The Unconsoled

Jul 24, 2012 K.D. Oliveros rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to K.D. by: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006-2010)

Shelves: 1001-core, drama, surreal, booker

A long 500plus-page read but an easy one. You don't need to grab the dictionary when you read an Ishiguro but you have to pause, drop the book, every hour or two just to take a breather. An Ishiguro is a joy because it is like a silent but deep pond but if you love to shoot the rapids, it can be boring. What I am saying is that this book is not for everyone and judging from the reviews of my GR friends who have read this already, their ratings tend to go either very/quite high (5 or 4) or very/q...more A long 500plus-page read but an easy one. You don't need to grab the dictionary when you read an Ishiguro but you have to pause, drop the book, every hour or two just to take a breather. An Ishiguro is a joy because it is like a silent but deep pond but if you love to shoot the rapids, it can be boring. What I am saying is that this book is not for everyone and judging from the reviews of my GR friends who have read this already, their ratings tend to go either very/quite high (5 or 4) or very/quite low (1 or 2). I am settling for 3 not that I am playing safe (I'd like to keep those friends whose taste on books is unquestionable) but that is really how I felt upon finishing this book.

This is a story about a pianist Ryder who is also the narrator of the story. The whole 500+ pages happened only in the span of 3 days. It begins with Ryder checking in a hotel located in a city where he is supposed to hold a concert. Over those 3 days, however, he experiences partial loss of memory that he can't even remember his schedule. He meets many people during his sleepwalking-like state including a woman and her son who happen to be his own wife and son and he couldn't recognize or remember them. The encounter with the porter with a long 4-page monologue that could have been delivered in just few minutes and the trip to an annexe that his supposed to be a ramshackle hut at the back of the hotel seems to indicate to me that Ishiguro is trying to show the unreal (the unconsoled) vs the real and so all those surreal scenes are part of our memories, the ones that we keep to ourselves because those are what we want to look back at when we are in the later part of our lives.

This is my 5th book by Kazuo Ishiguro and it seems to me that the theme of unreliable memory is always there in his first-person narrators: from Stevens, to Kathy, to Masuji Ono, to Etsuko and now to Ryder. Since I am now 48 (today is my birthday), I have no issue with this theme. Who wants to keep bad or sad memories? They will just creep into your heart and will lead to heart attack and so you die early and strain the finances of your family.

However, I also agree with my brother that this book has no denouement. But I think that is by design. The structure is formless. For some people, this differentiates Ishiguro from his Booker compatriots like the powerful plots of Salman Rushdie, the strong political themes of J. M. Coetzee, and the grandiose yet sublime attacks of Alan Hollinghurst. If these gentlemen always make sure that their female readers always achieve orgasm when these writers, through their books, make love with them, Ishiguro chooses to be different: there is a long foreplay and he leaves the woman to work her own orgasm. I hate to think of a married woman pleasuring herself. That is an "unconsoled" scene. But let's face it: for some women, this could be more satisfactory because they know their bodies best. Also, as they say, different strokes for different folks.

So, I suggest that let's leave it to her... at that. In the end, everybody's happy.(less)

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Oct 13, 2008 Alison rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 not? And whil

...more

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 not? And while you're at it, neglect your child! Break every promise you make! Ignore a man's getting his leg sawed off in front of you! LIFE IS BUT A DREAM!). Or, perhaps, a book in which a public figure should look about him and see all people and events only as elements of his own, all-important emotional life, while the public, simultaneously, view him only as a means toward forwarding their own agendas: public life is an interface at which people cease to recognize other people as people; there is only the I! Or, perhaps, a book that satirizes the idea that dreams have any meaning at all, by presenting the poverty of choice and experience that dreams represent. Or perhaps, a book that proves that ALL meaning can be found in dreams and the subconscious, giving us the dream-life of a character and practically begging us to deduce a coherent biography from the symbols!

I suppose that any or all of these things might be happening, or might not; I suspect that Ishiguro is teasing us, daring us to interpret the book, and then denying the possibility of any unified reading. Perhaps, this book tempts us toward interpretation, then reveals that the only logic that is being sustained is narrative whim: whatever Ishiguro wants to do next, he does! I imagine him typing gleefully at his desk, yelling, "Interpret that, fuckers!" And in a book that, perhaps, is also about the sheer power of the artist to create a city and a world out of his whims, to people it from his imagination, and to force it on anybody who gets close enough to get sucked in--why not? Enough of us have dutifully plowed through hundreds of his pages, then sat around scratching our heads and writing reviews about what he meant... Surely we can take a joke!

SPOILER! I must say that, having been an event administrator for eight years, I howled with delight near the end of the book, when Ryder is taken to task by the event planner for the city's gala, Miss Stratmann. Ryder bursts into tears, and she gives him--and us--a big plot surprise upon which all of our readings must ultimately depend (if any such readings can be said to depend, thusly--to hang together at all). Everything, in fact, depends on Miss Stratmann! So this is my final reading of the book: The Unconsoled is an extended analogy of the exercise of authorial power to the exercise of event administration. Ishiguro and Miss Stratmann are in control--and rest of us are just hapless members of their audience.

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Jul 14, 2008 Seth Hahne rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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

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Jan 02, 2013 Lobstergirl rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: glaziers

Shelves: own, fiction, vacation-reads

I read quite a bit of this during insomniac chunks in the middle of the night. In spite of the fact that much of what is happening to the narrator, Ryder, if it happened to me in real life would be intensely disturbing - things such as time and distance warping, people making constant and unreasonable demands on me, missing scheduled appointments, not recognizing people I knew well - I found the whole novel soothing, and actually hard to put down. Of the Ishiguro novels I've read, which is now m...more

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Apr 12, 2008 Emily rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2008, favorites

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 also just so happens that I read...more 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 also just so happens that I read Ishiguro in what you might call "increasing order of weirdness," and I had heard that this is indeed his weirdest book. There is something deeply satisfying about continuing my trajectory in this way, although at this point I doubt it's sustainable any longer - it would be quite a challenge to write a stranger book than this one.

Of course, many of its strange qualities have been explored before. The surreality, the language of dreams and nightmares in which the protagonist tries in vain to accomplish simple tasks, the sudden and confusing shifts in setting and perspective, the garbled rationale and bizarre priorities of the natives in a strangely familiar city: all of these elements have been combined and recombined to create the "Kafkaesque" genre. That said, this book does all of these things in a way that seems more tense and fluid than many other dreamlike stories I've read. Ishiguro really captures the shifting sands of perception that mark a dreamlike consciousness. At the same time, he manages to maintain cohesion within the narrative - just barely, at times, but he manages it. Sometimes the balance between the surreality and the sense of coherent character and voice, feels like a virtuosic juggling act that the performer is just barely pulling off; the audience is poised at the edge of their seats, transfixed at the intricate patterns traced by the juggled objects, and simultaneously nervous that they will, at any moment, come crashing down on the performer's head.

Appropriately, then, the main character of The Unconsoled IS a performer: Ryder, a famous English pianist revisiting a city which may or may not already be familiar to him, where he is supposed to give a performance which may or may not be very important in a variety of ways. One of the things I loved about this novel was the unique way that relationships slid in and out of focus; a few pages after seeking out the daughter of an acquaintance in a café, Ryder will gradually "remember" more and more details about her. Although it is at first implied that they have just met, they are soon having conversations that suggest a long history of mutual resentments and shared hopes, attacking and reassuring each other in a manner reminiscent of a (dysfunctional) long-term relationship. Ryder's own emotions and thought processes regarding the happiness and mental health of the woman's son, Boris, achieve a level of intensity more appropriate to a stepfather than a chance acquaintance, and Boris' own reactions to Ryder indicate a deep desire for approval reminiscent of a neglected child. At the same time, the closeness of Ryder's relationships with mother and child is never explicitly stated, and seems to wax and wane unpredictably throughout the novel.

In a similar vein, the life stories of different characters start to mirror and imitate one another in eerie and intriguing ways. Having been drawn into a conversation with the hotel porter, Gustav, about how Gustav has fallen into the habit of never speaking directly to his daughter, Ryder gradually adopts the same practice toward Boris, his sometime-son. Witnessing the fraught relationship between the hotel manager Hoffman and his son Stephan either suggests to or reminds Ryder of his own nebulous connection with his parents, who may or may not be arriving in the unnamed city to hear him play the piano for the first time in many years. The reader is never sure the extent to which the conversations and stories going on around Ryder create his perceived world, the extent to which he is extrapolating his own story outward onto those around him, and the extent to which a more complex dynamic is at work. The primal fears involved in many of these interactions (rejection by parents, arriving unprepared for important performances, the sudden realization that one's actions have been wildly inappropriate) add another level to the question of what Ryder is "half-creating" and what he perceives; there is a sense that we may be caught in an uncontrollable spiral, continually creating the worlds we dread through the very act of dreading them.

This sense of inappropriate behavior is a constant throughout The Unconsoled, and it runs the gamut from exhilarating to horrifying to surprisingly unexceptional. Nobody seems to notice, for example, when Ryder shows up to a fancy dress event in his dressing gown and slippers, and Ryder himself is strangely nonreactive when a journalist and photographer who are interviewing him commence talking about him as if her weren't present, planning how they will flatter and distract him into making unwise publicity decisions. On the other hand, he is horrified when the mourners at a funeral stop their sobbing to flock around him and deluge him with manic adulation, searching their pockets for refreshments to offer him and castigating themselves for having only a small piece of cellophane-wrapped cake. In one of my favorite scenes in the novel, Ryder and his wife-or-maybe-just-casual-acquaintance Sophie attend a late-night showing of 2001: A Space Odyssey - an alternate-universe version of the film involving interstellar gunfights between Yul Brenner and Clint Eastwood, who star as the astronauts who must dismantle HAL. The atmosphere in the theater is depicted as almost carnivalesque, with people laughing, talking, playing cards in the aisles, and, most bizarrely, rolling onto their backs with their legs in the air, shrieking with mirth, whenever anyone needs to inch by their seats. This is the flip-side to the terrifying or disconcerting abandonment of logical behavior in other sections - a giddy, liberating feeling which pervades the theater and lets the locals, as the hotel manager puts it, "unwind."

But the strangest narrative quirk of The Unconsoled is the way in which Ryder occasionally takes casual notice of a long, complicated back-story just by looking at a person, in the same way that he might notice a runny nose or a lipstick smudge. The first time this happens, as Gustav is showing him around his hotel room, I found the trick strangely disorienting, and actually doubled back to see whether I had missed a small phrase such as "I found out later" or "he would go on to tell me." But as I went on with the novel and similar incidents followed, it struck me as a very clever way to play with narrative. Readers are already familiar, after all, with narrators who notice small physical details about people they're observing, and even make assumptions or draw conclusions based on those observations. The next (il)logical step, in a novel of surreal perceptions taken to grotesque heights, is the ability to simply perceive another person's thoughts, feelings, past or present actions simply by looking at or thinking about them. So, for example, Ryder can take casual notice of Gustav's preoccupied air in the hotel room, and also casually notice that the porter is worried about his daughter, who has been handing off her son on certain days so that she can do errands, and then (Gustav has reason to believe) not doing the errands after all. Similarly, he can be waiting in the car with Boris while Stephan Hoffman runs an errand at a woman's apartment, and tell us how he watches Stephan climb the stairs and ring the bell, then recount his conversation with the woman as he enters the apartment and follows her down the hall, recounting the interior design as well as the conversation. Then, in case the reader is thinking that Ryder must have followed Stephen into the apartment after all, he writes that his attention was recalled by a noise made by Boris, and goes on to interact with the boy within the confines of the car. The liquidity of perception here is masterfully done, and once I cottoned on to this unique little trick, I quite enjoyed the experience of having the narrative stretch and balloon in unexpected and sometimes humorous directions.

Just as Ryder describes audiences reacting to the ultra-modern musical pieces performed in the novel, I loved The Unconsoled on a purely aesthetic basis. I'm not sure what lasting messages or morals I'll take away from it, beyond a sense of the universality of human fears and fallibility, but the tense, intriguing mood and skewed, shadowy universe it created are still tangible to me days after closing the covers. (less)

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Feb 21, 2012 Beth rated it 5 of 5 stars

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, the more 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...more 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, the more 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 my office, seeing the sun was streaming through the windows and all of my other duties of the day were happening on schedule, it seemed to be the perfect time to start my review. There would be plenty of time in the day for my other duties. In fact, the more I considered it, the more I relished the idea of really striking a nerve with my fellow Goodreads readers. This could, in fact, be the very review that could pull the Goodreads community together once and for all. Yes, a concise, well-written review is just what was needed, indeed I felt quite keenly that I had a responsibility to be the one to write it.

And it is true, many people may well read this review. Dare I say, among the readers of this review might well be many discerning readers and perhaps a writer or two. Perhaps Mr. Ishiguro himself visits Goodreads! I imagine him in his fashionable London flat, asking his assistant to explain to his publishers and his agent and all of his various arrangers hoping that he will offer a reading or a lecture about his work that he himself was entirely transformed personally by my very words! Perhaps my review will help him to understand his own book, with its metaphors, mystery, and magnificent surrealism even more completely than when he was writing it!

Imagining this energized me greatly, and as the light was waning I sat down to begin my review. I was just reaching for my opening words when I noted my morning’s work, still incomplete, on the screen. In the excitement of contemplating a brilliant review of The Unconsoled, I had completely forgotten to complete my responsibilities. I glanced at the time on my computer and saw I had a few minutes remaining before my deadline. In a matter of moments my clients would be calling me, asking for their reports. I figured that I could get a good bit done with the time I had remaining. I placed my hands on the keyboard.
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Jul 10, 2007 Boz4pm rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 person and through the ey...more 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 person and through the eyes of one Mr Ryder. At first you wonder if he’s suffering from jet-lag, or possibly even amnesia, but then it slowly dawns on you that it actually reads like a dream and it’s never wholly clear if this is Ryder’s genuine perception - i.e. he is insane - or simply a literary construct. Everyone he meets pours out their life stories to him, assumes he knows what the schedule is, expects him to know what they are talking about and that he is prepared and yet, just in some classic nightmare scenario, he has absolutely no clue whatsoever and lets them lead him from one scene to another.

