Kazuo Ishiguro

I understand Never Let Me Go is vaguely sci-fi, but is it otherwise realistic? I'd be tempted to give it a go if so.

I liked that "half-way house" aspect. There are these great "through the looking glass" moments in both books, where you feel like the moorings of the narrative to reality are coming loose, it's almost like vertigo.

One review of "Never Let Me Go" suggested that, between the title and the cover, it's very likely that a whole lot of ppl will pick it up thinking it's litechicklit.

Plus the back cover blurb is barely related to the content of the book. I know partially this is because publishers always try to disguise the SF-ness of SF-ish literary novels but that alone can't explain how off it is.

They were about as likely to do this as I am likely to do the same things about my crappy job and I think that was part of the whole point. It would have involved a way of thinking that was beyond the whole world as understood by them. A book where they led some sort've resistance would have been a wholly different book, amd a book that has been written a lot more than this one has. It would have been a cop-out that told lies about the world.

Even comparing their situation to your crappy job (and you know, your job is not that crap), not everyone just continues going to work every day. Some people get on a different bus in the morning and end up in Ulan Bator. Some people bring a shotgun into work. Some people embezzle money and run to the Caribbean. Lots of people form or join unions, and fight for better working conditions. But the donors did none of these things.

And if it was trying to make a point... well, who is it that needs to change but doesn't? Not people in their ordinary working lives, because they do change sometimes (and think about changing a lot of the time). Not people faced with the same kind of deadline as the donors, because they usually do whatever they can to change their situation. So who should be drawing a lesson from this?

as i read the novel i was just baffled that the huge plot holes weren't going to be registered by the characters & author let alone resolved. the main one, of course, is: WHY THE HELL DON'T THEY JUST DISSAPPEAR INTO SOCIETY? since they seem to be similar to humans in every way possible it seems like an easy option but Ishiguro doesn't even raise it in order to dismiss it, he just doesn't acknowledge it as an option.

plot hole number 2, as i see it, is that after being surveilled 24 hours a day (to the point where Kath and Tommy find it difficult to meet up somewhere on the grounds of the school where they can talk in private) they are sent away, at school leaving age, to live on communes with absolutely no security at all. can someone explain to me exactly what, in their situations, changes in order to allow these characters almost total freedom after being locked up for all of their formative years? and why doesn't it change the characters outlooks except in the most superficial ways? why doen't it make them realise that they could dissappear without question? and crucially, what is it that makes them acquiesce at some stage with tyhe whole donor project by giving themselves up as donors, knowing what it will lead to?

another problem: the link between the art work they do + "The Gallery" (ahem), on the one hand, and this notion they have that it might be linked in some way to some possibility of deferrment (FROM CERTAIN DEATH!!!!) starts off puzzling then ends up completely ludicrous! because 1. how could they be linked anyway, even in the characters' somewhat underdeveloped notions of society? 2. if you and your partner were looking at certain death you may wish for more than a "deferrment" from it and 3. when the link becomes clear, as much as it does, it ends up being part of the only meagre resistance movement that exists in defence of the donors - to wit: "this practice is inhumane because, well, look at these pretty pictures!". it's baffling.

BUT BUT BUT. this isn't the main reason the book is bad. it's bad because of the abolutely atrocious writing. line for line this is one of the most poorly written novels i've ever finished. it doesn't seem convincing to say that it's badly written because it's written by Kath (there is no real reason why Kath should be a bad writer considering that she is fairly well read*) it's simply badly written because of Ishiguro.

i'll pick out some howlers (as i see them) when i have the book to hand.

*SHE HAS EVEN READ "DANIEL DERONDA"!!!!

More like a dream state then - imagine a dream or a nightmare where the most bizarre and nonsensical things happen. Regardless of whether or not you try to change them, you never question why they're happening, you never say to yourself "this is insane!", you just accept that that's how things are.

That's why the obvious plot holes and the strange acceptance of the characters don't worry me - he's not trying to write a "what-if" sci-fi novel, it's all just a device to explore how people react to each other, and the situations they find themselves in, in a much more abstract way.

Perhaps you don't need to. I mean, a lot of Jews accepted their fate under the Nazis and just kind of went along with it. One could argue that people's lives are being directed and manipulated towards their own accelerated destruction everywhere, every day, and they just go along with it.
It's not so much the fact that they didn't do anything that bothered me. It's that they didn't even talk about doing anything. That would have seemed more realistic to me, I think.

Why the hell don't they disappear into society? Because they can't. Maybe they look different, we don't know. But they certainly behave differently. They don't know how shops operate, or ordinary relationships, or what jobs are even out there, never mind what they themselves could do. And they are also pampered and privileged and sheltered for a long time before they start their 'donations', by which time it's too late.
They remind me of the rabbits in Watership Down who lived in the lovely warren and were sleek and well-fed and had invented an elaborate belief system for themselves and did not run away from the snare, because that was the trade off.
Hmm, I might just be talking myself round to liking this book a little bit more than I did before. Thanks, ILB.

Largely because they seem to only see each other, and other donors. The one job they are allowed to do is that of carer for other donors, before they become donors themselves. And when they talk about jobs in offices, they don't really know what they entail.

It is true that they go into shops, yes. But I've just got this overall picture of them as essentially helpless and coddled, but in a bad way.

some more unconnected thoughts:

"What I'm saying" I went on "is that when we were that age, when we were eleven, say, we weren't really interested in poems at all. But remember someone like Christy? Christy had this great reputation for poetry and we all looked up to her for it. Even you, Ruth, you didn't dare boss Christy around..."

Ishiguro doesn't have a knack for naming his characters: Kath, Ruth, Christy, Miss Emily, Miss Lucy; the names just fall like stones. theres something about the names that renders the characters not just fictional but unbelievable. theres a reason ishiguro says "remember someone like Christy" rather than "remember Christy" in the above quote: that Ishiguro no more believes that this character exists than we do.

/

We'd been in the middle of what we came to call 'The Tokens Controversy' Tommy and I discussed The Tokens Controvery a few years ago and we couldn't at first agree when it had happened

oh did you really? sorry i don't believe you called it 'The Tokens Controversy', not a bit. it's just trash writing.

/

There's another unbelievable scene later on where Kath attempts to communicate Ruth's tendency to lie:

I was lying on a pieve of old tarpaulin reading... Daniel Deronda, when Ruth came wandering over and sat down beside me. She looked at the cover of my book and nodded to herself. The after about a minute, just as i knew she would, she began to outline to me the plot of Daniel Deronda

the point of the scene being that ruth is faking it by pretending to have read Daniel Deronda and does this by summerising the plot. i just don't belive this scene. I have no idea why ishiguro chose DD here (maybe it has some resonance) but it seems ludicrous to me that someone could summarise the plot without having read it. maybe Ruth saw the recent BBC adaptation, i dunno.

oh but she couldn't have because the book is set in "England, Late 1990's" according to the first page. i'm not quite sure how this can be since the book is set over about a 20 year period but forget about that (Ishiguro did).

/

then there's the scene whereby, as a kind of reunion, the three main characters drive out to see a boat that has run aground on some marshland. i'm not exactly sure what this scene is about - what is this land locked ship's hull supposed to mean? - but it's for damn sure supposed to mean something because it's been shoehorned in there like someone who learned how to write by studying cliffs notes for popular school novels. i'm sure this scene is hugely significant but it's lost on me. by the same token the book ends on a typicaly transparent epiphany, the type you learn to write in 6th form creative writing class. girl drives out in flat landscape and get out of car, overwhelmed by grief, at a place where the detrietus of the area has somehow collected: she sees that it somehow resembles the detreitus of her life before she briefly hallucinates a vision of her lost lover (they didn't seem to like each other much anyway, IMO) and then drives off into the future and towards her own fate (death by organ donation!).

the scene where Kath is dancing to the song she loves, the song that gives the novel its title. Ishiguro almost writes quite a touching scene here but he lets it down due to cackhandedness. Kath is obsessed with this one song "never let me go" which she plays over and over again. i get the dea that the song is supposed to be generic, in some sense, but the thing that lets the scene down in that the best ishiguro can do for a lyric for the song is

"never let me go...
oh baby baby...
never let me go"

ok dude, i get that the song is called "Never Let Me Go" but so is your novel - don't you think you could have come up with some thing slightly more interesting than that for what is, ostensibly, the central scene in in your book? "never let me go... oh baby baby... never let me go" just doesn't convince me, it's weak. Ishiguro makes the crucial mistake of telling you what the scene is about rather than communicating the idea through the writing. it absolutely lacks subtlety.

Some of the stuff people complain about, Ishiguro could have explained easily if he'd wanted to. An explanation of why they can't run away could have been handled in a sentence (microchip, tattoo on back, whatever) but I think it didn't figure bcz these particular people never considered it a possibility.

The ship was the most baffling part, not only is it bizarre that a beached ship is apparently famous throughout the whole country (at least among donors) but then there's no path to it or anyone else there. And what does it mean? No explanation I can think of is not LAME.

Links to lots of reviews here:
http://www.metacritic.com/books/authors/ishigurokazuo/neverletmego

surely one point of writing science fiction or (alternative society fiction) would be to change one major thing about a society and then consider how the rest of said society might change as a result of this massive change? Ishiguro opts out by having the rest of the society, what we see of it, virtually unchanged. how would a britain that has farmed human organ donors differ from britain as we know it now? sadly Ishiguro can't be bothered thinking about this.

