Kazuo Ishiguro

I only read it once, a long time ago, and I didn't really rate it. I absolutely adore The Unconsoled, and I think you're right in that WWWO uses the same dream-like techniques, but in the service of a scenario that is presented much more realistically. And that's really what irked me, I couldn't discount everything as obvious elaborate fantasy, but nor could I accept anything at face value. A definite falling between two stools, I thought. But, I didn't think too hard about why it might be like that - perhaps it's worth revisiting, especially as I was so sympathetic towards Never Let Me Go, which was similarly dismissed upthread and elsewhere as implausible and unrealistic.

I love The Unconsoled, too, but I don’t know that it would be worth your while to reread WWWO. I thought it was amazing, for whatever that’s worth. Then again, I like any puzzle that resists an easy solution but dangles one seemingly just within reach. Plus, it’s just so damn strange. Looking forward to Never Let Me Go, which I haven’t yet read.

P.S. Do think that WWWO's falling action and final scenes are a bit disappointing after the dizzying climax in the mazelike, bombed-out ghetto. Christopher's attempt to put things back in the box (so to speak) ring true, but undercut the power of what came before. And while it's hard to tell whether we're meant to accept the final reveal as the truth or just as a more subdued symptom, it's at least a mild letdown either way. Still, I liked the book enough to overlook these few small flaws.

I do think one problem with the switching back between unreliable narrator games and realistic historical detail in WWWO is that it can frustrate the reader's expectations. It would be interesting to read a straight historical novel about the Battle of Shanghai. It would also be interesting to read a psychological novel about an unreliable narrator who thinks he's a great detective. However, switching between the two, sometimes you might end up with the worst of both worlds - the surreal elements interfere with the interweaving of historical details and textures that transport us back in time, and the historical elements run the risk of seeming arbitrary and unrelated to the psychological inner story.

...the surreal elements interfere with the interweaving of historical details and textures that transport us back in time, and the historical elements run the risk of seeming arbitrary and unrelated to the psychological inner story.

It may not all work, and having had a day or so to think things over, I'm willing to concede that, whatever it's metaphorical implications, the handling of the final revelation regarding what really happened to Christopher's parents is probably a huge mistake on Ishiguro's part. It undercuts the terrible destabilization the preceding narrative had acheived in favor of something much less satisfying (if not quite as tidy as it might seem).

I just finished Never Let Me Go - for the second time, it turns out, as I'd read it a couple of years ago when someone lent it to me and told me what it was about. This time I was browsing the library and didn't recognise the name, and the blurb on the back didn't sound anything like what I'd remembered from the book, so I didn't realise.

I'd had most of the arguments on this thread running through my head as I was reading - ultimately it is slightly frustrating, but I think I fall on the side of "The cleverest, saddest aspect of the novel is the limit upon their imaginings." I've grown to really hate the style of novel where some secret is kept right until the end and the reader's main interest is figuring it out rather than caring about the characters. I don't think this book suffers too much from this, although the 'final confrontation' was slightly forced & formulaic.

I actually quite like the writing style, it exudes a childlike quality (although I could happily never read the phrase "as I say..." again). I thought all the little observations of, say, Ruth's actions were really well-written and touched a chord with me.

Slightly puzzled by the suggestion that the clones might/might not be distinguishable from "humans" - surely they are just the equivalent of a twin? I wonder if the flatness or immaturity is meant to be nature or nurture - I saw it as a result of how they'd been very carefully raised. That said I was half expecting one of the characters to hang themselves or something at the end. I noticed they never talk about love either, just 'being in a couple'.

My only other criticism is that I found it weird that the author would so overtly have the character say several times "I thought there was something darker underlying XYZ" - strikes me as superficial and lazy rather than giving us the feeling of 'darkness' himself. I guess without that kind of realisation by Kathy it would have been *too* flat and unfeeling. I don't know.

OK I don't know what I was thinking when I said they don't mention "love" as the whole last bit hinges around convincing people they're in love, but they don't *talk* about it convincingly or seem to have a grasp of what it is (hence Tommy's idea that you can prove it with the art). I guess that's the point he was trying to make..?

Also, just finished The Unconsoled, would be interested in anyone's ideas as to WTF it was all about.

in a more revealing but excised last chapter, the action switches to a domestic setting, where a young man is sat at a kitchen table. a calendar on the wall is turned to june. the young man with sagging shoulders stares at the back of a novel, a mixture of loss and confusion in his eyes. outside the kitchen window, a british man of japanese descent points and laughs at the young man, while autumn leaves fall around him.

