Reviews

https://medium.com/@jakefreeland/the-buried-giant-or-how-kazuo-ishiguro-made-me-never-want-to-read-again-d5583a038a99 agree with every word. Stopped at page 293.

Days later: I am still so sad I didn't like this..

wolfbridge's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes

5.0

An anti-romance novel in that it’s about what happens at the end of a long relationship, about trust, forgiveness, bitterness, tragedy, and so on. I consider it a novel about human relationships.

bryanzhang's review against another edition

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3.0

3.5, but the type that rounds down instead of up.

Ishiguro lends his somewhat surreal writing style to a fantastical Arthurian England beset by ogres, pixies, and dragons. His prose, and his dedication to period-relevant imagery, make for a colorful and rich reading experience.

Much like in an Arthurian knight's journey, our main characters, an aged couple, face various episodes as they travel in search of their son. It helps to approach the book not too seriously -- the episodes are rife with symbolic potential, which might just be another way of saying that they can be kind of confusing. I had a better reading experience once I just accepted that there were too many things to make sense of, and to just enjoy the ride.

If Ishiguro's execution on the setting was imperfect, it's forgivable considering he settled on it long after he came up with the idea for the central conceit, in which people and society at large are beset with a general amnesia. This pervasive forgetfulness plays nicely with a strategy to slowly reveal central missing plot points over the course of a book, and is complimented by Ishiguro's own subtleties and ambiguities in his writing.

With all this, Ishiguro gradually shifts focus from the hero's journey of finding their son, to the aged couple confronting the amnesia and slowly remembering their own past. However, similar to how I felt about Never Let Me Go, I was a little disappointed with Ishiguro's over-explanatory execution towards the end. He starts out flirting with surrealistic encounters that are pleasantly open-ended, but by the end, his handling of the setting becomes much looser as explicit depictions of mythical beasts and wizardry become commonplace.

Maybe I wouldn't mind this so much, if it didn't also end up playing into the actual explanation for the forgetfulness that the people experience. I'd have preferred if Ishiguro never explained it, rather than

Spoiler

hinting about a dragon for half the novel, and then it turns out there's a literal dragon that someone kills, ending the amnesia

. As well, I didn't feel it was necessary for us to know

Spoiler

exactly why the old couple ever feuded - though it provided some explanation for their son's absence, I still thought it felt a bit contrived

.

Overall, I think Ishiguro has a lot of fun playing with the concept of amnesia in this Arthurian England setting, giving it an interesting sort of "Vladimir and Estragon" quality as characters are all prone to randomly forgetting things and trying to make sense of themselves. The Buried Giant is an engaging read, with some very interesting threads and qualities strung together by the loving labor of an extremely capable writer, but ultimately, I don't think it lives up to its full potential.