User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
The author is Japanese-born but British enough through education and upbringing to have written The Remains of the Day. This is a long novel (more than 500 pages) that is like a Kafka dream, or better, nightmare.
An eminent pianist wanders in a dream-like state through an unnamed central European city. While the whole city awaits his performance, he misses appointments and neglects friends and family while he navigates through an unreal world of his own making.
It’s not a “pleasant” book but I found its value in reminding me how much a book can ”grab” the reader – and literally give one a visceral, if relatively unpleasant experience. The whole thing is like one of those “frustration dreams” where you are foiled at every turn. It shows how physically powerful the written word can be.
Some quotes I liked:
“It's nonsense to believe people go on loving each other regardless of what happens.”
“One should not, in any case, attempt to make a virtue out of one's limitations.”
“Leave us, you were always on the outside of our love.”
Not an easy read or a pleasant one, but a worthwhile read and very much unlike the author’s other works that I have read. (and in this case, re-read.)
Photo of Prague from academichelp.net
Photo of the author from theguardian.com
Rating: really liked it
Thoughts on my second reading of
The Unconsoled.
The novel's form is, I believe, a veiled commentary on the text's processes and progress. Structurally, it may be Ishiguro’s most daring novel so far. It must have been awfully hard to write; the prose is lighter than air. It strikes me as Ishiguro's most Kafkaesque novel, especially in its use of dissociative states. Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" especially springs to mind.
Its narrator, Mr Ryder, a pianist of international reputation, checks into a hotel in an unnamed (likely German) provincial city. He’s there to be part of a civic event-cum-concert that has been developed by the town graybeards to reverse a perceived decline, which is never really defined except as a certain amorphous sense of personal dissatisfaction. The people of the town, the unconsoled, want to recapture what they perceive as their past way of life. What's tragic is that they never can. As one says to Mr Ryder:
Perhaps you’ll warn us of the hard work that lies ahead for each one of us if we’re ever to re-discover the happiness we once had. (p. 115)
Ryder is there to both counsel and perform for them, but mostly he glides over the surface of events as one does in dreams. He has no itinerary, never knows where he’s supposed to be, but drifts from encounter to encounter. He is seen as an outsider by almost everyone, yet he has a longstanding relationship with a local woman, Sophie, and her son. He is driven to events far outside town and returns to the hotel by way of a short passageway. He drifts about being importuned by one resident after another. For example, in the middle of some business or other he will run into an old school friend he hasn’t seen for 30 years who will blather on for six pages. In another example, on the way to a reception he comes across his old family car which he once played in as a child, now decayed with rust. This revelation evokes pages of reminiscences.
Ryder is English so there are glimpses of his childhood in Worcestershire. Most remarkable I suppose is the way the author uses long monologues (my dreams are never verbal, always visual) to advance the story. Time tends to be attenuated. The first day of Mr. Ryder’s stay in town takes up 150 pages of the novel. Space is compressed, at times expanded. The book thus seeks to thwart reader expectations at every turn. We are kept in a constant disequilibrium. Everything is slightly off kilter as in dreams. Yet at the same time the surrealism, I think we can call it that, is held in check. The broad absurdist gesture is rare. Though neither are we ever very far from Lautréamont’s "beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” Ishiguro wants the striking incongruity, but he also wants a modicum of coherence. The text is a constant job of balance.
Perhaps Ishiguro’s strangest book to date, which is saying something. If you like his work you must read it. For those new to Ishiguro, don’t start here. Start with An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, A Pale View of Hills or When We Were Orphans.