:D

Up until about halfway through I was sure there was going to be some kind of real-world hint about it all, or I dunno, he was in a coma or something. Then I realised that probably wasn't going to happen, but I thought all the recurring and hinted-at events would culminate in something. For instance, I was sure there was going to be some car crash involving the kid Boris as there are refs to vertebrae breaking and his neck contracting and a few other things. Or we'd find out something about what his old school friend wasn't allowed to tell him.

I kind of like the dreaminess and characters but it seemed like there were tons of metaphors at play that I just didn't get.

I dunno man I think it's pretty straightforwardly just about LIFE and our basic inability to connect with anyone else... what's that quote along the lines of "we are all alone but it's important to keep on making gestures through the glass"? The message in The Unconsoled seems to be that the gestures are usually misinterpreted and largely futile. The dreaminess is just a way to let the protagonist experience - and inflict - this barrage of emotional torment without having to worry too much about the strictures of space and time and basic day-to-day plausibility.

When I put it like that it makes the book seem like a massive downer but, well, it is! I mean there's lols throughout but overall I do not come away from it filled with joie de vivre and love for my fellow man.

And not just about miscommunication, but poor self knowledge as well - or rather a lack of objectivity, how we place massive demands and expectations on other people but don't live up to what they demand of us.

I read it straight after 'Never Let Me Go' so was kind of primed to be looking for 'clues' about this world, that probably affected my reading of it.

There are so many specific touches that seem personal to one person or character but yet don't really shed any light - like the number of times Boris says "This book is great- it shows you everything" [meta-lol]. To me it seems that the general states everyone slips in and out of, and the nicely detailed relationships, were enough to create the point you make, yet these specific details were on top of all of that but I couldn't tell why. All the stuff about the city having problems, and the changing perceptions of their past leaders, seemed so far removed from the 'personal' introspective aspect of the book that I was sure it had to be some kind of metaphor.

Maybe it's a metaphor that unasks your question - the city hoping that art will save it but it all comes to naught = do not look for answers in art! Although that's so nihilistic and self-contradictory I don't want to buy it.

Tbh I'm such a surface reader it's almost embarrassing, I'm hopeless at uncovering metaphors, pretty happy to just enjoy stuff at face value.

http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-q/2009/12/forget-book-of-the-year-haruki-murakami-has-a-book-of-the-half-century.html

REALLY liked this. Hater's got it wrong.

Gonna be made into a movie too. Trailer looks allright, but I'm scared it's gonna suck because it's by the guy who directed "one Hour Photo," that movie where Robin Williams works in a photomat and goes psycho.

Don't know that the film is wholly successful--it's so locked into a certain mood, it's a little flat--but I liked that it doesn't alter what I assume is the novel's ending (haven't read it), and I did, thanks it part to the score, connect with that mood. A even bleaker dystopia than Children of Men, I'd say, which I just saw last week (and which flinches at the end).

I read Remains yesterday! What a completely successful novel.

that is one of my favourite books, I re-read it recently and if anything it was better the second time around.

i read 'remains' in high school and was, i think, the only person in my class who even finished it, let alone loved it. reread it last year and it's still a favorite. it seems to be a bit overlooked these days compared to his later novels, but i think it works beautifully.

Anyone read the new one, The Buried Giant?

Waiting for the paperback, or library copy.

Nobel prize

Crikey. The Buried Giant had pages of plaudits in the paperback edition, I thought it was his worst by far. The Unconsoled is a masterpiece though.

i read buried giant almost reluctantly because a lot of ppl were negative about it but i actually enjoyed it a lot. my favourite is artist of the floating world but the unconsoled is for sure his great work. that is a re-read i am saving up.

anyway, congrats kazuo

Just read The Buried Giant - he got the Nobel after this? I liked Never Let Me Go, somehow the shoddy world-building made it sadder, and When We Were Orphans was engrossing enough to really piss me off, but this one just drifts along with nothing to grab hold of. And the amnesia thing is so lazy and poorly thought out. There’s a nice idea at the center of it but the surrounding novel feels like it barely exists.

The idea at the centre of it is the major problem - the amnesia means the characters don't have a past, so they don't have any depth. They're just hollow simulacra, repeating the same empty phrases. After I read it I leafed through Never Let Me Go and by contrast immediately had a sense of real people with hopes and fears and tangled inner lives. I'm a fan of a lot of his other work - The Unconsoled in particular is incredibly rich, perceptive, penetrating, inventive, humorous, and heartbreaking - but The Buried Giant is just really bad.

I've given up on maybe three books in the last 15 years and two of them were by Ishiguro. I got about four chapters into The Buried Giant before thinking "no way am I wasting a day of holiday on this". I've never been tempted to go back.

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.