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Jul 14, 2008

Seth rated it:

The Unconsoled is almost certainly not a work for everybody. Or even, perhaps, for many. Ishiguro has crafted what is a pretty thoroughly boring, deeply rewarding novel. What at first appears to be a simple series of encounters between a renowned pianist—Mr. Ryder to you—and the inhabitants of a European city turns out to be anything but. Ryder is ostensibly meant to play part in the concert performance that will bring the city back from the realm of the culturally inconsequential and into the f More...

0 comments like (22 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Emily rated it:

Having loved all his other novels, I finally got around to reading Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, and boy, was it strange and wonderful. I'd heard a vast array of opinions about this book, from "It is one of my top ten novels of all time" to "I loved it in a tense, uncomfortable way" to "it was an unmitigated train wreck." It's always intriguing to me when a book attracts such a wide variety of reactions, so I was looking forward to The Unconsoled for that reason. It al More...

1 comment like (15 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Boz4pm rated it:

This has a similar feel to Crime & Punishment or Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas: dark, unsettling and vaguely insane. It is, though, a masterpiece, no more no less.

It’s huge and yet I zipped through the thing in little over a week simply because it is compelling and very readable. The best I can come up with to describe this is it’s like reading the literary equivalent of a painting by Magritte – the ordinary, the everyday made surreal.

The story is told in the first perso More...

0 comments like (9 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Ellen rated it:

As a person who compulsively makes lists and worries about crossing things off them, I read this book with a continual low-level anxiety. The main character, a pianist traveling in an unnamed European city, continually makes promises and takes on enormous responsibilities and then fails to follow through with them for various absurd and aggravating reasons. The style of the book is unique and unexpectedly engaging, but the experience of immersing yourself in the story is one of frustration. I More...

2 comments like (4 people liked it)

Oct 19, 2011

Jimmy rated it:

This is undoubtedly Ishiguro’s masterpiece! I’ve read several of his other books, but I always come away from them with a mixture of enthusiasm and reserve. The thing is, Ishiguro is a control freak. His books always seem to me to be so well planned out that there is no sense of discovery for the reader. It is almost like you are being shown a set of corridors that unfold very sure-handedly. It’s artfully done, but that is the problem: as a reader, I feel like he hides certain things from me (pl More...

11 comments like (6 people liked it)

Oct 13, 2008

Alison rated it:

There are spoilers here. But I hardly think they matter.

Since Ishiguro is so concerned with how personal accountability intersects with personal and public delusionality, it only makes sense that he should have written a book in which a man approaches a public concert and keynote--and his family life--with the reckless, responsibility-free logic of dreams (stand up to give a speech and find yourself naked; turn into a pig; go backwards every time you step forwards, and why the hell

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0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Jan 04, 2010

Ben rated it:

Felt like Ishiguro wrote it all in one go, without editing. Which I guess was probably the point, but overall a less than satisfying reading experience despite all the nice surprises and innovations you get along the way.

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jan 27, 2012

Kristen rated it:

This is a difficult read, but worth it, I think. It resonates in mysterious ways.

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 09, 2008

Matthew rated it:

Basically every review I read of this book talks about how it's dream-like or even literally a dream recounted. That's not a very Ishiguro-like device. I feel like these reviewers must have very... normal lives. Like nothing weird ever happens to them, like they never find themselves in situations where they are not in control, or where agency just doesn't seem to be particularly important. This book is as much a page from real life as any memoir.

It's tough, this book. It does More...

2 comments like (8 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Eugene rated it:

read this with joanna. i'd tried years ago and couldn't get through it. but this time, with her help, did. a beautifully sustained dreamworld slash alternative reality your choice. a massive accomplishment. i read it after NEVER LET ME GO, which i thought was a similar project, but the latter lost steam i thought as it tried to explain itself after the first third. ishiguro's always in control though, which is admirable. in this book he lets the dream be its own explanation, which is a purer eff More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 07, 2009

Andrew rated it:

Have you ever had one of those dreams where you are trying to get somewhere but things keep going wrong? You get on the wrong train, get off and go back in the other direction but it takes you somewhere else, then start walking but the streets don’t go where they’re supposed to?