It's a wrongheaded criticism that could just as well be levelled at any number of non-realist writers (why didn't Kafka consider how the rest of society might change in a world where people can turn into bugs?). How the rest of the world may or may not have changed is quite simply not the subject of the novel. The subject is the fate of the clones. In any case, we know very little about how the rest of the world may or may not have changed. We see everything through Kathy's eyes, and she has very little to say about the rest of the world. There's a scene where they go to Norfolk, and we learn that people work in offices, there are art galleries, and a few other things. We're simply not told much about the rest of the world. Actually, my sense from the novel is that not much is different, and that makes the novel more poignant, not less. We already know that our society is well capable of such indifference.

plot hole number 2, as i see it, is that after being surveilled 24 hours a day (to the point where Kath and Tommy find it difficult to meet up somewhere on the grounds of the school where they can talk in private) they are sent away, at school leaving age, to live on communes with absolutely no security at all. can someone explain to me exactly what, in their situations, changes in order to allow these characters almost total freedom after being locked up for all of their formative years? and why doesn't it change the characters outlooks except in the most superficial ways? why doen't it make them realise that they could dissappear without question? and crucially, what is it that makes them acquiesce at some stage with tyhe whole donor project by giving themselves up as donors, knowing what it will lead to?

Again, all this seems to me like a strength of the novel, not a weakness. The clones have entirely internalised their position in society. Just as we all have, just as we all "acquiesce" in the artificial social conventions which allow some people to be obscenely rich and others obscenely poor, for example. It's pretty easy to see parallels of the clones' attitude in our world. The vast bulk of slaves in ante-bellum America didn't all just "disappear", did they?

then there's the scene whereby, as a kind of reunion, the three main characters drive out to see a boat that has run aground on some marshland. i'm not exactly sure what this scene is about - what is this land locked ship's hull supposed to mean?

It's really not that hard to find metaphors in this scene is it?

BUT BUT BUT. this isn't the main reason the book is bad. it's bad because of the abolutely atrocious writing. line for line this is one of the most poorly written novels i've ever finished.

Well I don't think it's badly written. Sure, it's written a flat, affectless style, which works pretty well given the subject, the strangely flat lives these people lead.

If only it were true...

incidentally is "wrongheaded" a particularly fashionable word at the moment or have i just been reading it alot by concidence?

i simply don't agree with any of your other defences of the book either, sorry. basically i think that Ishiguro is a bad writer and a pretty unintelligent one.

If the book was about/engaged with that minority of donors (which it is easy to imagiune existing, should one want to) it would be a different book about a different subject, and a book that has been written before, whereas I think this one has not.

From John Mullin in the Guardian:

"If this were a science fiction novel, one would expect the central character to rebel, but there is never any question of that. When one of their "guardians", Miss Lucy, appears angry about their fate, Kathy and Tommy are curious, but uncomprehending. The cleverest, saddest aspect of the novel is the limit upon their imaginings."

The occupation of France is a bad example because most people were able to get on with their lives. And those who rubbed close to the occupation didn't simply ignore it, they thought about, tried to make peace with the occupiers, fought against them... reacted in some way. The donors don't react.

There's no indication that the rebelling minority of donors exists, and the donors that we see don't even fantasise about being in that minority. There are rumours of the donors who fell in love and got a deferment, not of the donors who stowed away on a boat to America, or who just disappeared, or who ran away at the last moment and had to be dragged to the operating table. Why is there a limit on their imaginings? I don't think it's psychologically defensible.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/bookclub/story/0,,1744265,00.html

"It is sometimes a feature of really arresting novels that some readers take as a virtue what others find a failing. I wrote in an earlier column that Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is made compelling by its characters' compliance with their fate. Human clones, bred to provide vital organs for others and condemned to die an early death, they embark willingly on each stage of the progress to "completion". Among the many readers writing in to the Guardian Book Club weblog, the issue of this failure to rebel has provoked the most animated questions and disputes. Several readers have strenuously questioned the willingness of the "students" and in particular the narrator, Kathy H, to cooperate with those who would exploit and finally kill them.

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Here is one characteristic comment. "I was wondering what others thought of the characters' overwhelming passivity - they never once tried to escape or tried to actually live a normal life once out 'in the world'." Often the objection comes from readers who are otherwise moved and convinced by the novel. "I found the book overwhelmingly powerful, but I am bothered by the issue of passivity - given that it's clear that the 'students' could pass for non-clones in the society around them." The same reader points out that, in one episode, Ishiguro shows us that "normal" people cannot identify them as clones. Another reader argued that the novelist could have devised a sci-fi way out of the problem. "Why would the Hailsham donors read and discuss complex works of literature, poetry and philosophy and not question or rebel against their fate in any way? I did not understand how this annoyance was not addressed in the novel by a simple ploy of electronic chips/tagging or (more chillingly relevant) by sophisticated ID cards."
Yet there were readers who felt the force of the novelist's decision. One noted that the story of the rebel against some future tyranny is the conventional pattern of dystopian narrative. "Writing a novel of rebellion is an easy option - though it's the difficult thing to do in life. Going with the flow is the easy thing to do - and is a much more difficult story to write in an interesting way." Another noted that Ishiguro does make one of the "students", Tommy, angry, but without allowing him the clarity of actual rebellion. "Through him, Ishiguro shows us just how far it is possible for conscious rebellion to take place - the result being nothing more than the impuissant bouts of inarticulate rage that mark his childhood."

