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3.54 AVERAGE
3.54 AVERAGE
Kafka by way of Vanity Fair, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled takes one of my favorite genres of storytelling, the 'devil comes to town' narrative in which a figure of mystery and malice turns a community's sins out into the open to spectacular destructive effect, into something much more muted and in its own way, more unsettling. The townspeople in The Unconsoled don't have moral failings to expose and explode, but instead a deep-seated malaise and vacuity that sets them adrift, pinging off of each other and our central pianist as he tries to navigate the town. I've never been particularly inclined to read a lot of Ishiguro, but I'm glad I started here (at what people say is his strangest novel.)
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
mysterious
slow-paced
loved the ✨️atmosphere✨️, but man it took me a long time to get through
challenging
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Spent the first half of this book slogging through it because I'd said I would, and the second half becoming increasingly sure it was brilliant.
On the surface, this doesn't read like most Ishiguros's work, and the things it seems to lack are usually why I love his writing. The precision of the prose is there, and the frustrating blinkered unreliability of the protagonist is more frustrating than ever. But this book is strange, increasingly funny, and it's hard to find the emotional investment. But at the core Ishiguro's favourite themes are here — the suppression of emotion in the search for something greater that in itself impedes any real fulfilment; the sense of the gulf between how the world is seen and how it is. And in the strange dream-logic that everyone in the book lives in, there's a new way of reaching these ideas to be found in the shifting characters, all reflecting and distortiny each other.
Deeply frustrating and yet deeply satisfying. A fantastic nightmare of a paradoxical book.
On the surface, this doesn't read like most Ishiguros's work, and the things it seems to lack are usually why I love his writing. The precision of the prose is there, and the frustrating blinkered unreliability of the protagonist is more frustrating than ever. But this book is strange, increasingly funny, and it's hard to find the emotional investment. But at the core Ishiguro's favourite themes are here — the suppression of emotion in the search for something greater that in itself impedes any real fulfilment; the sense of the gulf between how the world is seen and how it is. And in the strange dream-logic that everyone in the book lives in, there's a new way of reaching these ideas to be found in the shifting characters, all reflecting and distortiny each other.
Deeply frustrating and yet deeply satisfying. A fantastic nightmare of a paradoxical book.
challenging
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
N/A
challenging
funny
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
challenging
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Cleverly written about our search for meaning and purpose in life.
challenging
dark
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes