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