Remains Of The Day was a fabulous book IMO. I looked forward with great anticipation to his next novel, which was The Unconsoled.
At the time I read it I found it impenetrable. I really couldn't make heads or tails of it. I wonder if anyone else tried it and what they thought of it.
I found it fascinating, maddening, and very different from anything else he wrote. I imagine we have all had dreams where we are trying to accomplish one simple task — in the case of the hero, finding a piano to practice on — but we are diverted and frustrated at every turn by a series of absurd circumstances. One knows The Unconsoled does not take place in waking reality because of the impossible geographical juxtapositions — he steps through a door and finds himself in a place that could not possibly be there and which wasn't there the last time he looked. So, I took it as an exhausting feverish nightmare, the dream state spanning the whole book from beginning to end.Originally Posted by desiresjab
I have read three of Ishiguro's books: An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans. The best of those three was The Remains of the Day, I thought. The Remains and An Artist have many similarities. They were both about late middle-aged men who realize they have been fooling themselves all these years. Both look back over their lives, painfully unpicking their memories, trying to work out where they went wrong. Orphans was a departure. It started a bit like the others, with a protagonist looking back over his youth, but instead of gaining greater clarity, his world became more confusing and more impossible. When I read the cover of The Unconsoled it looked like Ishiguro had gone more down this direction. I was a little tired of his slow, reflective style of writing anyway, so I decided not to read it. I have read reviews of The Unconsoled that rate it one of the best books of the 21st century, but I am still not tempted to read it.
According to Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence once said that Balzac was 'a gigantic dwarf', and in a sense the same is true of Dickens.
Charles Dickens, by George Orwell
I didn't know anyone exalted The Unconsoled to that extent! I was drawn in in part because I am a musician, but I figured the book was understandably obscure. I took it as an experiment along the lines of Dostoyevsky's Double — an exploration of unreliable reality. I was glad someone did it, but my teeth were on edge the whole time. Maddening, frustrating, nightmarish. In short, I am far from giving it an unequivocal recommendation.
Another of Ishiguro's books that gets out of the middle-age angst mold is Never Let Me Go, but that one too is disturbing, if one buys into its basic premise — and absurd if one doesn't.
I had exactly the same experience! I also thought "Remains of the day" was fabulous, but gave up on "The Unconsoled". It put me off reading Ishiguro for a while, but I've since read "An Artist of the Floating World" which I think is even more fabulous than "The Remains of the Day". I think there is much more to these books than middle aged angst, and even more than the important "complicity with fascism" theme that permeates them both. The former may be the most poignant modern novel I've read, and perhaps the most important, as it considers the destruction of a world (the Japanese "floating world") that is totally permeated by art, from the simplest acts, like pouring a cup of tea, to the most complex ones of creating a new school of painting. I was decrying, in a recent thread, the fact that post-war British authors don't compare with the Americans, but Ishiguro (if we can claim him!) is surely the exception. I also thought "Never Let me Go" was tremendous, and greatly enjoyed "Nocturnes", a collection of short works that is certainly one for music lovers!
On another message board some years ago, I described a dream that I had had. Someone said it sounded like The Unconsoled so I read the book. It is odd isn't it? But it made some sort of imaginative sense.
Previously JonathanB
The more I read, the more I shall covet to read. Robert Burton The Anatomy of Melancholy Partion3, Section 1, Member 1, Subsection 1
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