Grammar is very important. Without that comma, my title is about looking for senior citizens. With it, those selfsame senior can go on an adventure. And what a wonderful adventure!
Unfortunately for all of us, I have forgotten the names of the characters involved but that’s okay. Looking back on my old reviews, I rarely really include character names anyway! This book is set in roughly Arthurian England, there’s even mention of one of his knights. The Buried Giant is also stylistically similar to so much of what we read in my 10th grade British literature class. I was getting strong hints of Chaucer and Beowulf and yes of course Knights of the Round Table. There was something about the way the prose was structured that just spoke Old English to me and I really dug it.
The Buried Giant tells the story of an older British couple who venture out from their small British village to visit their son, from whom they have been estranged from some time. There also appears to be a strange mist enveloping the land that causes all who encounter it to lose some of their short term memory. No one can recall a visitor who came through the village or the fight they had with their neighbor or really anything that isn’t part of their day in, day out lives. Along their journey, the couple meets several figures including an Arthurian knight, a Saxon warrior, and a strange, sad young boy.
This is a book you will want to puzzle through in as few sittings as possible – it’s one that is best completed in just one fell swoop if you can manage it. It was very much something new and different (funny, given that I’ve compared it stylistically to so much that is so old) and I very much recommend it.
I also wrote about commas affecting interpretation of titles for Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory”.
I liked this novel and I know a lot of people didn’t. But I was very much into how controlled the fog and mist felt in this novel. Like I only ever knew exactly as much as Ishiguro wanted me to at any time.