``The best of the best from this year's bountiful harvest of uncommonly strong offerings .
Deeply original.
`` -- O, The Oprah Magazine ``Milena Michiko Flasar's beautiful novel .
is a story about freedom and responsibility, and it results in an almost Sartrean meditation.
``-- Times Literary Supplement ``Exceptional .
In today's less-than-brave new world in which sincere human interaction is disappearing even as the numbers of so-called 'friends' are multiplying, Necktie is a piercing reminder to acknowledge, nurture, and share our humanity.
``-- Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center blog BookDragon ``The quiet reflection of this jewel of a novel is revelatory, redemptive and hypnotic until the last word.
``-- Kirkus Reviews ``A spare, stunning, elegiac gem of a book.
Milena Michiko Flasar writes with a poet's clarity of language and vision, probing deeply below the surfaces of familiar Japanese stereotypes .
to tell a compassionate and insightful story of dysfunction, despair and friendship.
``--Ruth Ozeki, author of A Tale for the Time Being ``Flasar's exquisite, finely wrought novel is both a prose poem and a parable about how we deflect, defer and disconnect from life, and what is needed before we can bravely embrace it again.
`` -- Monique Truong, author of The Book of Salt and Bitter in the Mouth ``A tender, melancholy book of great linguistic beauty and clarity.
A flawless novel.
``-- Suddeutsche Zeitung ``With high artistry .
this seductive beauty is also strangely religious: the book treats life with an almost Buddhist serenity.
``-- Der Spiegel Twenty-year-old Taguchi Hiro has spent the last two years of his life living as a hikikomori--a shut-in who never leaves his room and has no human interaction--in his parents' home in Tokyo.
As Hiro tentatively decides to reenter the world, he spends his days observing life around him from a park bench.
Gradually he makes friends with Ohara Tetsu, a middle-aged salaryman who has lost his job but can't bring himself to tell his wife, and shows up every day in a suit and tie to pass the time on a nearby bench.
As Hiro and Tetsu cautiously open up to each other, they discover in their sadness a common bond.
Regrets and disappointments, as well as hopes and dreams, come to the surface until both find the strength to somehow give a new start to their lives.
This beautiful novel is moving, unforgettable, and full of surprises.
The reader turns the last page feeling that a small triumph has occurred.
Milena Michiko Flasar was born in 1980, the daughter of a Japanese mother and an Austrian father.
She lives in Vienna.
I Called Him Necktie won the 2012 Austrian Alpha Literature Prize.
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New Vessel Press I called him necktie, paperback/milena michiko flasar