Final note. The surreal hotel setting here reminds me a little of Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries. But there are of course many novels set in hotels. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, technically a spa; Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises et. al
Rating: really liked it
The Unconsoled, Kazuo IshiguroThe Unconsoled is a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, first published in 1995. The novel takes place over a period of three days. It is about Ryder, a famous pianist who arrives in a central European city to perform a concert. He is entangled in a web of appointments and promises which he cannot seem to remember, struggling to fulfill his commitments before Thursday night's performance, frustrated with his inability to take control.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و هفتم ماه جولای سال2008میلادی
عنوان: تسلی ناپذیر؛ نویسنده: کازوئو ایشی گورو، مترجم: سهیل سمی؛ تهران، ققنوس، چاپ نخست سال1386؛ در736ص؛ چاپ دوم سال1388؛ شابک9789643116781؛ چاپ سوم سال1392؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان ژاپنی تبار بریتانیا - سده20م
داستان «تسلی ناپذیر»، یکی از دیگرگونه ترین رمانهای «کازوئو ایشی گورو»، و همچنین یکی از نابترین فرمهای روایی، در ادبیات داستانی این دوران؛ و داستان مرد پیانیستی است، که برای اجرای مراسمی، به شهری غریب آمده است؛ او وارد شهر میشود، و هماره با رخدادهای ویژه و گوناگونی رودررو میشود؛ نامش «رایدر» است، و یکی از مشاهیر موسیقی کشورش و جهان، به شمار میآید؛ همگان در این شهر، به او احترام میگذارند، و او را به عنوان یک نابغه ی موسیقی، میشناسند؛ نامکانی شهر، و نوع رخدادها، رمان را به کارهای «کافکا» بسیار شبیه کرده است؛ «رایدر» وارد شهر میشود، و رخدادها، پی در پی، مسیر زندگی ایشان را در دست میگیرند؛ او با زنیکه در کودکی همبازیش بوده؛ دیدار میکند؛ به جشنها و مراسمی دعوت میشود، و در خلال رخدادها، هر لحظه مسیر داستان، دیگر میشود؛ بیراه نیست اگر درباره ی این داستان گفته شود، که هر لحظه باید منتظر رخدادی بود؛ به گفته ی یکی از ناقدان آثار، رمان شبیه به مخلوط کنی میماند، که خوانشگر را درگیر خودش میکند، و در انتها همه چیز به حالت نخستین خویش باز برمیگردد؛ «تسلی ناپذیر» داستانی پر از نشانه هاست، و در اشارات داستانی، همه چیز در کمال سادگی، در هم گره خورده اند؛ خبرنگاری که ابتدای داستان، به سراغ «رایدر» میآید، در جای دیگری و در نقش دیگری، حضور پیدا میکند؛ انگار شخصیتهای داستان، همگی در زندگی یکدیگر دخیل بوده اند، و حال هیچ یادمانی از هم ندارند؛ شاید نویسنده میخواسته شخصیتهایش را در موقعیتهایی قرار دهد، که آنها یادمانهای خود را مرور کنند، و به آرامش و تسلی برسند؛ «رایدر» از همه فرار میکند، و باز هم به هر انسانی که میرسد، میبیند که با او نیز یادمانی مشترک داشته، و زندگی و رخدادی تازه شکل میگیرد؛ رخدادهایی که خود بدل به یادمان میشوند، و آغازگر رخدادهای تازه نیز هستند؛
میتوان گفت، چکیده ی قصه ی این کتاب، گریز از یادمانها، شاید برای رسیدن به یک آرامش باشد؛ یادمانهایی که انسان را رنج میدهند، و هر آن، و به بیارتباطترین براهین میتوانند سراغ انسان بیایند، تا او را از فضایی بیرون کند، و وارد فضایی تازه، سازند؛ «ایشی گورو» برنده ی جایزه «بوکر» هستند، و هماره به عنوان یکی از شانسهای نخست «نوبل» نیز به شمار میآمده اند؛ این رمان را جناب «سهیل سمی» برگردان کرده، و از سوی نشر «ققنوس» روانه بازار کتاب شده است؛ «ایشی گورو» شاید، از کم شمار نویسندگانی باشند، که در این سن، همه ی آثارشان، به زبان پارسی ترجمه شده، و خوشایند خوانشگران قرار گرفته است
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 15/04/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 03/02/1401هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
Rating: really liked it
I felt a tremendous sense of relief that I had finally completed Ishiguros’s The Unconsoled. I allowed myself to remember the experience of reading it, with its unusual memory-impaired narrator and the endless stream of absurdity and satire, and its improbable, dream-like narration. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like it would make the perfect subject for a Goodreads review. I worried a bit about the time it would take to make my feelings clear about the book, but after looking around my office, seeing the sun was streaming through the windows and all of my other duties of the day were happening on schedule, it seemed to be the perfect time to start my review. There would be plenty of time in the day for my other duties. In fact, the more I considered it, the more I relished the idea of really striking a nerve with my fellow Goodreads readers. This could, in fact, be the very review that could pull the Goodreads community together once and for all. Yes, a concise, well-written review is just what was needed, indeed I felt quite keenly that I had a responsibility to be the one to write it.
