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3.54 AVERAGE
3.54 AVERAGE
challenging
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
funny
hopeful
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This truly felt like a one of a kind read. Never have I read anything like it, but I can't see it going down well with people who like their stories to have a clear point. You spend a lot of your time reading The Unconsoled confused. Why are we here? Why can't our narrator remember anything? Why is he constantly getting lost and moving on to the next task or person without resolving the last? I've not a clue, but I spent my time with it equal parts calm and anxious.
For me, the book says slow down, enjoy your moments, rest, and make time for people, but most importantly, don't place all of your hopes on one singular life event. Too much pressure on anything is bound to fail. I don't know. I could be talking complete bollocks, but I am a person who puts too much pressure on moments in their life. This is definitely the weirdest book by Kazuo Ishiguro I have read so far, but it has me even more intrigued to complete the rest of his back catalogue.
For me, the book says slow down, enjoy your moments, rest, and make time for people, but most importantly, don't place all of your hopes on one singular life event. Too much pressure on anything is bound to fail. I don't know. I could be talking complete bollocks, but I am a person who puts too much pressure on moments in their life. This is definitely the weirdest book by Kazuo Ishiguro I have read so far, but it has me even more intrigued to complete the rest of his back catalogue.
As with any Ishiguro book, I find myself beginning with superlatives at the beginning of any review – or even, really, when I talk to anyone about it – before I even come to explain the plot. This is probably just due to the prose that encapsulates every book, which, of course, some have come to hate, but that I think about before even thinking about what happened inside.
For books such as Never Let Me Go or Klara and the Sun, the plot does the heavy lifting. While sometimes inconsistent and often supposedly anachronistic, you'll always refer to them by the plot. Never Let Me Go is always "that one with the organ harvesting". With The Unconsoled, Ishiguro grants us no such grace of understanding. It, of course, has plot. Ishiguro says he sets out to make a world other than our own; a world with a different set of rules, and that's exactly what he did. More than the sci-fi or the fantasy that he's written, this world is distinctly different from ours. But it also rambles and confuses us, so needs to rest on the laurels of just the world's best writing style.
The book is prose-first, and of course it is, because without the elegance of sentences that are short and words that are small, pages and pages of both internal and character monologues might be just beyond a normal reader's grasp. Without it, the act of Ryder stumbling upon stranger after stranger that turn into loved ones and enemies in just a couple of sentences might confuse the hell out of us. Ryder's long journeys away, in which he opens a door just to find himself back where he'd started, might leave us wondering if it even happened at all. And it still does, sometimes. Just as his forgetting commitment after commitment still leaves us frustrated. And yet, the storytelling brings it all together.
This book almost encourages acting as Ryder does. I find myself forgetting large swathes of my days while I read. I find myself on a twenty-minute walk only to wind up at a restaurant just down the road. I find myself narrating as I feel a 'large bout of impatience' at only a second's notice, and calming down just as quickly. I'm not sure if reading it has made me smarter, wiser, more cultured, or just given me short-term memory loss. But wow, did I enjoy it – at least, as much as I can remember of it.
This might not sound like the most glowing of reviews. I myself reading back over this had a double take when I confirmed that I had put the book at 5 stars, and not 3 or 2. I explained the plot to a friend while reading it, in the most excited voice I could muster, and they seemed less and less interested in borrowing it from me with every word. But still, I could not get enough of it. It's not every day that you read a book that's this different. It's also not every day that you read a book that's this *similar*, nostalgic or familiar.
For books such as Never Let Me Go or Klara and the Sun, the plot does the heavy lifting. While sometimes inconsistent and often supposedly anachronistic, you'll always refer to them by the plot. Never Let Me Go is always "that one with the organ harvesting". With The Unconsoled, Ishiguro grants us no such grace of understanding. It, of course, has plot. Ishiguro says he sets out to make a world other than our own; a world with a different set of rules, and that's exactly what he did. More than the sci-fi or the fantasy that he's written, this world is distinctly different from ours. But it also rambles and confuses us, so needs to rest on the laurels of just the world's best writing style.