It does mean that, reading it, you get that same sensation as you do in exactly those kind of dreams – faintly nervous, anxious, unnerved by the whole thing, yearning for clarity, explanation or some kind of end to the roller-coaster effect of travelling on and on without quite getting to where you thought you were meant to be going. You are desperate for Ryder to actually DO all the things he claims he needs to do, or that people ask of him, and yet the diversions and distractions come one after another and nothing is quite as it should be. It is only when you are about three-quarters of the way through that slowly things start to pull together and you suddenly see the genius in the writing – that this mad, linear weirdness actually is forming something quite astonishing.

As the story unfolds, we feel great sympathy for Ryder, lost as he is in this weirdly phantasmal world where nothing feels certain and time and space seem to bend at will at times. Slowly, though, the sense of confusion and amnesia in the character dissolves to a sense of arrogance, and by the end we can not only appreciate Ryder’s frustrations, but also that of those around him. Ultimately he turns out to be selfish and shallow, and yet we are not unsympathetic – we have come on this journey with him, so when we know him at last in his responses to others, we are frustrated by him more than we loathe him. He has been as much at fault as others, perhaps, but as much through circumstances as his own inability to empathise.

And empathy is needed. People are falling apart around him – sometimes literally. The depth of characterisation is extraordinary. Everyone has long, long soliloquies in which we learn so much and which are surprisingly readable and entertaining. Indeed you want to know more, you want to find out what will happen, if Ryder will ever get himself together or if events will completely defeat him.

Slowly, bit by bit, each layer is peeled back and you find out more and more about the main characters around him, each of them dependent on Ryder or asking something of him, needing him to do something (or so he believes, rightly or wrongly), or into whose lives he feels himself drawn in spite of himself. By the end, their stories have become far more important than Ryder’s own, indeed Ryder has become a complete irrelevance almost in every possible sense. That in itself is a comment, a commentary on the man – and this is something that, so I understand, this author does a lot: allows you to gain huge sympathy with the main character and only then reveal their flaws via other people’s reaction to them. It’s a superb technique, and you don’t really see it or understand that as happening till towards the end.

This book is utterly enthralling and absorbing in a way that is hard to describe. I can highly recommend it.(less)

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Jul 12, 2007 Ellen rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

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 se...more

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Oct 19, 2011 Jimmy rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: people who aren't too anal

Recommended to Jimmy by: Jessica

Shelves: united-kingdom, year-1990s, male, novel

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 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 (plot points, twists, etc.) that end up making me feel manipulated.

Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of manipulation in this book as well (perhaps even more). However, it seems well earned here. His reveals are done so organically that when it comes you get this ‘of course!’ moment. That is because these characters are so well developed, and you find out more and more about them as the novel unfolds, and each one is a little less surprising knowing what you know already, it’s totally believable. The other thing is that Ishiguro balances out his control-freak nature with an opposite impulse: by writing in the style of a surreal dream-state, he necessarily introduces elements that are indeterminate, illogical, and irresolvable. It means that his carefully controlled plot is always veering seemingly out of control, yet always still maintaining control. It is this tension that makes it work. I feel like many amateur writers try this surreal Kafka-esque kind of writing. But without the discipline that Ishiguro brings here, the writing often suffers from a sense of complete randomness, i.e. weird for the sake of being weird. What’s impressive is that through all the craziness, you can see that Ishiguro has a concrete, realistic vision and emotional center (though at points it does seem random, it takes 535 pages to finally see how it all comes together).

To me, it’s a book about the futility and short sightedness of human endeavors, and about how we are all pulled in certain directions by our past so that we end up in a rut going around in a circle. The last image of the book is especially poignant. Ryder is riding (intentional pun?) on a tram that circles the city. He is understandably sad about the events that have transpired, and yet he’s made a new friend who doesn’t care to ask too many personal questions. On top of that, there is a buffet being served. Ryder finds his mood improving already. All the themes of the book are here, the insularity of the small town with its citizens stuck on a circular track, the shortsightedness of immediate distractions, the futility of ever truly addressing deeper problems (i.e. Ryder’s essential unhappiness).

Ishiguro is able to build highly complex characters, each with their own set of crazy behaviors. But underneath that wacky exterior lies a hidden agenda. Each character’s hidden agenda is what drives him/her to act/interact with others the way they do, often using others only as a means to their own ends. It’s a tightly knit tangle of complex emotions and motivations that becomes claustrophobically more depressing the more you think about it. Each character’s trajectory weaves into those around them, and necessarily brings the whole community down. What Ishiguro says about this small town is devastating, his vision of humanity is one of the saddest things to read, though not without a lot of truth... for many of these characters have very good intentions, but they are blinded by their own myopic goals, so that they never see the world around them.

