New blog entry on some Red Sox and Mets prospects in the NY Penn League is up. My hit from this afternoon with Colin Cowherd is also online. I’ve filed my reaction to the Blue Jays/Braves trade, so it should be along shortly.
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One of you warned me about Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled
The plot revolves around Mr. Ryder, a renowned concert pianist who has just arrived in an unnamed Central European town for a performance, only to find himself sidetracked by an endless series of errands and other unfinished business, because the town is populated by people he’s met before, even including a girlfriend and a sort of stepson, but he doesn’t remember any of this. Time bends in odd ways, people act and react strangely, and monologues go on for pages and pages. And the town seems to define its identity by the status of its best musicians, having cast one aside when his style fell out of vogue and a new star arrived, only to find the latter to be a broken man and a drunk.
It seemed clear to me from early on in The Unconsoled that Ishiguro was writing a realistic novel within the world of dreams – the abrupt transitions from scene to scene, the fact that two buildings on opposite sides of the town turned out to be one and the same, the way items could change within a room over the course of a conversation, and the frequent situation that should be familiar to all of you of Ryder’s inability to get to someone he’s left behind or forgotten about or just needs to reach. If that was the author’s intent, he was successful, as I was off balance almost the entire novel because various conventions of the realistic novel no longer applied.
But the execution suffered in two ways: One, Ryder’s actions became extremely frustrating. He’d fail to say or do obvious things to alleviate bad situations, such as the time a childhood friend wants to show him off to her snobby friends who doubt she knows Ryder, only to have him come along but do nothing to reveal his identity. He’s rude and even cold to the boy, Boris, to whom he is something of a father figure, and often leaves Boris on his own inappropriately. It was maddening, even more than in a novel where the main character is simply unlikeable. In this novel, he’s unreadable.
Two, the end of the novel does not answer the key question: If this is all a dream for Ryder, what on earth does it mean? Are all of these people real, or merely manifestations within his brain of stages of his life? Stephan, a young pianist, can’t seem to satisfy his parents through his music, as they insist on seeing him as a disappointment; is that Ryder’s own experience as a young man? Why does Ryder spend much of the novel fretting over the arrangements for his parents, who are coming in to see the performance, only to find out (or be reminded) that there’s no evidence they’re coming at all? Why are there at least four or five of his friends from his youth in England living in this small Central European town, all acting like little time has passed? I read the book expecting some kind of a resolution at the end, either an explicit one (e.g., Ryder wakes up) or an implicit one (e.g., Ryder starts to identify some of the parallels between the dream-world and his own past), but I got nothing, not even hints at Ryder’s pre-visit life to help me make the connections myself.
I love Ishiguro’s prose, but in The Unconsoled his dialogue was out of control, with the aforementioned long monologues (one lasted at least five pages, with not so much as a paragraph break) and very frequent repetition of phrases or meaningless points. His prose was far more in control in The Remains of the Day, and after The Unconsoled he wrote another altered-reality novel that was tighter and much more compelling, Never Let Me Go.
Next up: Geraldine Brooks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning March
Keith, you’re far from alone in responding to the book this way; it’s an absolute mess, a failure in many ways.
But at the same time, it’s a book I’ve long admired, and that I think is a key indication of another side of Ishiguro’s approach as a writer. I wrote about this at some length last fall in the course of a review of his recent short story collection, Nocturnes, for the Quarterly Conversation. The new collection seems to me to do a good job of drawing together the control of Ishiguro’s earlier works with the ambition and experimentalism of The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans.
Yeah.
In a way, it’s a natural topic for Ishiguro, who is so deft at writing from the unique points-of-view of his narrators. After all, our dreams are entirely personal — no one else can even HAVE a point-of-view of them. Trying to deduce the meaning from the book is like trying to deduce the meaning of a dream. To the extent that dreams have meanings at all, those meanings are (usually) buried within the subconsciousness of the dreamer. Without knowing more about Ryder’s real world life, we have no platform for interpreting his dream.
It’s an interesting writing experiment, but it’s a damn frustrating read.
The Unconsoled is far away and the best of Ishiguro’s novels. I’m not surprised it doesn’t appeal to someone who’s overly rational and demands well-thought out explanations for narrative turns. The entire thing is a Kafka tribute and thus several of the moments you look to reason with are really just jokes/commentary on moments in Kafka. It’s not a detective novel, it’s a work of incredibly nuanced art. Whether you “like” the main character is sort of besides the point; he’s not Yunel Escobar, he’s a work of fiction. I’m not saying everyone has to enjoy “The Unconsoled”, especially those who are looking for a sci-fi mystery along the lines of “Never Let Me Go.” But you’ll enjoy it more if you appreciate it for what it is, rather than criticizing it for things it never even attempts.
Did you truncate the RSS feed on purpose?
Mitch: Yes and no. Was playing around with options to try to alter the way search results appear on the site. Do you want it back the other way?
Eleanor: I’m not sure if that’s meant as parody, since The Unconsoled was itself satirizing the very “you just don’t understand” mentality of much of the art world. I would suggest you read more of my reviews and lists before throwing ad hominems at me, since you seem to have no idea of my values beyond this particular book. (For example, The Trial is on the Klaw 100, as are other “irrational” books like The Master & Margarita and One Hundred Years of Solitude.)
And, for what it’s worth, I seem to have the critical consensus on my side here, including James Wood’s famous comment that the book “invented its own category of badness.”
I would love it if you would go back to the untruncated feeds.
I much prefer full feeds since Google’s mobile RSS reader is excellent, while Blackberry’s mobile web browser is well, not. If you would make the change back that would be much appreciated.
Fixed it more or less right away. I figured out how to truncate the listings in search results and archive pages anyway.
Wow. I hadn’t encountered James Woods’s opinion before. That’s some impressive dislike, given how many categories of badness there already are.
I absolutely LOVE this book. After reading it (it’s the only Ishiguro I’ve read so far), I was quite surprised to see how many people dislike it. The thing I kept thinking the whole time I was reading it — and still think — is, “I’ve been waiting my whole life to find a book like this.” And I consider myself a pretty discerning reader.