I have read too many books by Kazuo Ishiguro to be just a casual fan. I have everything except When We Were Orphans, which I hear is not very good and am in no rush to read, and his collection of short stories Nocturnes, which I have heard zilch about. That is too much to have read to just like him as I do. A Pale View of Hills and An Artist in a Floating World are fairly decent books to start with in my opinion and really work to establish whether or not Ishiguro is your thing. Never Let Me Go is too over dramatic with a few really good aspects, but overall, it is a seriously overrated novel that whose notoriety heightened by a famous movie adaption, which I liked a little bit more than the book. His best book, by far, is The Remains of the Day, his, deservedly, most famous book. With its unreliable narrator, and the way it uses memories to recall a man’s unbearable regret in his winter years is amazing, and one of the best books of the last quarter of the 20th century. Here with The Unconsoled, I think he has managed to write his second best book. This, his longest at 535 pages, has a world famous pianist, Ryder, who is about to give a performance in an unnamed city in Central Europe, and the many excursions he takes while there, which hint at his loss of memory and the strangeness of the world around him. It is funny at points, like the dog funeral, and the other famous musician having emergency surgery after getting hit by a car, which leads to a hilarious reveal and image in the readers mind. The big problem is that this book turns into a mess at one point, with Ryder meeting people he knows and us never knowing if what is happening is real or fake. This is where the non-Ishiguro fans will probably put the book down never to return, but I like the guy, and the mess is a fun one to try and resolve, even if you never end up cleaning it all the way. If you haven’t read Ishiguro, don’t start with this, but you may like him and want to challenge yourself with a daunting work.
Rating: 4/5
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