The character of Tommy, furious about he knows not what, fascinated several who discussed the novel with its author at last week's Guardian Book Club. One reader spoke of the powerful "absence of rage" on the part of the "guardians" who look after the clones as well as the clones themselves. There was no one saying "this is intolerable", she observed, before adding, "I found that quite satisfying". The exclusion of anger from the book, and from the school where the clones are looked after, made the reader "turn inwards, and think about it".

Ishiguro said that he sympathised with the objection to the apparent passivity of the clones. When faced with the task of making some axiomatic condition of a novel more plausible, his instinct as a novelist had always been to avoid the problem. "Let's just assume that it is out of the question for them to escape. There is some big reason why it is impossible ... You just ask the reader to enter into the conceit." He admitted that he had no interest in sci-fi possibilities of technical explanation, which is why the book is set not in the future but the very recent past ("England, late 1990s").

Some bloggers were troubled about this, the plausibility of setting the novel not in a future place but in what one of those who discussed the setting with the novelist called "an analogue England". "An England where human beings are bred and killed for their organs would not much resemble today's world, but Ishiguro's is almost identical. There is no serious political controversy surrounding 'donation', no indication that a single clone has ever fought against their fate, none of the propaganda, incarceration and perversion of a democratic society that would be necessary to make the system work."

Yet there were readers ready with critically eloquent explanations of why this was an achievement of the novel. As one of them put it: "You don't escape or rebel against your reality if it's part of who you are, and all you've ever known. And, most of all, it is this that makes the novel so tragic. The real theme of Never Let Me Go is a more universal one: lives that are never what they could be, something I think most people in real life experience." The sense that a narrator's limitations were the point of a narrative reminded many readers of other Ishiguro novels, notably Remains of the Day. "He writes about characters who, however tragically or misguidedly, have a sense of their fate or role in life and he explores how those characters bestow value on their lives, which to others may seem unfulfilled or stunted." Feeling frustrated about what characters cannot do might be part of the purpose."

My first KI, from And The Snow Fell Softly in ILB: What Are You Reading Now Winter 2017/18

I'm reading Ishiguro's Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall. I like the first one, "Crooner," especially this bit:
We went through that song, full of travelling and goodbye. An American man leaving his woman. He keeps thinking of her as he passes through the towns one by one, verse by verse, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Oklahoma, driving down a long road, the way my mother never could. If only we could leave things behind like that---I guess that's what my mother would have thought. If only sadness could be like that.

The second one, "Come Rain Or Come Shine," immediately and for most of it seems even better, or different: a wild/precise dark comedy, going toward farce, then more poignant---but ending up too The Big Chill for me, off-putting and retrospectively reductive in some ways. But I def. get his range and depth, to some extent---other Ishiguro I should read---?
No clear objections to the actual The Big Chill, far as I can recall, but subsequent arts reminders of it seem too auto-generational re middle-ageing etc. (not nec. Boomer).

other Ishiguro I should read---?

I totally loved When We Were Orphans, which I don't hear anyone talk about much; I think I strongly identified with the narrator's status as an immigrant who thinks he's assimilated much more than he actually has. Remains Of The Day is good too, as you may have heard. Both feature sad unreliable narrators.

― Daniel_Rf

Tired of unreliable narrators, esp. sad, but whaddayagonnado, sigh. Will check, thanks. Also curious about his allegorical fantasy novel or straight-up fantasy novel or whatever it is.
--dow

fear unreliable narrators are kinda Ishiguro's thing? I read his fantasy novel - The Buried Giant - recently and thought it was just ok. Reminded me a lot of T.H. White.

― Daniel_Rf

Starting to notice what could be called a musical effect/approach in some of the xpost Nocturnes: "Crooner"'s (apparently reliable and not too sad)narrator is a young-seeming guitarist from an unnamed, formerly "communist country," as he and other Euros ( def.incl. the trash-talking two-faced gondolier) always refer to it, culturally deprived category being more important than name. He's regarded as an anachronistic but necessary evil by anxious cafe etc. owners around the Venetian plaza: they're afraid the tourists won't see a guitar as traditional enough, even though it's antique-y as possible and the various little folk etc. ensembles sound better with it judging by wine sales etc. One day he spots an American crooner, the one his sad Mom loved from afar, wearing out his records way back in that communist country.