And it is true, many people may well read this review. Dare I say, among the readers of this review might well be many discerning readers and perhaps a writer or two. Perhaps Mr. Ishiguro himself visits Goodreads! I imagine him in his fashionable London flat, asking his assistant to explain to his publishers and his agent and all of his various arrangers hoping that he will offer a reading or a lecture about his work that he himself was entirely transformed personally by my very words! Perhaps my review will help him to understand his own book, with its metaphors, mystery, and magnificent surrealism even more completely than when he was writing it!
Imagining this energized me greatly, and as the light was waning I sat down to begin my review. I was just reaching for my opening words when I noted my morning’s work, still incomplete, on the screen. In the excitement of contemplating a brilliant review of The Unconsoled, I had completely forgotten to complete my responsibilities. I glanced at the time on my computer and saw I had a few minutes remaining before my deadline. In a matter of moments my clients would be calling me, asking for their reports. I figured that I could get a good bit done with the time I had remaining. I placed my hands on the keyboard.
Rating: really liked it
One very hefty tome about musical geniuses & unsure artists (plus the people who love them).
This is one strange, uber-Surreal in that Czech sort of way (yup, the birthplace of surrealism)--twisty streets, opaque individuals... resplendent crystals. Mr. Ishiguro strayed from his quiet solemnity to include literary examples of the picaresque.
But it does not reach the same heights of "Remains of the Day," "A Pale Vies of Hills" or "Never Let Me Go." It is not as perfect a novel as any one in his soul-affirming trifecta...
Rating: really liked it
There’s a theory about dreaming that says all dreams are born out of an emotion. The emotion comes first, then your brain retrofits a narrative around it. This is the inverse of most novels which typically use narrative to induce specific emotions in the reader.
Under this theory it is pointless to ask what a dream means. If your high school principal turns into a giant mopoke, it doesn’t
mean anything—all that matters is how you
feel about it.
Ishiguro’s
The Unconsoled seems to be written according to this inverted logic. What if you flip the novel on its head, start with an emotion and let the narrative unspool, almost randomly, from there? You get something circuitous and frustrating, elusive and uncomfortable, where time and space are elastic and anything that happens might be undone in the next scene. It enables you to experience the narrator’s confusion and impatience (maybe his pique, too) and these emotions seep into your mood, leaving a taint the way a dream can.
Like a jigsaw puzzle put together wrong, it is possible to rearrange
The Unconsoled into a conventional novel about a renowned concert pianist, the burdens of fame, familial obligations, and a provincial town with cultural pretensions. It would be half as long and much easier to stick with, but probably less affecting and memorable too.
The Unconsoled shares with all of Ishiguro’s works a very particular emotional weather—guilt, regret, duty, missed opportunities, unfulfilled potential—and adds to it the atmospheric pressure of an anxiety dream. What does it all mean? I don’t think that really matters.
Rating: really liked it
The Unconsoled is an extraordinary work. It is close in themes and texture to Ishiguro’s equally extraordinary
The Buried Giant, even though they were published at twenty years’ distance from one another,
The Unconsoled in 1995,
The Buried Giant in 2015. There are similarities in reception, as well. Both novels sparked wildly disparate responses in their readers, with some regarding them as masterpieces, others as unredeemed turkeys. James Wood’s original review of
The Unconsoled in The Guardian stated that it had “invented its own category of badness.”
I am squarely in the masterpiece camp, in both cases, although I do feel that both
The Buried Giant and
The Unconsoled require a little patience and trust in the reader: a willingness to follow these deeply eccentric novels on their meandering journeys, secure in the knowledge that you are being taken somewhere worthwhile. I didn’t have that patience and trust the first time round with
The Unconsoled. As I started reading the novel recently, I found the first pages familiar and recalled an earlier, failed and long-forgotten attempt to get into it. I must have abandoned it then only a few pages in.