I wish Ishiguro would stop writing those Never Let Me Downs and Artist of the Floating Worlds and write more books like this one.(less)

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Dec 25, 2012 Bettie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: winter-20122013, published-1995, music, hungarian-root

1995
Narrated by: David Case (British)
Audiobook Publication: Books on Tape Inc, 1998
Length: 19h 55m, unabridged
Tracks: 8 chapters
Source: Cassette (home edition)

blurb: The Unconsoled is the story of a man named Ryder. He is a pianist of international renown who, as the novel opens, has arrived in a European city he cannot identify to give a concert he cannot remember agreeing to give. In the days before the concert, he is led in and out of the lives of seeming strangers, but his fleeting recollect...more

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Nov 14, 2012 Kaci rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It was definitely... interesting. Not a book you can sit and read in one sitting without experiencing it to its full value. The characters sure as hell talked a lot, though - that got on my nerves a bit, but overall this was a decent read. Made me think for once. I liked it.

Felt bad for Stephan, Boris, Fiona and Brodsky. They never quite got the treatment they deserved. Hoffman and Sophie were probably my least favorite people. Ryder had good intentions but the poor guy was so stressed and tire...more

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May 27, 2008 Ben rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2008

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.

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Nov 15, 2012 agent zero rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: anglofoni

Premetto che il libro sembra il perfetto esempio di opera destinata a piacere molto o a non piacere affatto, a seconda dei gusti, perché centrata su un'idea a dir poco inconsueta e tirata molto per le lunghe.
Qual sarebbe l'idea? Eccola: il romanzo è strutturato come un sogno del protagonista, ma in modo sottile e ben misurato, e proprio come capita nei sogni i concetti di tempo e spazio sono malleabili in funzione delle cose che ci accadono, i ricordi vanno e vengono, le ansie e i timori si tras...more

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Apr 09, 2008 Matthew Snyder rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 doesn't come easy. It...more 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 doesn't come easy. It reads like Proust at times. It made me want to throw the book across the room violently at times, it's so maddeningly slow. I have never felt so much a party to the trials and frustrations of the narrator as I did in this book. And part of what made the book so successful is that I had so little respect for the narrator and yet I found myself taking his side, repeatedly, throughout the book.

Troublingly, for me, there are a number of scenes where the protagonist is chided or downright excoriated for his lack of warmth towards his son. His son to me seemed unbearably annoying and difficult. I felt that the protagonist rightly called a spade a spade and said that his boy was the unreasonable one and that he didn't understand why his boy's mother was upset with him, what more was required of him. Other reviewers have commented that this was a particularly toxic part of his personality, that it cemented their hatred for him. And yet, I found myself agreeing with him and hating the boy. I seriously wonder what this means for my parenting skills.

I would generally not finish books like this, since it is on several levels rather boring. Eons pass before conversations end, conversations about nothing, full of pleasantries and social graces. It's very British in that respect. What kept me reading was this endless optimism, this feeling that if I just kept reading, eventually the narrator would figure it out and get beyond the sort of nightmarish succession of useless interludes whose meaning he continually failed to grok. Whether I really wanted there to be some kind of plot at the end of this, or whether I just really enjoyed seeing him fail, I can't say.

I absolutely love the fact that the big climactic event, the concert he's been invited to give -- the success of which will somehow determine the rise or fall of this town for generations to come -- was scheduled for a Thursday night. I suppose the babysitters are a little cheaper. I know it was a minor detail but to me it was so telling, so *right*.

This is now one of my favorite books, one which I will almost certainly never recommend to anyone.(less)

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May 04, 2007 Eugene rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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

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Nov 22, 2012 [P] rated it 5 of 5 stars

You know how young girls feel about Justin Bieber? Well, that's kind of how I feel about this. I often pull it from my shelves and look at it in a dreamy fashion. In short, it is mega.

As I have noted previously, the phrase Kafkaesque gets thrown about like a porn star filming a gangbang scene, and the term is often applied to The Unconsoled also. Wrongly, of course, because Ishiguro's novel is warmer, more wonderful [but not necessarily better], than anything Kafka wrote. You know how if you st...more

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knig mega, eh? I would agree you, but then we'd both be wrong. As i was a captive audience on my flight back from Venice yesterday, I had to plough through...more
Jan 14, 2013 08:58am

[P] Interesting take on it, knig. It's so long ago that I read it that I can't give you a detailed analysis but, at the time, it struck me as a novel abou...more
updated Jan 14, 2013 09:16am

knig Well, if its such a favourite, you definitely owe it to yourself to parse it out a bit more. Its clearly widely open to interpretations (although I ha...more
Jan 14, 2013 09:24am

Mar 07, 2009 Andrew rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 literally. I t...more 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 literally. I think in most authors’ hands, it would be. But Kazuo Ishiguro is a natural storyteller and somehow he pulls it off. In many of his books, things are left unsaid or unexplained. His narrative style is subtle and understated. He’s the perfect person to write this kind of book.