In "Malvern Hills," the narrator is also a young guitarist, who has left school with his little old acoustic, is unable to find work with London band, none of whom want anyone without equipment and pref. transport, especially "one of those wankers who go 'round writing songs, " which he is. He goes to stay with his sister and brother-in-law in their Malvern Hills cafe--they live upstairs, it's actually in the hills, mostly serving locals, they can't afford to pay him, but the idea is he's working for his room and board, the brother-in-law, especially, seems torn between reproaching him for not working harder and feeling guilty for expecting/depending on him to work at all (hey, he's a guest, he's a volunteer, he's family, he's working on songs dammit). Then he meets an older couple from the Continent, who are travelling musicians---pref. experimenting with Swiss folk music, but very often expected by cafe etc.owners to play and dress trad., also to play the Beatles, Carpenters, ABBA (the often loudly positive hubbie looks like Bjorn or Benny might in later middle age). They came after seeing a documentary about Elgar riding these hills on his bicycle (hub loves the look, more mercurial wife later says the area is like a little park).
So the "musical" part I meant is the way he repeats, varies, recombines elements of characterization and setting and plotting.
Also the phrasing, pacing etc. are fluid enough without every getting gushy.

We went through that song, full of travelling and goodbye. An American man leaving his woman. He keeps thinking of her as he passes through the towns one by one, verse by verse, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Oklahoma, driving down a long road, the way my mother never could. If only we could leave things behind like that---I guess that's what my mother would have thought. If only sadness could be like that.

I hate when novelists do this

"that song"

― Number None

"that song" in reference to a title he had just mentioned, had mentioned several times.
I like the way his narrators never tell me too much. Why, for instance, after the security guard flips the lights on in the hotel ballroom about 3 a.m. to see what the ruckus is, does the LAPD cop not more extensively question the man and woman standing on stage? They tell him they've been looking for munchies, and he does wonder aloud why room service isn't good enough for them, judging by his own experience---he's a guest too; maybe he's off duty and on vacation, just wearing a suit and carrying his badge when the guard calls, but wanting to get back to his plush room (how can a cop afford this ritzy place?) The lady he's interviewing is wearing a very fine bathrobe, the fact that she and the gentleman are wearing bandages that cover their whole heads, except for mouths and eyes, evidently working in there somewhere, are further indications of status, which he may take into account (LAPD prob knows about the context). Better to back off, for now anyway.
And maybe the guy who sees them on another night, and comes up with his own tentative explanation in the form of a question, also knows when to go about his business, in this town of endless business permutations. The co-stars of "Nocturne" mean to stay on point too, but they just have to take the scenic route, especially when they get to the "go back to cover our tracks" fallacy (not so far from "spend money to make money," a given here). But there's much more to it---not too much, just typically spare and graceful and energetically generating textured details all along, for the right number of pages, although I hope the last story won't go to a downtempo ending, as usual----its titled "Cellists," so not expecting fireworks finale.
---dow

So "Cellists," the last story in xpost Nocturnes, turns out to be a strong finish. Continuing the recombinant flow, we go back to the opening "Crooner"'s setting, the Venetian Piazza San Marco, with the hopeful cafe managers and tourists and pigeons and musos. "The big Czech guy with the alto sax," mentioned by the "Crooner" guitarist-narrator, tells this one, and an American lady appears, with a secret, a talent, a calling, none of them quite the same, keep thinking she's also from a story by Elizabeth Bowen, Katherine Mansfield, even, vibe-wise, Jane Bowen---but mainly she's another driving, veering, purposeful, impulsive, compulsive, improvising self-projecting muse-agents in the winter of discontent, racing the clock or feeling it, at least, one of the ones in all these stories (one's in two).
Good stuff. Could be quite different from the novels in some ways, at least judging by descriptions in the endpages of this Vintage International trade pb: grafs re An Artist of the Floating World, Never Let Me Go, A Pale View of Hills,The Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled, and When We Were Orphans.

― dow

Jane Bowles, not Bowen, of course! Sorry, Jane!

― dow

Just to confuse things further - there's an English photographer named Jane Bown. Here's a picture Bown took of Bowen:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/15/elizabeth-bowen-author-fiction

--Ward Fowler

Anyone else catch the documentary this weekend?

It did sadly reinforce in me the idea that his early stuff is more interesting than the later work - I will give him credit, though, for never trying to do the "well, it's not REALLY sci-fi/fantasy" thing; sadly one of the talking heads in the doc does do it for him.

The music stuff seems bad but also endearing.

The footage they showed of the Late Review (?) reviewing The Unconsoled, though, I dare you to look at that and not end up firmly in Ishiguro's corner. Allison Pearson and some other idiot just doing the worst kind of non-criticism, telling you nothing at all about the book and expecting you to guffaw at their boring zingers. Dude actually suggests Ishiguro commit ritual suicide at one point, astonishingly racist.