This was an ironic experience, since buried memories and their resurfacing are a major theme of
The Unconsoled, as also of
The Buried Giant. The consciousness of the mysterious first-person narrator of
The Unconsoled, the concert pianist Ryder, is constantly disrupted by memories of his past. Following a kind of dream logic, these do not surface consciously as memories but rather as reshapings of reality, as when Ryder suddenly realizes that the hotel room he has been given in the unnamed Germanic city in which he is due to give a concert is the same room that he inhabited for a couple of years as a boy in an aunt’s house “on the borders of England and Wales” (I don’t think the liminal location is fortuitous.) Similarly, though far more strangely, when the hotel porter Gustav persuades him to meet with his daughter Sophie and grandson Boris, Ryder begins to recall past, shared episodes that suggest that Sophie and Boris may in fact be his own wife or partner and son.
I speak of “dream logic” advisedly. Ishiguro has talked in interviews about
The Unconsoled as an attempt to capture the grammar of dreams, and to explore the shared territory of dreams and memory. As he notes, we do all experience this second, dream grammar, and we grasp its logic intuitively, even if we reject it by daylight. People suddenly surface where they have no right to be, the dead along with the living, new and slight acquaintances with people who have meant everything to us. Spatial and temporal divisions are collapsed or elided, as are the usual deictic functions of language. “Here” and “there” can be the same place, “then” and “now” the same time (and that’s before we even get on to “you” and “I”—a perfectly reasonable interpretive hypothesis is that Ryder is also Boris and perhaps the alcoholic former conductor Brodsky, in different temporal guises.)
The dreamscape of
The Unconsoled is suffused with anxiety of a particularly dream-like nature. Ryder has a few days in the city before his concert, during the course of which a tight schedule of meetings has been arranged for him; yet this schedule is constantly pulled out of place as new obligations are placed on him. He is rarely in the right place, and never prepared for what he is supposed to be doing. The extent of his obligations, meanwhile, keeps growing; it seems that the entire city feels it has lost its way and slipped from an earlier moment of civic harmony and unity, which only he, Ryder, can restore.
Ambitious, experimental novels of this kind live or die by the quality of their execution, and Ishiguro’s, in my view, is pretty much flawless.
The Unconsoled is a very long novel—far longer than
The Buried Giant—and the narrative material is (intentionally) highly repetitive. It’s really a set of variations on a theme. Yet it never, for me, got boring. It is endlessly inventive in formal terms; and it’s complex and subtle and original in its probing of the texture of human experience. Fissures, misunderstandings, disharmonies, at the level of individual, couple, family, larger social community—these, along with memory and the workings of the psyche, are what I take to be the primary themes of the novel. All are highly familiar, obviously, but “defamiliarized” here, to striking effect.
Most surprisingly of all, despite a very Ishiguro-esque undertone of melancholy,
The Unconsoled is often quite hilarious. I really can’t remember the last time I laughed aloud so often when reading a novel. The humor is that of dreams, again, or surrealism. When the displaced conductor Christoff takes Ryder to meet a gathering of the city’s intellectuals, it seems distinctly odd that they drive off miles down an out-of-town highway for the rendezvous; and stranger still when Christoff stops outside what looks like a lorry drivers’ café. It is even more surprising that the intellectuals are found bending over steaming bowls of “what looked to be mashed potato … eating hungrily with long wooden spoons.”
Two elements in Ishiguro’s toolkit in this novel particularly delighted me: one, from the outset; the other, incrementally. The first is the charming culture of Schoenbergesque modernist music that plays such a prominent role in the novel. I finished the novel somewhat unconsoled myself that I would never have the chance to listen in reality to Mullery’s
Ventilations, Yamanaka’s
Globestructures—Option II, or Kazan’s
Glass Passions. This ethereal, demanding, non-existent music clearly offers some kind of formal analogue to Ishiguro’s literary experimentation in
The Unconsoled, and it may well be that the accompanying critical language of “crushed cadences” and “pigmented triads” is the only one that could truly do justice to Ishiguro’s artistry in this novel. Certainly, there is a strong element of minimalism in the novel, in the utter, unrelieved, perfect-pitch plainness of its style.
The other element, which crept up on me more across the novel, was Ishiguro’s talent for creating peculiar places for his peculiar happenings. Heterotopias feature large among the novel’s locations; we have a hotel, a zoo, a graveyard, a concert hall, as well as various more or less dystopian roadscapes. Within the larger structures, there are mysterious sub-spaces, which captivated me more and more as I read on. I loved, for example, the two successive practice rooms that the hotel manager Mr Hoffman finds for Ryder on the morning of the concert: the tiny cubicle off a corridor, opposite a row of sinks, painted “an unpleasant frog-green colour,” and the out of town hut, up a muddy path, where his practice of Mullery’s
Asbestos and Fibre is interrupted by a strange digging sound outside …
This was my first reading of Ishiguro since he won the Nobel Prize, and I felt more and more convinced of the rightness of that choice as I read this novel. His is a unique voice, highly distinctive, fresh and original in each novel but with very strong consistencies of form and thematic focus. These are the makings of a classic author. To paraphrase James Wood, Ishiguro has invented his own category of greatness.