I’ve had those, mostly at times of stress, when I had a lot on my mind and my life felt out of control. This book is one of those dreams, described in detail for 500 pages. It sounds like a nightmare, quite lite More...

1 comment like (6 people liked it)

Jan 25, 2009

Ricardo rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

4 comments like

Oct 05, 2011

Lucy rated it:

I hated this book almost as much as I hated myself for finishing it! If it hadn't been a library book I genuinely would have thrown it away. It infuriated me incessantly. I honestly expected to get the end and see the phrase 'and then he woke up and it was all a dream' but was even more irritated when this didn't even happen, such was the non-sensical dreamesque drivel that had occupied the previous 500 pages. The character's weak will and inability to do what he wants to do was beyond irritatin More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 02, 2011

Turner rated it:

Sprawling, unfocused, enigmatic, and absolutely fantastic. This is one of those texts that seems best suited for a reader who doesn't mind getting lost, quite literally, in their book. The narration switches, without warning, from past to present and reality to dreams as the narrator gets as lost as the reader in the magical realism of a world built on memories (as all world are?). There may not be a specific point to the novel, but viewed as a study of an unraveling mind and the unpredictable p More...

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Jan 20, 2011

Elsje rated it:

Door de naam van de auteur ging ik ervan uit dat het een Japanner was, en kocht het boek dus in het Nederlands. Blijkt dat het een Brit is! Een fijne confrontatie met mn eigen vooroordelen... Nee, nazoeken in de Wikipedia geeft me gelukkig deels gelijk! *veegt zich opgelucht het voorhoofd af*. Maar goed, ik had De Troostelozen dus wel gewoon als The Unconsoled kunnen lezen...

Wat een maf boek is dit! Eerst maar eens een indruk van het verhaal, niet meer dan een indruk hoor want het is z More...

2 comments like

Nov 21, 2010

Joselito rated it:

I can forgive Franz Kafka. In his AMERIKA I never got to find out why the teenage protagonist, newly arrived in New York, was suddenly abandoned by his rich senator uncle. Biographers say that Kafka sort of planned to have the characters reconcile and have a reunion in the end but that for unknown reasons he decided to suddenly stop writing the novel and left it unfinished. He never sought to publish it but a friend, after he (Kafka) had passed away, thought that the novel, though incomplete, de More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Aug 15, 2010

Aly rated it:

My second foray into Japanese surrealist novels, after reading some Murakami. A friend of mine, who recommended the book, mentioned that the author likes to play with time a lot, writing, for example, a series of dialogue that would take at least 20 minutes if actually spoken between two people, yet which occurs on an elevator ride between the first and third floor. It's a good thing I'd heard that coming in, because I think the extent to which time-- and for that matter, space and perspective-- More...

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Jul 05, 2010

tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE rated it:

GoodReads, & my compulsion to write a review of every bk I read now, is beginning to turn into a nightmare for me. I look at my huge pile of bks-to-be-read & I think something like: "Am I ready to tackle this one yet?" Given that I tend to accumulate bks that I think will somehow expand my mind, the answer to the question is more than a bit ambiguous. Don't I already have enuf on my plate? & isn't GoodReads pushing the profit-off-of-ads thing A BIT TOO FAR?!

ANYWAY, it More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Mar 09, 2011

Beth rated it:

I felt a tremendous sense of relief that I had finally completed Ishiguros’s The Unconsoled. I allowed myself to remember the experience of reading it, with its unusual memory-impaired narrator and the endless stream of absurdity and satire, and its improbable, dream-like narration. The more I thought about it, it seemed like it would make the perfect subject for a Goodreads review. I worried a bit about the time it would take to make my feelings clear about the book, but after looking around More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

May 07, 2008

Allison rated it:

This book was *way* too self-conscious. I couldn't finish it. The main character, who has forgotten who he is and what he's doing in some unspecified city, gave me anxiety attacks because he was constantly rushing around, missing or late for appointments he didn't know he had. He treated his girlfriend and her son terribly, and at the end, even if it was all revealed to be some gorgeous modernist metaphor, I just wanted to get as far away from it as possible.