The stuff with the AI was dire, though that's Yentob's fault, not Ishiguro's. I'm sure A.I. will get to the point where it becomes eerie/impressive but it ain't there yet. Didn't make me feel confident about the new novel, anyway.

Sad that my personal fave, When We Were Orphans, merited nothing more than a passing mention.

Didn't know that was on, will give it a whirl. Might have to revisit WWWO at some point too. I am trepidatious about the new one, was reading the LRB review but it looked like it was going to give away the whole plot so I don't know if it was positive or not, I did get as far as the reviewer saying that The Unconsoled might be the best novel written in his lifetime which got me on side.

New one seems to be boldly doing warmed over versions of stuff genre SF has been considering for years as though it's somehow new and prescient.

^ The problem with Literary authors doing sci-fi in general, innit.

I did see the doc. I agree about the Late Review. Tony Parsons was the bad person who said the appalling thing. In those days - though I know it sounds odd - it was not at all obvious that Allison Pearson was a dreadful sociopathic lunatic bigot.

It was good, then, when John Carey said it was a masterpiece.

I still haven't even read that novel yet, I'm afraid, but I know which side I was on in that discussion.

It was indeed rather bad when another foolish person on the programme said 'of course this isn't SF, it's much better and more serious'. Surprised that happens in 2021.

Not surprised

Klara and the Sun - it has the uncanny valley feeling present in almost all of his works, where the world is almost but not entirely the same as ours and the difference is discomfiting. It doesn't have the emotional impact of his best stuff though. There was one bit that approached The Unconsoled, where two people have an argument in a cafe. They don't hold anything back - not in the sense of screaming at each other, but in the way they say absolutely everything that is on their minds, not devoid of bitterness or enmity but unafraid of judgement, not entirely free from petty point scoring but also wanting to be seen, to have their pain recognised. Somewhere between a row and a couples therapy session. There's an emotional depth and honesty there which when he pulls it off (once or twice here, throughout The Unconsoled) is breathtaking. It's a shame the narrator here is such a cipher.

the uncanny valley feeling present in almost all of his works, where the world is almost but not entirely the same as ours and the difference is discomfiting

I think that's a really good description.

Thanks. I think it's true even for The Remains of The Day, where the sense of butlering as a self-effacing vocation is pushed beyond how it might have been at the time. Stevens reads butlering magazines and goes to (or hears of) a butlers' conference - maybe those things existed, it's by no means impossible, but they seem like an invention of Ishiguro's, a bit of a gag but also something that contributes to that world.

Very much agree. It's fascinating and bizarre how far he pushes it. Yet you also feel that this stuff may well have been real, and the surrealism would be the strangeness of real history.

On the other hand he can't create a convincing SF/fantasy world AT ALL, so maybe he's just really bad on the incidental details of life in general.

I love THE BURIED GIANT - which could be called 'fantasy' or could be called a reworking of the realm of Arthurian romance. I don't know about 'convincing' but I don't remember having a problem with that world.

I don't think THE REMAINS OF THE DAY is at all bad on 'the incidental details of life'; quite the contrary.

I just finished THE UNCONSOLED. The mystery in a way is still why it needs to be so long - but then again, it's good, so maybe that's not a bad thing.

Suppose we take this as 'fiction trying to render the condition of a dream', has it ever been bettered? The comparison would be FINNEGANS WAKE, which is sometimes, perhaps half-bakedly, described that way. I think that THE UNCONSOLED does resemble what most of us could recognise as a dream; I don't think FW does. This leads me to think that Joyce might have been, in part, trying to render an equivalent of some aspects of dreams, but only at a distorted distance. In other words FW wouldn't represent a dream any more directly than it represents waking life.

The other comparison plainly is Kafka, but I don't think Kafka is so unambiguously dreamlike; more that the dreamlike is one of his methods or instincts. But it must be true that THE UNCONSOLED is the closest thing I've read to Kafka since Kafka, including Lethem / Scholz's KAFKA AMERICANA.

I thought also of Magnus Mills' ALL QUIET ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, because of the inexorable, menacing way in which a polite, innocent sort of person is talked into doing things - jobs, errands, favours - because they're too polite to refuse. In Mills this takes over the protagonist's life entirely. In Ishiguro it's more a series of constant digressions: whenever he's made up his mind to get back on track and do something, someone else comes along and pleads with him to assist with something, and his previous urgent tasks fall away for another 30 pages.

KI is good at polite English discourse - here it's written in English, at least, though most of the characters are not English - thus endless rounds of ...

"Ah. Yes, very good. Well let me say, sir, on behalf of the orchestra and, if I may make so bold, the entire town, not to speak of community, that I, that is to say we, are most grateful for your assistance. Indeed, I would venture to say that the entire programme, thus far, has been a considerable success - not to speak of, dare I say it, sir, haha - a triumph!"

