The Unconsoled | Kazuo Ishiguro | Rewarding, Disorienting

The Unconsoled | Kazuo Ishiguro | mezmerized

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The Unconsoled

	The Unconsoled Kazuo Ishiguro Vintage, 1996 - 544 pages average customer review:based on 142 reviews view larger image
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The Unconsoled is at once a gripping psychological mystery, a wicked satire of the cult of art, and a poignant character study of a man whose public life has accelerated beyond his control. The setting is a nameless Central European city where Ryder, a renowned pianist, has come to give the most important performance of his life. Instead, he finds himself diverted on a series of cryptic and infuriating errands that nevertheless provide him with vital clues to his own past. In The Unconsoled Ishiguro creates a work that is itself a virtuoso performance, strange, haunting, and resonant with humanity and wit.

"A work of great interest and originality.... Ishiguro has mapped out an aesthetic territory that is all his own...frankly fantastic [and] fiercer and funnier than before."--The New Yorker

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Rewarding, Disorienting

Rewarding, but one of the more difficult and disorienting of Ishiguro's books, because time and space have little meaning, and the the reader must focus mainly on dialogue and character behavior to maintain any sense of order. As other reviews have already stated this book reads like a dream. I therefore found it harder to follow than his other books such as "A Pale View of the Hills" and "Remains of the Day" which I would recommend to readers who want an easier book to read.

mezmerized

I'm only writing this so that this amazing book gets another 5 star rating.
Read it. Descriptions will not suffice.

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No Unconsolation Prize

I suppose once one wins the Booker Prize and gets an OBE one can write (and have published) anything one wants. This book is the sort of thing that results from such plaudits. The first chapter reminds one of Kafka. The second chapter reminds one of...Kafka, and, to be sure, the last chapter reminds one of...Kafka. Yes, the novel and situations are rather "dreamlike." But for a true stylist of the oneiric, read Von Hofmannsthal's The Lord Chandos Letter. It's much better written and only 128 pages. The prose here is not lyrical nor poetic nor stylistic. Other reviewers have dubbed it "virtuosic." But if it's only a small step from the sublime to the ridiculous, then it's even a smaller one from the virtuosic to the factitious, the word I would use to describe Ishiguro's prose as well as this book

Prospective readers will be wondering what these 500+ pages are about. Nothing, I would say. Except for one small observation perhaps: One becomes increasingly aware, as one ploughs through this book, how little the characters know about each other, how wrong all their impressions of each other are. This applies not just to our, I suppose, protagonist, Ryder, but to one and all. Every person in this German city who, whatever the audiotape may sound like, all speak in a mildly upper class British idiom, presume too much. They are completely at sea even about, especially about, those closest to them. And the distance between them simply grows wider and wider, even unto Brodsky's death, as the book, sort of, progresses. I can sum the effect up in two lines by the poet Conrad Aiken:

"Separate we come, separate go.
And this be it known is all that we know."

I don't suppose the book really deserves three stars. But, for those who need over 500 pages for what they can get in two lines, this book will do the trick.

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