My experience with Kazuo Ishiguro has only been Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. The more I’ve read of Mr. Ishiguro’s, the more I enjoy his style. He begins his narratives very subtly developing conflicts and characters and builds towards endings that pack a punch. The Buried Giant departs from his usual content, while he tackles re-imagining British mythology. The world of the story is post-Arthurian where the Britons and the Saxons are living amongst each other, slowly building the cultural milieu we […]
Subtlety at its finest
This is my first Kazuo Ishiguro and I’m still mulling it over, always the sign of a book that is going to stick with me. There’s a light plot in The Remains of the Day, but most of it is a character study and an examination of what it means to give your life totally to a vocation. The narrator, Stevens, is a great English butler still recovering from his old employer’s death and trying to come to terms with moving into the last phase […]
A double cannonball to contemplate
What a subtle, poignant, sad book. In post-WWII England, Stevens, a butler of a formerly great aristocratic house takes a road trip through the country and has the opportunity to reflect on his tenure of servitude. Through these memories — many with another employee, Miss Kenton — Stevens sketches a life left rather unlived through the endless pursuit of dignity, that intangible, elite quality embodied by the foremost butlers. What is dignity? No one can put it into words, not even Stevens, but based on […]
If “Waiting for Godot” were written by T.H. White
This novel did not benefit by the way I read it—in fits and starts over the last few weeks. It has a dreamy and fantastic tone, but I just couldn’t get emotionally invested in it. As a result, it felt more “sloggy” to me than I would have liked. There are parts of it that I found intriguing, but mostly I felt like I was reading a variation on Waiting for Godot—people talking and talking and waiting for something that never seems to come. Ishiguro […]