Weekly “what are you reading” Thread #34

After finishing Never Let Me Go for the book club, I decided to delve further into Ishiguro's works.

I started with his debut novel, A Pale View of Hills, which was a fine little book. If you're familiar with British post modernist works of the time, you'll feel familiar with this one as well, despite its Japanese aesthetic. In fact, I found the few bits dealing with the modernization of Nagasaki and American influences on the culture to be far more interesting than the parts to do with memory. One interesting thing I found, as someone who can read a fair bit of Japanese and has read many Japanese works translated to English, was the dialogue. He clearly wrote it all in Japanese, or at least an approximation of Japanese, and then translated it to English. Naturally, it reads a bit stilted, which is a funny clash with the excellently written and very English prose.

I also read The Buried Giant. I think I would need to reread this one before writing about it, but it was by far my favourite. So, I was surprised to see when I finished it and went to look for reviews that it's probably his most divisive work. But I was relieved to see that that likely came from poor marketing. It's stocked under the fantasy genre, but is as Ishiguro as any other Ishiguro book. Not surprising, but many of the negative reviews I saw seemed to come from younger readers who were expecting something more traditional. I saw a couple try to compare him to Brandon Sanderson. That was vindicating.

I plan to read Klara and the Sun next, and then I think I'll take a break from ol' Kazuo for a while. Most people describe him as being obsessed with memory, and certainly that's true, but I think a bit more than that his primary theme is self conciousness. Not a single exchange of dialogue goes well. Everything is awkward, and all of his characters are in a constant state of self reflection. I wonder if it's perhaps the result of his part Japanese, part British upbringing that made him into the most neurotic writer of all time. Which is funny, because he comes across as a cool dude in interviews. Either way, he writes some good books.