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Apr 11, 2010

Grace rated it:

I thought this was excellent but, when I think about what to write here, it just sounds awful. A renowned pianist arrives in a town not quite knowing what he's scheduled to do there. It quickly becomes apparent he doesn't have a firm grasp on anything in his life, including who he is. Alienated from any normal social context, this is an anxiety dream of his life (or his life as an anxiety dream - is this a moot point for a fictional character?) at a crisis point. Everyone has high expectations o More...

1 comment like

Feb 02, 2010

Candace rated it:

I just saw that it only took me one week to read this book...for some reason I thought I was going on two weeks...

As for the book...I read several reviews before I started reading the book (it's kind of a habit) and most everyone was saying that this book seemed like it was kind of a really long dream sequence and a little difficult to follow...so I started it DETERMINED that I would understand this book from front to back and make sense out of it...didn't happen...

Once I More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 03, 2011

CaterinaAnna rated it:

Ryder turns up to give a recital. Then we - and probably he - realise he's to do a speech. Then it's a Q & A session that could save the town from some unspecified calamity. Meanwhile other people nvolved in the concert, and some who may be his family, are demanding his help in ways that mean he cannot possibly fulfil all the commitments he finds himself making. Generally speaking, he gives in and tries to do it all but, on the rare occasions he asserts himself he comes across as a nasty piece o More...

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Apr 22, 2011

Kirs rated it:

Well... that was weird. While I'm not sure I liked the book, I also couldn't stop reading the thing, so maybe that's the deciding factor. Ishiguro's prose style is dreamlike, a sort of lulling rhythm, which works perfectly for a book where you feel like you are in someone's never ending nightmare. I could relate to Ryder's predicament because I've had all of those nightmares: your house that isn't your house; geography of the town you live in inexplicably changed; walls or people or something bl More...

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Jul 03, 2009

Ak rated it:

Something is amiss with this narrator. At first it just felt a little quirky, but I'm starting to think something is rather...off with him... possibly even something sinister. I can't put my finger on it but there seems to be maybe a Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense-esque thing possibly afoot. His conversations with people are weirdly disjointed - at least their responses to him are. He has a strange relationship to his own memory and, I suspect, others' histories. Everyone he meets wants so More...

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Nov 16, 2011

Donovan rated it:

The Unconsoled as Broccoli

You know how some things are good for you in the long-run though unpleasant at the moment of? Well, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled feels like green vegetables to me. As an overall work, the novel carries immense depth; reading it, on the other hand, was a chore.

Where Were We?

Set in an unnamed Central European city, Mr. Ryder, the tome’s protagonist, is a prestigious pianist that will give a performance he cannot remember agreeing to give.
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Jun 03, 2009

Jen rated it:

I wanted to get Remains of the Day but the library was out of it. So I got this instead. I read his book "Never Let Me Go" a few years ago and liked it, but I really didn't like this one at all. I was never quite clear about what exactly was going on and why. There was a certain event that was alluded to be of dire importance to this town where the story was set, but it was never adequately explained. The main character was supposedly the father of this boy, but then the boy's grandfat More...

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Jul 22, 2010

Abeer rated it:

This tome of a book follows Ryder, a master pianist about to give a recital in a city he knows and doesn't, with a cast of characters he sometimes remembers but vaguely, from a past that looms and recedes in his possibly brain damaged mind. I think he's dreaming, which would account for the impossible passage of time, and his conversations, the lengths and omniscience of which are impossible, unless you (he) (everyone) were on an acid trip.

The unnamed Eastern European city setting More...

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Jul 13, 2010

John rated it:

to me, titling a book the unconsoled suggests a kind of sad elegance or graceful tragedy or delicate melancholy. ishiguro manages none of that here.

while it's true that many of the book's characters are without consolation throughout, the manner in which they remain in these states and the action and folly that keeps them there is one reach after the next. the protagonist, ryder, suffers from strange and very recent amnesia, which he seems strikingly unalarmed about. as he bumb More...

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Aug 31, 2010

Peter rated it:

This was a difficult book. I love Ishiguro, but this book took his tendency to explore the tension created by not saying things you should be saying to people you love to a new high. In his other novels this distance is poignant, and it can be in the Unconsoled as well, but it's also infuriating. There were many passages where a tense or sad situation could be resolved by one or two words, but those words were never said.

The experience of reading it, as well, felt like one of those More...

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