"Indeed", I replied, "And I'm most grateful to you, Mr Volkstein, for your assistance in recent days in assuring such a happy outcome. I'm confident, indeed, that the programme has gone well, under your capable stewardship. Nonetheless, Mr Volkstein, there are certain matters outstanding, which I need to clarify."

"Of course, sir. That's entirely understood, and we will indeed have plenty of time to deal with any outstanding matters after the reception. However, sir, I wonder if I could ask you, for the moment, to turn your attention to the question of the Municipal Library."

I had no recollection of any previous reference to a Municipal Library, but decided it best to press on without raising any objection. "The Library. Ah, yes. Of course."

... KI does this for page after page. It has a certain effect, makes a certain point, is comic - but once you start, it's not very difficult to keep it up. But I like the emphasis on high culture - modern classical music, etc - as part of the town's embattled attempt to claim status and confidence.

A lot more is going on, including family: the parents who are supposed to be arriving but never do, but whose much earlier previous visit to the town is then mostly happily confirmed; the incoherent relation to partner Sophie, son Boris, her father Gustav; the childhood memories of rooms and of schoolfriends turning up. And I suppose the other strength to mention is the creation of fictional spaces with impossible relations: the way that a door will open on to a quite different kind of room, or a road through the city leads through a forest, a roadside café backs directly on to a distant hotel.

Frank Kermode's description of it as 'tragic farce' nails a great deal of the appeal for me - it's very funny (the 2001 scene, the wooden leg amputation, the journalists calling him a fucking shit), but ultimately has a quite cynical and depressing view of human nature and relationships, or those of the characters in the book anyway.

Did not like The Buried Giant at all - the severe amnesia of the main characters rendered them completely hollow and lifeless for me.

Farce, yes; sad, yes; but I don't think it can be tragic, as it doesn't really have any of the criteria for tragedy (destruction of the hero, in accordance with his own great flaw which is also his own strength? Painful irony as an inevitable fate is played out according to the characteristics of the protagonists? etc).

I don't mean to be dogmatic about that genre, which might be definable many ways (cf eg Eagleton's tome SWEET VIOLENCE), but THE UNCONSOLED ends on a sunny morning with the protagonist cheerfully eating a croissant and chatting to someone on a bus while looking forward to his next adventure!

But that may be a digression from the larger point about 'human nature' as seen in this novel.

THE BURIED GIANT for me was an action-packed thrill.

Apologies for the ending spoiler in my last post.

Listening to a BBC radio documentary about 1960s avant-garde literature, it occurred to me that one faint source for THE UNCONSOLED (whose name I largely find relatively unfitting) could be THE UNFORTUNATES.

Anyone read the new one, The Buried Giant?

― kinder, Thursday, 5 March 2015 09:06 (seven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

A mere eight years later (almost to the day! Waht!) I am beginning this, having forgotten it existed. I think I am not going to like it very much, but at least it's easy to read.

I found the Buried Giant a bit of a slog, in terms of the constant amnesia making my brain feel like it was walking through treacle. The setting/style felt quite off for KI, not a great fit imo. I kind of shrugged when I finished it and was glad to be free of the 'mist'. I think some of the magic things like the elves or whatever they were had a nice bit of understated horror.

Anyway, I thought I was probably done with Ishiguro then I picked up Klara and the Sun not knowing anything about it. Would be interested to hear others' thoughts?

I felt it was probably the most 'Kazuo Ishiguro' book yet (or since the early ones) or maybe a 'greatest hits' tour - it hit all the Ishiguro notes - naive yet intelligent outsider learning about human nature, society and love; some slightly melancholy future setting where humans can be a bit different in ways we have to figure out; trying to piece together a history from what the adults say and how the kids react; like Never Let Me Go the latching on to the idea of real true love being a reason people shouldn't get hurt; sacrifice, etc. Not to mention the naive (or is it) certainty of the 'scheme' reminding my of WWWO (not that I can remember much about that book).

I enjoyed it so much more yet it left me with the usual annoyances, contradictions and feeling of unfinished business.
I LOVED the visual perception breaking down, and how that was described.

I read a bit of theory that Josie did die and Klara became the replacement - he makes it very clear that Klara is an unreliable narrator by the end, with the explanation of her memories overlapping, and the stuff with the coffee cup shelves in the shed being unquestioned . I'm not sure this really works but it's fun to think about.

I love THE BURIED GIANT. I still want to get round to reading KLARA.

Haven't read but good to hear, I was also underwhelmed by the Buried Giant, Zelda vibes aside.

xpost

And I only counted 2 or 3 "as I say"s - as opposed to its driving me to distraction in NLMG.

