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christopherc 's review for:
The Unconsoled
by Kazuo Ishiguro
After making a big splash with The Remains of the Day, which was a fairly straightforward account of a butler looking back on his life (with a little plot twist), Kazuo Ishiguro's next novel was a sprawling 535-page work of intricate design that baffled reviewers at the time and is still probably given up by more readers than finish it.
As The Unconsoled opens, an English concert pianist named Ryder is arriving at the hotel of a nameless Central European city where he is to give a recital. Immediately the reader senses that something is off – initially, the work feels like Kafka with its somewhat passive protagonist being led by other characters through a world full of strange rules he cannot grasp. But the logic of the novel is ultimately more comparable to a dream where time is impossibly stretched: as Ryder goes up to his room in a lift, the porter carrying his bags delivers a rambling speech that goes on for many pages, impossible when they are just headed two floors up. Later, space is warped as well when, for example, Ryder takes a car ride to the empty countryside outside the city, and then realizes that the farmhouse he enters is a back room of his hotel back in the city centre.
As he moves through this dreamlike world, Ryder is besieged by the people of the town, all of whom have demands on his time: the hotel manager wants the pianist to look at his scrapbooks of clippings, a young man needs help with his piano technique, a boy who wants Ryder to find a toy he has lost, and so on. As he tries to help one character out, another character comes up with another request and leads Ryder off a new tangent. Nowhere can our protagonist find a minute of peace. The town is riven by a conflict that Ryder is drawn into: Brodsky, a conductor the town once believed in, has long since become a crotchety old drunk who shouts obscenities. Can Brodsky really be sobered up, and can he pull off the performance scheduled for the evening of Ryder's recital?
While I can appreciate Ishiguro giving free rein to an unusual imagination, I found The Unconsoled an unpleasant experience. The dialogue that Ishiguro gave to the townspeople is often just as long as that opening speech by the hotel porter: Ryder just stays silent as characters go on and on about their thoughts and personal crises for page after page, repeating themselves many times over in the process. The result feels like a shaggy dog story where the reader is being deliberately jerked around. I don't believe that this technique had to be used so heavily to preserve the book's oneiric logic, and if an editor could have shaved 200 pages from The Unconsoled, we would end up with a much stronger novel.
One can take away a few morals from The Unconsoled: the life of an artist is a lonely one that damages relationships with friends and family and leads to alienation, that the public is too ready to look to artists as a saviour for their personal predicament, becoming almost parasitic on him or her in the process. However, I don't think these insights are worth the slog. Furthermore, in interviews Ishiguro himself seems unsure of what his own work means.
While The Unconsoled is comparable in its unusual technique and its grand designs to many books of the 20th-century modernism, Ishiguro's writing does not demand any specialist literary background, and the language used in the book is rather simple as well. All one needs is patience and endurance, and you'll make it through the book fairly quickly. But I found that this did not repay my patience, and I cannot recommend it.
As The Unconsoled opens, an English concert pianist named Ryder is arriving at the hotel of a nameless Central European city where he is to give a recital. Immediately the reader senses that something is off – initially, the work feels like Kafka with its somewhat passive protagonist being led by other characters through a world full of strange rules he cannot grasp. But the logic of the novel is ultimately more comparable to a dream where time is impossibly stretched: as Ryder goes up to his room in a lift, the porter carrying his bags delivers a rambling speech that goes on for many pages, impossible when they are just headed two floors up. Later, space is warped as well when, for example, Ryder takes a car ride to the empty countryside outside the city, and then realizes that the farmhouse he enters is a back room of his hotel back in the city centre.
As he moves through this dreamlike world, Ryder is besieged by the people of the town, all of whom have demands on his time: the hotel manager wants the pianist to look at his scrapbooks of clippings, a young man needs help with his piano technique, a boy who wants Ryder to find a toy he has lost, and so on. As he tries to help one character out, another character comes up with another request and leads Ryder off a new tangent. Nowhere can our protagonist find a minute of peace. The town is riven by a conflict that Ryder is drawn into: Brodsky, a conductor the town once believed in, has long since become a crotchety old drunk who shouts obscenities. Can Brodsky really be sobered up, and can he pull off the performance scheduled for the evening of Ryder's recital?
While I can appreciate Ishiguro giving free rein to an unusual imagination, I found The Unconsoled an unpleasant experience. The dialogue that Ishiguro gave to the townspeople is often just as long as that opening speech by the hotel porter: Ryder just stays silent as characters go on and on about their thoughts and personal crises for page after page, repeating themselves many times over in the process. The result feels like a shaggy dog story where the reader is being deliberately jerked around. I don't believe that this technique had to be used so heavily to preserve the book's oneiric logic, and if an editor could have shaved 200 pages from The Unconsoled, we would end up with a much stronger novel.
One can take away a few morals from The Unconsoled: the life of an artist is a lonely one that damages relationships with friends and family and leads to alienation, that the public is too ready to look to artists as a saviour for their personal predicament, becoming almost parasitic on him or her in the process. However, I don't think these insights are worth the slog. Furthermore, in interviews Ishiguro himself seems unsure of what his own work means.
While The Unconsoled is comparable in its unusual technique and its grand designs to many books of the 20th-century modernism, Ishiguro's writing does not demand any specialist literary background, and the language used in the book is rather simple as well. All one needs is patience and endurance, and you'll make it through the book fairly quickly. But I found that this did not repay my patience, and I cannot recommend it.