The main character is a famous concert pianist called Ryder who arrives in an unspecified town somewhere in central Europe to give a recital. The book covers the three days of his stay in the town. As he stays, more demands are made on him, demands that he can never seem to satisfy. He never has enough time, he is always late, always tired, always disappointing people. His life feels out of control.

One thing I liked was that it was never made obvious that it was a dream. Nothing really outlandish happened - the narrator didn’t suddenly start flying across rooftops (another mainstay of my dreams) or confronting big green monsters or anything like that. The effect of a dream was created through confused logic - events narrated as if they made sense, but with a big contradiction in them. For example, an old porter who carries his luggage at the hotel talks about his daughter and grandson. He’s worried about them and wants Ryder to go and meet them. When Ryder does meet them, the daughter is now his wife or at least lover. The contradiction is maintained through the book and never explained logically. At several times, simple geography is distorted. Ryder goes all the way across town to a party at a country house, and then when he wants to go back to the hotel he discovers that he is actually already back there - he just came in by a different entrance and didn’t recognise it. A ticket inspector on a tram turns out to be an old childhood friend from England. Like everyone else, she expects a lot from him and he lets her down.

I realise that it probably still sounds like a nightmare of a book. It’s hard to explain quite why I liked it. I suppose the premise was so difficult that it was good to see Ishiguro pull it off so artfully. There were also a lot of interesting subplots about the people in the town - an alcoholic old conductor, Brodsky, who’s trying to resurrect his career and win back his wife; a hotel owner Hoffman and his son who wants to be a pianist but only disappoints his parents; Ryder’s relationship with Sophie and the boy Boris; the old porter Gustav and his friends who meet in the Hungarian Cafe. I was interested in these people partly for themselves, and partly because if the whole thing is a dream, then they are clues to the dreamer’s personality: figures from his past, people he feels guilty about treating badly, or perhaps different incarnations of himself at various points in his life.

Despite all the good points, the book did feel very long after a while - the action is deliberately repetitive and circular, and I thought that it could have been shortened quite significantly without losing much of the overall meaning of the book. But I still felt compelled to read on, even though I knew really where it was all going. And at the end of it all, I had that warm feeling of satisfaction that comes from having read a really good book.(less)

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Jan 25, 2009 Ricardo rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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Mar 15, 2013 Philip rated it 3 of 5 stars

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled presents the reader with a thoroughly strange experience. Initial impressions might suggest something merely conventional. Charles Ryder is a pianist and is apparently famous. He arrives in a town, ostensibly to give a concert. This is a town, we are told, that in unfamiliar to Ryder. He checks into a hotel and makes ready for his performance. But we are hardly in the building before the hotel porter embarks on a lengthy soliloquy where he unburdens his care...more Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Unconsoled presents the reader with a thoroughly strange experience. Initial impressions might suggest something merely conventional. Charles Ryder is a pianist and is apparently famous. He arrives in a town, ostensibly to give a concert. This is a town, we are told, that in unfamiliar to Ryder. He checks into a hotel and makes ready for his performance. But we are hardly in the building before the hotel porter embarks on a lengthy soliloquy where he unburdens his cares on the new guest. This is strange behaviour indeed, but falls into a pattern obeyed by many people in this equally strange place. Given a stranger, it seems, and everyone wants to relate their life story or examine their fears. Until now, what seems like it might be an introduction to a plot is very much still alive. But don’t worry, it soon dies off. It doesn’t actually disappear, but becomes hidden behind a screen of non-sequitur.

It’s not that The Unconsoled has no plot. It does. But it’s not a plot worthy of the name, unless its plot is to confuse and annoy, which it does with great ease and regularity if, that is, you expect it to conform to a preconception of what a novel ought to be, because The Unconsoled will surprise at every turn, contradict itself, claim facts of geography that are denied in the next sentence, take the reader to new places and claim they are familiar. It offers little in the way of linearity, even when the jumbled recollections of various characters are unpicked. Generally these seem irrelevant to the main thrust, whatever that might be. And there is no resolution, so do not be tempted to dip at the last chapter as a short cut. It will take you nowhere, just like the rest of the book.

In this apparently central European town, Charles Ryder has encounters with a succession of people. There’s a hotel manager, a porter, a woman called Sophie and her son, Boris, who is into playing with his carpet football set. There are repeated appearances by a man called Brodsky, a local hero, alcoholic and perpetual performer. He is to conduct the concert at which Ryder will perform. But, paradoxically because we think he is new to this place, there is also one of Ryder’s old friends and a childhood sweetheart makes her appearance on a tram. One at a time, almost every person that Ryder encounters embarks upon a soul-revealing monologue, delivered usually without paragraphs or apparent pause. The stories rarely relate to anything that has happened either to them or Ryder in the immediate past. Each encounter almost becomes a short story in itself, with the subject matter usually bearing no relation to context, preceding experience or even forthcoming events. One suspects a writer, somewhere, with a scrapbook of ideas that has been cut up and pasted almost at random in this text.

