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juliencalendar 's review for:
The Unconsoled
by Kazuo Ishiguro
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.