Rating: really liked it
4.5 stars.
The Unconsoled is at once humorous, touching, uncanny, and intricately, beautifully absurd. My words are failing me at present; the best I can do to describe this paralyzing, captivating reading experience is to say that my inability to wrench my eyes from the page, even when my mind was desperately claustrophobic and screaming for air, felt remarkably similar to the exquisitely unbearable compulsion which gripped the narrator in his childhood:
“My ‘training sessions’ had come about quite unplanned. I had been playing by myself out in the lane one grey afternoon—absorbed in some fantasy, climbing in and out of a dried-out ditch running between a row of poplars and a field—when I had suddenly felt a sense of panic and a need for the company of my parents. Our cottage had not been far away—I had been able to see the back of it across the field—and yet the feeling of panic had grown rapidly until I had been all but overcome by the urge to run home at full speed across the rough grass. But for some reason—perhaps I had quickly associated the sensation with immaturity—I had forced myself to delay my departure. There had not been any question in my mind that I would, very soon, start to run across the field. It was simply a matter of holding back that moment with an effort of will for several more seconds. The strange mixture of fear and exhilaration I had experienced as I had stood there transfixed in the dried-out ditch was one that I was to come to know well in the weeks that followed. For within days, my ‘training sessions’ had become a regular and important feature of my life. In time, they had acquired a certain ritual, so that as soon as I felt the earliest signs of my need to return home I would make myself go to a special spot along the lane, under a large oak tree, where I would remain standing for several minutes, fighting off my emotions. Often I would decide I had done enough, that I could now set off, only to pull myself back again, forcing myself to remain under the tree for just a few seconds more. There was no doubting the strange thrill that had accompanied the growing fear and panic of these occasions, a sensation which perhaps accounted for the somewhat compulsive hold my ‘training sessions’ came to have over me.”
This sensation gradually but inexorably turned into something of a perverse pleasure, and I found myself beginning to savor the feeling of sinking in quicksand, enmired, immobile, and utterly confined. For while this novel was often painful to read, it became ever more painful to stop.
Rating: really liked it
A long 500plus-page read but an easy one. You don't need to grab the dictionary when you read an Ishiguro but you have to pause, drop the book, every hour or two just to take a breather. An Ishiguro is a joy because it is like a silent but deep pond but if you love to shoot the rapids, it can be boring. What I am saying is that this book is not for everyone and judging from the reviews of my GR friends who have read this already, their ratings tend to go either very/quite high (5 or 4) or very/quite low (1 or 2). I am settling for 3 not that I am playing safe (I'd like to keep those friends whose taste on books is unquestionable) but that is really how I felt upon finishing this book.
This is a story about a pianist
Ryder who is also the narrator of the story. The whole 500+ pages happened only in the span of 3 days. It begins with Ryder checking in a hotel located in a city where he is supposed to hold a concert. Over those 3 days, however, he experiences partial loss of memory that he can't even remember his schedule. He meets many people during his sleepwalking-like state including a woman and her son who happen to be his
own wife and son and he couldn't recognize or remember them. The encounter with the porter with a long 4-page monologue that could have been delivered in just few minutes and the trip to an annexe that his supposed to be a ramshackle hut at the back of the hotel seems to indicate to me that Ishiguro is trying to show the unreal (the unconsoled) vs the real and so all those surreal scenes are part of our memories, the ones that we keep to ourselves because those are what we want to look back at when we are in the later part of our lives.
This is my 5th book by Kazuo Ishiguro and it seems to me that the theme of unreliable memory is always there in his first-person narrators: from Stevens, to Kathy, to Masuji Ono, to Etsuko and now to Ryder. Since I am now 48 (today is my birthday), I have no issue with this theme. Who wants to keep bad or sad memories? They will just creep into your heart and will lead to heart attack and so you die early and strain the finances of your family.
