[In the following review, Havel offers a positive assessment of Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age, praising the author's “gift for the portrayal of the inevitable emotional blunders of human beings.”]

Fans of Oe's work will recognize the author's alter ego K and his disabled son Eeyore in this latest novel [Rouse Up, O Young Men of the New Age] by the Nobel Prize winner. The chronicling of the father-son relationship continues, but the latest developments seem more serious, as they pertain to Eeyore's onset of adulthood and his family beginning to see him as a physically intimidating person with a sexual identity. K's intellectual concerns are centered on his analysis of William Blake's poetry as it has influenced his life and how he has tried to raise his son; this analysis, with its wonderful explication of Blake's writing, is a sort of bonus for any reader. While less poetically stunning than A Personal Matter or A Quiet Life, this volume is more complex in its storylines, including K's attempts to understand Eeyore's vision of the world: how his imagination works, whether he dreams, etc. Translator John Nathan adds an afterword and provides helpful information about Oe's past work and its relation to his family life, clarifying the fact that this work is not a memoir but drawn from similar experiences. Several specific moments in the novel display Oe's gift for the portrayal of the inevitable emotional blunders of human beings. For example, when K finds out that Eeyore's deformity at birth was actually a second brain growing from his head, he can't help but look at it from an intellectual/philosophical standpoint, losing perspective from its devastating effect on Eeyore. Over and over Oe presents examples of how real communication between people is almost impossible, in the end suggesting that maybe simple presence of mind and gentle care are the best we can do. Whether this is a first experience with Oe or not, the reader will be left with questions, many questions, and all good ones.