The book is prose-first, and of course it is, because without the elegance of sentences that are short and words that are small, pages and pages of both internal and character monologues might be just beyond a normal reader's grasp. Without it, the act of Ryder stumbling upon stranger after stranger that turn into loved ones and enemies in just a couple of sentences might confuse the hell out of us. Ryder's long journeys away, in which he opens a door just to find himself back where he'd started, might leave us wondering if it even happened at all. And it still does, sometimes. Just as his forgetting commitment after commitment still leaves us frustrated. And yet, the storytelling brings it all together.
This book almost encourages acting as Ryder does. I find myself forgetting large swathes of my days while I read. I find myself on a twenty-minute walk only to wind up at a restaurant just down the road. I find myself narrating as I feel a 'large bout of impatience' at only a second's notice, and calming down just as quickly. I'm not sure if reading it has made me smarter, wiser, more cultured, or just given me short-term memory loss. But wow, did I enjoy it – at least, as much as I can remember of it.
This might not sound like the most glowing of reviews. I myself reading back over this had a double take when I confirmed that I had put the book at 5 stars, and not 3 or 2. I explained the plot to a friend while reading it, in the most excited voice I could muster, and they seemed less and less interested in borrowing it from me with every word. But still, I could not get enough of it. It's not every day that you read a book that's this different. It's also not every day that you read a book that's this *similar*, nostalgic or familiar.
challenging
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
inspiring
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
challenging
mysterious
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
emotional
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
My latest Ishiguro read sat on my TBR shelf for a while. At 535 pages, I anticipated a bit of a slog. I egged myself on with the same cantrip I often mutter while reading Ishiguro’s books: Get to the fucking point!
So, I picked it up, and was surprised to find how readable this book is. Now — I have to take pause. This book, to me, is entirely without meaning (unless you prepare yourself to spend hours laboring over hints of subtext and symbolism — by yourself, I might add, because nobody else you know of has read this book). I’m keen on books about nothing, though, and partially credit Ishiguro for me taking a shine to them.
The Unconsoled is simply too long. It’s about a famous musician who arrives in town to put on a seminal performance some three days later. Intending to spend time practicing and preparing for the recital, Mr. Ryder instead finds himself committing to a neverending series of tasks. The spaces between story developments are the novel’s strongest points. I don’t think I’ve ever read something that exemplifies “liminal” so well. Those creepy TikTok videos where the caption reads “you feel like you’ve been here before”, followed by a slideshow of abandoned playgrounds, fluorescent hallways, and impossible landscapes that all seem vaguely familiar? The Unconsoled is that in novel form. It’s dreamlike in a way that is completely un-literary and entirely knee-jerk intuition. As always with Ishiguro, I finished this book with a sense of deep unease. It is, perhaps, not his most focused work, but one I’m glad to have spent time with.
So, I picked it up, and was surprised to find how readable this book is. Now — I have to take pause. This book, to me, is entirely without meaning (unless you prepare yourself to spend hours laboring over hints of subtext and symbolism — by yourself, I might add, because nobody else you know of has read this book). I’m keen on books about nothing, though, and partially credit Ishiguro for me taking a shine to them.
The Unconsoled is simply too long. It’s about a famous musician who arrives in town to put on a seminal performance some three days later. Intending to spend time practicing and preparing for the recital, Mr. Ryder instead finds himself committing to a neverending series of tasks. The spaces between story developments are the novel’s strongest points. I don’t think I’ve ever read something that exemplifies “liminal” so well. Those creepy TikTok videos where the caption reads “you feel like you’ve been here before”, followed by a slideshow of abandoned playgrounds, fluorescent hallways, and impossible landscapes that all seem vaguely familiar? The Unconsoled is that in novel form. It’s dreamlike in a way that is completely un-literary and entirely knee-jerk intuition. As always with Ishiguro, I finished this book with a sense of deep unease. It is, perhaps, not his most focused work, but one I’m glad to have spent time with.