From the Bookshelf of Constant Reader…

An Artist of the Floating World

Kazuo Ishiguro

Start date: August 15, 2009

Finish date: August 15, 2009

Discussion: Reading List

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Reading List

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What Members Thought

Aug 05, 2009 Melissa rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: constant-reader

An autumnal, ruminative walk back through a man's life as re-imagined in his seemingly placid retirement. The need to find a suitable marriage partner for his younger daughter leads to a slow unfolding of elements of his career as a painter, with ideals, perspectives and achievements whose value shifts with the larger catastrophe that hits his nation.

The discussion of painters' use of perspective, color, line, and theme I found oddly but pleasingly reminiscent of a major strand in Pamuk's My Nam ...more

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Aug 02, 2009 Jonathan rated it it was amazing

The Remains of the Day -- in Japan. This book is similar to Ishiguro's better known story of a reserved English butler, but the context is totally different. An elderly, retired painter is looking back on his life, deconstructing his own angst over what he believes to be grave mistakes that contributed to the downfall of traditional Japanese society after World War II. The narrator is, by his own admission, not to be trusted for accurate transcripts of the dramatic conversations and events that ...more

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Oct 23, 2007 Kristin rated it liked it

I don't know what to say. I really enjoy Ishiguro's novels, but they really are the same. The same fixations on memory over and over again. Still beautiful, but I feel that an author should be exploring new arenas with future works. He writes about different subject matter, from a man in Japan who was pro WW2 feeling guilty after the war to a butler in England in the 50s to a clone in the present-future (a present where human cloning, a futuristic idea, is commonplace), but the style is much the ...more

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Sep 11, 2009 Katy rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction

Careful writing characterized by exquisite restraint distinguishes this early Ishiguro novel. It slowly builds to what? It is not really clear. It reminded me of The Remains of the Day in that each book deals with the nostalgic memories of different persons from the perspective of age and retirement. What did it mean to have lived these lives is perhaps the intended unanswered question.

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Nov 07, 2011 Inder rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 20th-century, 1001-books, fiction, audiobooks, war, japan, read-2013

Ishiguro definitely has a "formula" - unreliable (generally older, male) narrator, careful and thoughtful prose, twisty plot, pervasive uncertainty and ambivalence, deep thoughts on the nature of memory, self-perception, and moral responsibility.

It's a good thing I happen to love this formula. ...more

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