The Unconsoled | Kazuo Ishiguro | The Unconsoled. A Dream

The Unconsoled | Kazuo Ishiguro | Loved it - Hated it.

books:

The Unconsoled

	The Unconsoled Kazuo Ishiguro Vintage, 1996 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 142 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

The Unconsoled. A Dream

First of all I must confess I am a fan of Ishiguro -the writer. I enjoyed all his books (although I still have to read the first two ones), and this one more than the others. The Unconsoled is a dream. Only in a dream you can: go to distant places and times by just crossing a door; see what people inside are doing, and hear what they talking about, from the seat of your car parked a hundred meters away outside; talk to someone that is also you, just much younger or much older...come across grown-up childhood and college friends in improbable places and situations. And what about collapsing a lifetime and the world to just a few days and one city ? Ishiguro's character Ryder experiences all this, and also does the reader, without any sense of discontinuity, which would have compromised beauty. The Unconsoled is a dream translated to words, with all the pain, humor, improbability, and arbitrariness of dreams. I highly recommend this book to all those people who are permanently examining who they are, to those who are always asking themselves "do I really belong here?", who find themselves asking one and again "how come things are the way they are?", to those with melancholy views of their childhood and youth and/or skeptical views of their old-age and thus cannot fully live in the present, ...in a few words I recommend this book to the dreamers and the unconsoled, to the readers of Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Maupassant.

for more information click here

Loved it - Hated it.

I finished reading this book over two weeks ago and I still can't get it out of my thoughts. My thoughts specifically are, "WHAT??" Even though this book is frustrating to a degree where I would have liked to have chucked it out of a moving car, it was far and away one of the better and more memorable books I have ever read.

I'm glad I didn't read the reviews prior to taking on this challenge, I may not have done so if I did. While I kept hoping that all of the issues presented would tidy themselves up in neat little packages, I then realized that this is not a Hollywood movie and I needed to relax and enjoy the very bizarre journey.

There is a story to be told and, you may end up hating every one of the characters at some point, but it is well worth every minute of your time.

for more information click here

It got on my nerves - as it was suppose to do

This is an unusual novel, written almost as if it were a dream narrative, with all the frustrations of a bad dream. I would like to discuss three aspects of the novel; the use of a dream narrative to form the basis of the novel, Perl's dream theory, and the modern sense of anxiety and neurosis.

The narrative of this novel is dream-like in many ways. A dream has its own sense of time and space and sequencing of events. Oftehn in a dream the sense of time is distorted and space is bent and shortened. That is certainly the case in this novel. The anxieties of everyday life are taken into the dream and thus the dreamer feels a sense of emergency or urgency around nonsense in a dream. Logic,which follows rules in the real world, no longer follows those rules in the dream world. There were wonderful clues to this process throughout the novel. For example, early in the novel Ryder and Boris try to keep up with Sophia as she walks through a maze of old-town streets. No matter how they try to hurry, she always turns a corner ahead of them and they become anxious trying to catch up to her. In another scene, Ryder goes to a movie but the movie seems to be a conglomeration of several films including 2001: A Space Odessey as well as a Clint Eastwood western. In another scene, Ryder responds to an emergency in his bathrobe, ends up in a formal partly, is invited to speak, and when he does the bathrobe opens exposing his nude body. All of these images tell the reader that he is in the world of the dream. Dreams don't necessarily resolve issues. They usually only point to problems and hint at answers. In the Jungian approach the hints are big. However in our modern existence, when we search for a myth to live by, the sense of anxiety becomes the predominant feature of the modern dream. Jung's dream theory indicates that dreams can be used to enrich or existance whereas Perl's dream theory indicates that the anxiety and dread experienced in dreams are symptoms of a larger neurosis, caused by the conditions, pace, relationshis of modern life, to say nothing of the need in modern existance to find meaning in life since we can no longer rely on the dominant forces of the church or state to define our reason for living.

I think the dream theory developed by Fritz Perls and revealed in his Gestalt Psychotherapy would shine light on the meaning of this odd novel. Perls would say that everyone and everything in the dream is actually a part or aspect of the dreamer. One way to interpret this is that the young boy Boris reflects Ryder's childhood, the young pianist Stephen reflects the artistic awakening of Ryder, and the elderly drunken Brodsky reflects the despair and end of the artist, no longer able to produce with vitality and creativity. Another piece of evidence that everyone in the dream reflects some aspect of Ryder's personality is the similarity of voice of many of the male characters in the story. They had this extremely polite way of manipulating. Perl's thought that uncertain vague anxiety was a symptom of neurosis, the psychological state of modern man. This dream was full of the anxious dread characteristic of neurosis.

Which comes to the point of my review that if a dream reflects the anxiety of modern existence and a novel should reflect modern existence, then the novel should be as anxious as a neurotic dream. This aspect of the novel obvious drove many readers and reviewers to distraction, as evidenced by their scathing reviews of this novel.

But what is the source of the anxiety? This novel would indicate that it is our inability to be all things to all people. Ryder is continually asked by strangers to help with this issue or that issue, all of which divert him, cause him discomfort, and yet always help him understand himself better. When modern man is in the state of anxiety, he looks for authoritarian answers. Ryder, a great musician, is seen by others an a wise authority figure and Ryder knows that he has not real expertise in the live and troubles of others.

Another interpretation may be that Ryder is a rider, that he is the human soul, continually bouncing from one illogical and nonsense experience to another.

Ryder has dream amnesia, not clinical amnesia, since he easily flows from situations where he has no member to a realization that he is familiar with the situation and the persons and flows back into uncertain illdefined relationships with the other characters.

Who are the unresolved? I think the unresolved are the vast range of characters, searching for the expert, the wise old man, the artist, the star to in some way address their issue and solve their problem.

I did not give this book 5 stars because I found it overly long and overly frustrating. It got on my nerves, as it was suppose to do.

for more information click here

Books, Fiction

Book is old and pages were yellowish.....arrived in good condition and quickly. Book is very wordy and at times more conversation than I wanted.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

products you might be interested in