio University he majored in French literature, graduating BA in 1949, before furthering his studies in French Catholic literature at the University of Lyon in France between 1950 and 1953. A major theme running through his books, which have been translated into many languages, including English, French, Russian and Swedish, is the failure of Japanese soil to nurture the growth of Christianity. Before his death in 1996, Endō was the recipient of a number of outstanding Japanese literary awards: the Akutagawa Prize, Mainichi Cultural Prize, Shincho Prize, and Tanizaki Prize.
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