Though Ryder himself does appear to be concerned with his own needs, particularly his need to practise before the concert, visit the performance venue and meet his fellow performers, each of the people he meets en route seems to want to confide in him, to bear the soul through the revelation of apparently irrelevant detail - most of it also inconsequential - and then to make personal demands on Ryder’s attention and time. Frequently these encounters present a dream-like quality, but overall the feeling veers more towards the surreal, events being overloaded with detail rather than bereft of it.

And it’s not only the characters who often only make partial sense. The very geography of the town seems to be deliberately distorted by the author. The reader is led up a path towards to a distant place that turns out to be back where we started, despite the fact that the journey took time and miles of travel. Ryder has never been there before and seems unaware of local customs and history, but Sophie is apparently his wife and Boris his son. Often people expect him to find his own way to places he has ostensibly never visited before. Ryder is usually treated as an outsider, but he clearly often on the inside of events, fully aware of what went before and what the likely outcomes may be.

The Unconsoled would have become a tiresome progression of random inconsequential encounters if the prose had not been so transparently easy and elegant. Thus the episodes come and go. The tram journeys, visits to galleries and coffee shops, the trips in various cars to meet unknown people begin to flash past, eventually leaving little impression. And, in the end, the two hundred thousand plus words of The Unconsoled have perhaps taken us nowhere at all, except to absurdity and left us there. The experience is strange, deeply strange, but always interesting and engaging. It is the reader who eventually becomes the unconsoled.
(less)

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Feb 23, 2013 LG (A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions) marked it as dnf · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2011, acquired-library, format-print

Truthfully, I abandoned this book several weeks ago - I've only gotten a few pages further into this book since the last time I wrote about it. However, I've still had it in my apartment, bookmark in place, taunting me. I've now officially decided to abandon it and move on to something else, guilt-free. However, before abandoning it, I wanted to write a little about it.

I've finished a third of the book. I hate not finishing books, especially ones I've gotten as far into as this one, but I have a...more Truthfully, I abandoned this book several weeks ago - I've only gotten a few pages further into this book since the last time I wrote about it. However, I've still had it in my apartment, bookmark in place, taunting me. I've now officially decided to abandon it and move on to something else, guilt-free. However, before abandoning it, I wanted to write a little about it.

I've finished a third of the book. I hate not finishing books, especially ones I've gotten as far into as this one, but I have a steadily growing pile of ILL books, used and new books I've bought, and unwatched anime - all of it is capturing my interest more than this book.

I originally started reading this as a palate cleanser - I desperately needed a break from romance novels, and this book fit the bill. It's a strange story. The protagonist, Mr. Ryder, is an exhausted and confused pianist who has been invited to give a performance in a European city still recovering from some sort of disastrous event. What that event was, Mr. Ryder doesn't know. In fact, he doesn't know much at all - he supposedly has a packed schedule, but he can't remember what's in that schedule, and he doesn't even know exactly what it is he's supposed to be doing at the performance. Because everyone else seems to know what he's supposed to be doing and assumes he does too, he feels too awkward to ask any questions.

Despite his supposedly packed schedule, Mr. Ryder gets sucked into one ordinary and incredibly time-consuming errand after another. It becomes evident to the reader that there is something not quite right about Mr. Ryder's memory, or perhaps there's something off about his entire time in this city. In one scene, he seems to be a complete newcomer to the city, while in another he might be chatting with people he knows intimately, who he seemed not to know at all only a few pages earlier. He might observe other characters and suddenly seem to be able to know their thoughts - without ever thinking it's strange, he'll know things about other characters' pasts that one would think he shouldn't know, only for it to later be revealed that he actually had known those characters for years but somehow did not remember. All throughout this, Mr. Ryder is incredibly, deeply exhausted. He needs a good night's sleep, but things keep getting in the way.

At first, I found this all fascinating. I could have cared less about the town and its big event, but I really wanted to know what was going on with Mr. Ryder. I thought the strangeness was all just due to fatigue - sleep deprivation can mess with your memory. Then I got to the part where Mr. Ryder is attending a dinner of some kind and must give a speech. Even though he is wearing a dressing gown, and even though that gown falls open when he first attempts to give his speech, no one reacts the way I would have expected people to react. The location itself becomes a bit fuzzy - it seemed clear, at first, that it was taking place somewhere Mr. Ryder had never been, but then it turned out to be taking place in the very hotel he (and I) thought he had left.

It was at that point that I decided the only plausible explanation for everything going on was that Mr. Ryder was having a dream. I think that's part of the reason why I lost interest. There's no point in trying to figure out what's going on if the author can make anything happen. It could turn out that I'm wrong, and something very different is going on, but, to be honest, I'm no longer interested enough in the book to want to find out.