However, I also agree with my brother that this book has no denouement. But I think that is by design. The structure is formless. For some people, this differentiates Ishiguro from his Booker compatriots like the powerful plots of Salman Rushdie, the strong political themes of J. M. Coetzee, and the grandiose yet sublime attacks of Alan Hollinghurst. If these gentlemen always make sure that their female readers always achieve orgasm when these writers, through their books, make love with them, Ishiguro chooses to be different: there is a long foreplay and he leaves the woman to work her own orgasm. I hate to think of a married woman pleasuring herself. That is an "unconsoled" scene. But let's face it: for some women, this could be more satisfactory because they know their bodies best. Also, as they say, different strokes for different folks.
So, I suggest that let's leave it to her... at that. In the end, everybody's happy.
Rating: really liked it
As a person who compulsively makes lists and worries about crossing things off them, I read this book with a continual low-level anxiety. The main character, a pianist traveling in an unnamed European city, continually makes promises and takes on enormous responsibilities and then fails to follow through with them for various absurd and aggravating reasons. The style of the book is unique and unexpectedly engaging, but the experience of immersing yourself in the story is one of frustration. I see that other people noticed similarities with Kafka. I find Kafka extraordinarily frustrating as well, for many of the same reasons, so those comparisons seem apt to me. Overall: argh!
Rating: really liked it
From the writer of giants like Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day comes something completely different. Ryder is an accomplished and famous musician who has being invited/hired to appear at a special event that is set to rejuvenate an artistically imploding city in an unnamed West Central European city. We then have 500+ pages of missed opportunities in business, life and love and by multiple characters!
I would even go further and say that the book itself could be seen (intentionally?) as a missed opportunity itself. Not only do characters miss out in the past, as well as the present in opportunities, it feels that Ishiguro himself does with the plot, which at many times seems to veer into something really captivating before dimming out and going back to the almost circuitous theme of Ryder or another character missing the chance (often through just bad timing or bad luck) to better their physical or mental wellbeing. I feel that Ishiguro really tests me, by not clarifying relationships in the book. Has Ryder been to this city before? Was he married, is the child in the book, his? Is Ryder delusional? All these grey areas enhance the book's themes, as much as they annoyed me whilst reading. An almost purposefully at times tortuous read, where the power of it lies with the greatness of the whole than the actual content, Ishiguro's read is challenging, and it is that itself that makes this book yet another quality piece of work by him, in my opinion. 8 out of 12.
Rating: really liked it
A strange, surreal, dream-like work, this book--to me--is Ishiguro's most daring and ambitious, and the one I'm tempted to re-read above all his others, if only to plumb the depths I might have missed the first time.
Rating: really liked it
I hated this book almost as much as I hated myself for finishing it! If it hadn't been a library book I genuinely would have thrown it away. It infuriated me incessantly. I honestly expected to get the end and see the phrase 'and then he woke up and it was all a dream' but was even more irritated when this didn't even happen, such was the non-sensical dreamesque drivel that had occupied the previous 500 pages. The character's weak will and inability to do what he wants to do was beyond irritating and it was impossible to feel anything towards Ryder other than contempt by the end. I understand that certain characters were obviously intended to represent Ryder in his youth which might have been a clever concept if the events surrounding this concept hadn't been so annoying and so even this wasn't enough to make me respect this book. I read this straight after reading Remains of the Day which I loved. To say I was disappointed with this book would be an understatement. I really did hate it and it put me in the worst mood ever after finishing it. I can honestly say I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
Rating: really liked it
I read quite a bit of this during insomniac chunks in the middle of the night. In spite of the fact that much of what is happening to the narrator, Ryder, if it happened to me in real life would be intensely disturbing - things such as time and distance warping, people making constant and unreasonable demands on me, missing scheduled appointments, not recognizing people I knew well - I found the whole novel soothing, and actually hard to put down. Of the Ishiguro novels I've read, which is now most of them, this one verges closest on magnificence, I think. I now look back on many of the odd and dreamlike sequences of Murakami and suspect that Murakami is the poor man's Ishiguro.
Some books are really fantastic and yet you feel like you would not want to reread them. This book feels like one that could be, and wants to be, reread. I'll give it a few years and come back to it.
Rating: really liked it
This is a bizarre, dream-like, meandering and somewhat bewildering book – and I think I rather loved it.
