I decided to try a novel approach to a book reviews, and write a review of the reviews of the book before I have completed reading the book. Why would I do that? Do a Google search on “book reviews [novel title],” and you will find many reviews by Amazon.com reviewers and other bloggers. You could consider it a collaborative review of sorts, where different opinions build on each other, rather than another rambling, unrelenting, self-involved soliliquy. By sticking to the first 3/5 of the book, I can reduce the chance that I will spoil the novel for others that might wish to read it—although The Unconsoled is not a novel that I would expect to end with a lot of clarity. As the title of this post states, I am going to give the 3/5 review of reviews treatment to The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. (Hopefully, I have done more justice to his name than I did for poor Nabakov Nabokov. Since most of the reviews are lengthy, I will simply take snippets with links to the larger articles. (Unfortunately, I accessed several of the articles through a free trial with highbeam.com, so it is a bit of work to get at the full articles.
So what on earth is this? Ishiguro’s new novel, The Unconsoled (535 pages. Knopf. $25), is a fat, inert and baffling book about a famous pianist’s Kafkaesque misadventures on his way to a performance. In England, reviewers have already kicked the novel up and down the stairs — often admitting they’ve got no idea what Ishiguro is prattling on about. Let’s take a look.
A certain “Mr. Ryder” arrives in an unnamed city in Central Europe, intending to schmooze, give a lecture and perform a moody, postmodernist piece called “Asbestos and Fibre.” Unfortunately, the locals all talk his ear off and beg preposterous favors. Instead of practicing, Mr. Ryder rehabilitates an alcoholic conductor, counsels estranged families and tries to settle a bizarre feud about music (“Mr. Ryder, Mr. Ryder, is it truly the case that pigmented triads have intrinsic emotional values regardless of context?”). All the while, the pianist suffers from something-or-other. He has no memory. He occasionally finds himself invisible, or unable to speak. He stumbles around a hallucinatory landscape always falling behind schedule. Mr. Ryder wants to get to a piano, but the piano keeps getting further away.
From: The Unconsoled. (book reviews)
Source: Newsweek, 10/2/1995.
Via:HighBeam™ Research
COPYRIGHT 2009 Newsweek, Inc. All rights reserved. Any reuse, distribution or alteration without express written permission of Newsweek is prohibited. For permission: www.newsweek.com
I am sure many people who read this book will feel this way. It would be hard not to read the novel and not categorize it as Kafkaesque. It seems that anything that demands the reader have a high threshold of ambiguity gets the Kafka tag. I am not all that sure I know what Ishiguro might be prattling on about either; however, I am enjoying it immensely. Of course, for some people my idea of a good read is the literary equivalent of being bludgeoned to death with a sack of frozen pigeons. At any rate, at the 3/5 point I am wondering whether I am getting a deeper understanding of the novel, which leads to the next review snippet.
Reading this book, one is reminded of the Swiss novelist and playwright Max Frisch, which certainly cannot be said of Ishiguro’s earlier work. There is the phantasm of social domination and betrayal of Frisch’s most famous play, The Firebugs, and there is the dreamy lack of identity and memory, those shifting realities of self, of Frisch’s novels I’m Not Stiller, Homo Faber, and Gantenbein. Ishiguro’s novel opens with Ryder arriving at the city’s premier hotel, now a bit down-at-the-heels, and the language of the scene “The ceiling was low and had a definite sag” established for me an echo of Frisch that I couldn’t shake for the rest of the novel, suffused as it is, page by page, with a sense not only of European decline but of a decline stemming from profound and unnameable moral failure. The city is run by an enfeebled aristocracy in search of idols and kings, and it represents more than Germany, in fact. It represents all of Europe.
From: The Unconsoled. (book reviews) by Passaro, Vince
Source: Harper’s Magazine, 10/1/1995.
Via:
COPYRIGHT 2007 Harper’s Magazine Foundation
I had not been reminded of Max Frisch as I read The Unconsoled, until I read this part of the review. (I have not read the Firebugs, but I have read the other Frisch novels.) The comment about the shifting realities of self in Frisch’s novels does connect to a feeling I have been having about the characters. As I reached the 3/5 mark, I began to wonder if some or all of the characters in the novel are actually the narrator and his immediate family, but at different points in their life. In particularly Ryder/Sophia and Brodsky/Miss Collins, seem to pair up. Brodsky is a down-and-out conductor that is trying to redeem himself in the eyes of the town. He is separated from Miss Collins, as a result of his alcoholism and past failures. While Ryder is always described at the height of his professional powers and worshipped by the townspeople, Sophia often pleads with Ryder to go take care of his family and “go back to the way it was before” for the sake of their son, Boris. At one point Ryder takes Boris to what is ostensibly their old apartment to retrieve a toy from the boy. A neighbor appears and tells Ryder that the previous family in the apartment (which would logically be the Ryders) was dysfunctional—in particulary the father that probably drank too much. As is the case at several points in the book, there is a strange disassociation that occurs in this conversation. In his conversation Ryder with the neighbor, Ryder does mention that they were the previous tenants, but the way Ishiguro writes the passage, I don’t get the sense that Ryder is being deceptive in any way, except maybe self-deceptive.
To a large degree, the surreal effects are derived from Ishiguro’s bending of space throughout the novel. Places that seem far removed from one another turn out to be easily accessed through a series of narrow passages or underground tunnels, much like I imagine mazelike corridors beneath DisneyWorld (itself a rather surreal space). While a number of reviewers use this feature to bolster their argument that the novel represents a dream, it most reminded me of how individuals suffering from dementia attempt to rationalize their disorientation.
http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-the-unconsoled-by-kazuo/
The thought that the narrator is in a mental institution rather than a town had not occurred to me, either, so I included this snippet in my review of book reviews. Right now my read of the novel is that the reason for surreal physical space is that the town might actually be a projection of the narrator’s mental state. He may be institutionalized, but I don’t think what is happening in the town is necessarily a reflection of that physical space. Still, I thought it was a worthy interpretation worth considering.
If you have a threshold for ambiguity, then perhaps you would like to purchase The Unconsoled from Amazon?
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2 Responses
I will trust your review rather than the first one, it seems a very nice novel. I’m intrigued now, because the only book by Ishiguro I’ve read is The Remains, and The Unconsoled must be completely different from it.
The Unconsoled is the only book that I’ve read by Ishiguro, and I am bit hesitant to read The Remains and his other earlier works. I might be disappointed they are not more like The Unconsoled.