Some might find the gradual unwrapping of the town's residents and past interesting and keep going just for that. I did find it all interesting, at first, but then I just got tired of the way it was all written. It's hard to tell, sometimes, what information is important and what isn't - characters can talk for pages at a time about very little. Paragraphs that are anywhere from one to four pages long are a regular occurrence, and they became more annoying to me as the book progressed.

According to some Amazon.com customer reviews I read, I'm not the only one to find this a difficult book to get through. It sounds like Ishiguro's other works are not necessarily like this, so I might try one of his other books one day. It's possible I might try this book again one day, but I kind of doubt it. It's an exhausting book - I'd rather devote my energy to something more immediately enjoyable.

(Original review posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)(less)

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Feb 05, 2013 Beth rated it 1 of 5 stars

I really wish I could finish this book, but I just can't bear it any more! As a new reader of Ishiguro, I devoured Never Let Me Go, When We Were Orphans, and Artist of the Floating World in a month, but this book is so deeply frustrating, I found myself scanning whole chapters in an attempt to avoid the endless conversations.

While I can understand some people liking this book, the constant stalling drove me crazy, and it felt like Ishiguro was deliberately being obtuse to prove how clever he...more

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Nov 25, 2012 Alison Brown rated it 5 of 5 stars

Amazing book! Notable for the fact the lead character (and the audience) has no idea who he is, where he is, or what he's doing - at any point through the novel.

In a way it's an anti-detective novel. Although it's evident that Ishiguro has crafted the book carefully and deliberately created the impression of chaos, trying to detect or piece together a sensible narrative of events and characters is completely against the idea of the book, and if you try to read the text in that way, you'll very l...more

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Nov 01, 2012 Kathy rated it 1 of 5 stars

Oh good lord, this book never ends.

It just goes on and on getting weirder and weirder until you want to use the hefty thing to bash someone over the head with.

The story goes that Ryder arrives in a generic European city with no idea where he is, why he is there or who he is. An interesting premise but one which fails to deliver again and again. The whole thing is written like one of those never-ending dreams where you're constantly going through impossible doors and realising you're late for ap...more

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Sep 30, 2012 Pat rated it 2 of 5 stars

I was relieved, on reading a couple of reviews, to find that people were either enthralled by this book or couldn't bring themselves to finish it. I'm in the latter camp: made it about halfway through over a couple of months and have finally given myself permission to walk away. I was reluctant to put the book down because Ishiguro's prose really is luminous, and the premise--a surreal struggle to get where one is expected to be and do what one is supposed to be doing, while being constantly dis...more

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Jun 12, 2012 Barney rated it 5 of 5 stars

I found this to be a remarkable novel on so many levels. Because the novel of experiment is (being now so weary a thing) prone to skepticism (), please allow me to

Given the work's relative obscurity within Ishiguro's portfolio, as a (cautious) fan of of his work I hoped for the best but didn't expect too much.

Twenty or so pages in: whilst the prose - and poise - of the protagonist (a [perhaps self-imagined?] famous concert pianist visiting a nameless Eastern European capital where expectations...more

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Jun 06, 2012 Laura Rittenhouse rated it 3 of 5 stars

This was a very hard book for me to rate. Some part of me (the patient, literary part) thinks it deserves 5 stars. The prose are beautiful. The emotion strong. The characters, well (if bizarrely) drawn.

Then there's part of me that was tempted to hide the book under my matress and forget about it when I was 1/3 through - so that part of me maybe thinks it deserves a 1 star rating. The book is long. The side-stories are legion. The weird "is this a dream, a nightmare or some kind of (hopefully no...more

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Jun 03, 2012 Sarah Beth rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: former Murakami devotees, lovers of Kafka

These people talk soooo much. It goes on for pages, turning into an actual soliloquy. They never get anything done because they waste so much time talking about what they want to do. And then they're happy about it, after they've shouted and cried.

Nothing happens as planned or everything happens exactly as the fatalists predicted and it turns out there are no serious consequences.

Reading it, though, is definitely not a waste of time. I don't know if I read for the enjoyment of it or not, but t...more

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May 24, 2012 Alex rated it 5 of 5 stars

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Mar 14, 2012 Palmyrah rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book has been repeatedly hailed as a masterpiece. Perhaps this is because, though monumentally tedious and irritating, it has an uncanny power to hold readers until the end. One is repeatedly tempted to hurl the bloody thing across the room, but somehow one never does.

It is certainly a very clever book and even a very funny one if looked at from a certain angle, though since the jokes are all variations on a theme of frustrated expectations – some the characters', some the readers' – the hu...more

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Oct 05, 2011 Lucy rated it 1 of 5 stars

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

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topics	posts	views	last activity
unreadability	11	59	Dec 26, 2012 02:44pm
Frustratingly compelling	2	66	Dec 01, 2008 07:33am

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