Klara and the Sun - it has the uncanny valley feeling present in almost all of his works, where the world is almost but not entirely the same as ours and the difference is discomfiting. It doesn't have the emotional impact of his best stuff though. There was one bit that approached The Unconsoled, where two people have an argument in a cafe. They don't hold anything back - not in the sense of screaming at each other, but in the way they say absolutely everything that is on their minds, not devoid of bitterness or enmity but unafraid of judgement, not entirely free from petty point scoring but also wanting to be seen, to have their pain recognised. Somewhere between a row and a couples therapy session. There's an emotional depth and honesty there which when he pulls it off (once or twice here, throughout The Unconsoled) is breathtaking. It's a shame the narrator here is such a cipher.

― Scheming politicians are captivating, and it hurts (ledge), Wednesday, 21 April 2021 07:51 (one year ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is so true re really nailing people and their POVs here that it seems so much more "affected" that the narrator is so "reasonable" and observant yet not - but I think that's the point, again, the negative space in Klara of what humanity is and why she can only come so close.

Yes maybe that's the point but I couldn't get over the flatness and shallowness of Klara - (or the couple in TBG). As the narrator she is very much the heart of the book and she's just not a real person!

Also the way everyone accepted Klara's fatuous idea about going to the setting sun was ridiculous. You'd think an AI (proper artificial general intelligence, not a chatbot) would have the basic facts of astronomy in its coding. I accept this second point may be akin to complaining about the donor system in NLMG - it's just the world he's set up and you take it or leave it. The first point seems more critically unrealistic about human behaviour.

I don't think she told them exactly what she was doing but there was a bit of 'well you're a super intelligent AI so why not'. With Rick it seemed fine. With the dad I guess they set him up to be a renegade-action kind of guy so it sort of fits, but is forced. But then chasing the Mcguffin WORKED! I was so PISSED OFF. But then that left me with Questions so, good job, I guess, KI

And I hate to say it but I do feel like Klara sometimes. Like I know intellectually why people might be doing something but I'm not always sure how to handle it or can't quite grasp subtleties - I think I am a bit neurodivergent so I kind of like the matter-of-fact character and seeing how she interprets things (some things. Some are left completely opaque - I think that's one of the more annoying/glaring contradictions, that she understands physics and human interaction to the point of being able to correctly judge why people are doing things, but completely idiotic about other things.).

Just finished Artist of the Floating World. Admired the elegance of the sentences, control of mood, etc, but overall it felt a bit threadbare, like an overextended short story. Perhaps, having only read one of his novels, I'm mistaking his strengths for weaknesses?

threadbare, overextended as actual strengths??
Seems like would take a miracle, like the "fantasy" I mentioned on WAYR?

Just now made it almost all the way through Klara and the Sun before echoing another ilxor's recent cry re another offering, "What the Hell, Ishiguro?!" Because of a spot of fantasy appearing in the swirl and clank of fairly rigorous, or at least committed, faith-keeping science fiction, the kind with nuances of individual characters, in context of small group and societal dynamics, influenced by technological options and some related shades and spaces back there (a lot of detail, but gaps for readers to fill as well, agreeable balance, I think).
So better to think of it the way Wells labelled his most popular novels as "scientific romance," like, don't expect total rigor, and know that this sweetened spot (though not "sweet spot," in terms of ideal balance) of authorial convenience leads around and back into the overall cadence, groove of involving elements

lots of expository conversations, but also hearing yourself say that, and how verbalization x thought loops, plans, decisions snowball that way, re diff ideas and "Oh it wasn't even really an idea...(later, re same conversation)Mom just had this shitty idea..." as everything keeps moving along.

The plot's pretty tight, so hard to highlight w/o indicating spoilers, but, re xpost Klara and the Sun as scientific romance, I now notice that Library of Congress data has it classified as Science Fiction and Love Stories, which is right: these are the love stories, as told by Klara, AF (Artificial Friend) series B2, of her and her chosen child owner,Josie, of Josie and her longtime best friend, Rick, as they now struggle with new roles of boyfriend and girlfriend, also stories of love of children and parents, incl. more struggles of course.
Model B2, state of the art/being superseded by new B3, but perhaps compensating for relatively limited features, is here especially challenged tune into and understand humans, sometimes remixing on the fly, as do the humans--because Josie is one of those lucky children, not just gifted, but lifted, genetically edited, which is risky, expensive in a lot of ways, but worth it, if you want your child to have a chance at anything in this world, which is strange and getting stranger, also more familiar, just up the road a little way (copyright 2021, but no pandemic culture; he probably wrote it before we were assured of the probably lingering elements of that, but isolation is a way of life in this story, though Josie and her privileged peers are now reaching the age, as part of college prep, when they must have meetings, which means learning how to be with people outside of the immediate family and household---and that's enough for this month, kids).

― dow, Wednesday, January 26, 2022 3:15 PM