I have a friend here on Goodreads who reads the books of the authors he fancies chronologically. I admire his tenacity and discipline. Even if I have all the author's works in my bookshelves, I still always pick first his most famous work. My reason is that if I die soon, at least, I've already read the author's masterpiece.I think I liked Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (4 stars) and Never Let Me Go (4 stars) that almost all of his other works seem to be mediocre. It's like that I've fallen in love with a beautiful woman and all of the other girls around are incomparable if not downright ugly. I know I should have stopped after reading his collection of short stories, Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (3 stars) but his other 3 books are also 1001 and many of my friends in my book club are raving about Remains as it is our book for this month, July 2012, so I resumed reading his other works.I am not pulling your leg. Check my profile. Among my favorite ever books are Lolita, The Golden Notebook: Perennial Classics edition, The Wars and Embers and I have many of those authors' (Nabokov, Lessing, Findley and Marai respectively) other books in my tbr piles at home. However, I am afraid that I would dislike those other books because I liked their masterpieces very much.This is not the first time this happened. I used to adore Haruki Murakami, C.S. Lewis, and Ken Follett, until I read many of their books and now I am losing my interest on their other works. I think the only ones who have so far survived this feeling are Ian McEwan (5 books and still to disappoint), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (4 books and still among my favorites), J.R.R. Tolkien (4 books if LOTR is counted as 3), Paul Auster (4 books and still hangs there) and John Steinbeck (3 books and I am still insatiable).For me, Kazuo Ishiguro, unfortunately, is not among them. This book, A Pale View of the Hills, in my opinion, is not at par as his more famous works. The only reason why I am not rating this with 1 star is that some of my friends (who still admire Ishiguro) will definitely find my above reason flimsy and I don't want to lose them. However, I know what I feel as a reader and I am entitled to my own opinion and they are my friends and true friendship is not measured by how many books they both liked or disliked.You see, this book was Ishiguro's first and this won the 1982 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize (that has been superseded by Ondaatje Prize). I would imagine Ishiguro's feeling then. His first novel immediately winning an annual literary award given by Royal Society of Literature. He must have said to himself: "It worked! They liked my style! They liked my formula! I should use it again!"And so he did.Based on the first 5 books I've read this is his ta-da! formula: (A) first-person unreliable narrator plus (B) open-ended almost absent denouement plus (C) narrator recalling the past plus (D) interplay between past and present plus (E) detached and quiet narrative equals Kazuo Ishiguro's style.There's nothing wrong with having a distinctive style, right? Dickens has his fondness for details, Steinbeck always has his dear California as setting and J.M.Coetzee has his Costello as his favorite recurring character. It's like the authors establishing their trademark and making it their competitive advantage, i.e., something that when you read their work, even if you cover all the titles and the author's name on the book, you would still easily identify who wrote it.Overall, this is an okay book. Not bad for a first book. I just can't help myself to like it because of the following reasons:1. Many loose ends are not explained. Examples: Why did Keiko kill herself? When did Etsuko get married to her second husband? Others may say that these are inconsequential but these, in my opinion, are vital to the story to establish what kind of wife and mother Etsuko was. Ishiguro made use of her unreliability as an excuse for his style. When I closed the book I had the feeling that he did not know how to end his book that was why he left it open ended. But it worked, it won an award. So, from then on, he made sure all of his succeeding books are open ended.2. Even when the characters are Japanese and have never been to Britain, they talk like British. I have been to Japan thrice and as part of my work for so many years, I have been communicating with Japanese. In this book, the characters say "certainly", "lovely", "wonderful" or "Why, of course, Etsuko." That "Why" that starts a response caught my attention while reading. Japanese do not use that. They normally just say "Yes" (like when they snappily say "Hai!"). They normally don't use flowery words. Think about Haruki Murakami's novels, and you know what I mean.3. Although I liked the overall style of the book: the hallucinatory guilt of the mother whose elder daughter Keiko killed herself presumably because she was uprooted from her native land, I've read and loved two more powerful depiction of extreme sadness and loneliness of women who have just loss their loved ones in Janice Galloway's The Trick Is to Keep Breathing and Lydia Davis's The End of the Story. Even my brother's favorite book, Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight has captured better the melancholy emotion of a woman in the height of her sadness and despair over a loved one. For me, Ishiguro is better when his first person unreliable narrator is a male instead of a female. There are just some emotions that fail to transfer to me when a male author is trying to make me believe that the female narrator is sad, hallucinating and probably contemplating on suicide. I could taste a tinge of deception and dishonesty at the tip of my tongue.However, I do not blame others for liking this book. Ishiguro's style is his and who am I to challenge it. It's just that I'd rather have variety in my reading. I do not want to keep on reading the same plot with only few of the elements changed. When I open a book, I would always like to be engaged and if this is not asking for too much... to be surprised. Beautifully surprised.
This is my third Ishiguro and at the risk of sounding presumptuous, I think I'm beginning to detect a pattern. His works so far have been mysteries and thrillers, but not in the traditional who dunnit sense. As a reader, the mystery lies in trying to figure out the true motivation of the narrator, since one is never really certain whether to trust them or not because they appear to make such odd choices. The mystery also lies in figuring out what the "it" is, ie, the nugget, the game-changer, the reason why all the characters are behaving somewhat strangely, not saying exactly what they mean because they all understand the implications of a certain unspeakable factor. And it's thrilling because of the buildup and the moment where he reveals the answers to these questions, reminiscent of an Agatha Christie novel, where all the guests are gathered in the parlor room and either Miss Marple or Hercules Poirot start to unpeel the layers revealing the murderer - who is in that very room with them.And therein lie both the wonder and the disappointment of Ishiguro's novels for me - the wonder, because mysteries are always fun to read and it always keeps the reader hooked to find out a reason why a particular character is making choices that you find totally bizarre or tragic. But disappointing because, like in "A Pale View of Hills", I get the sense that Ishiguro relies too much on these interesting literary devices, and not enough on the literature part, so that the devices are exceptionally presented and engaging, but once they reveal the "it", you begin to feel cheated. I don't want to beat this point to death - it just seems to me that the novel was written in this haunting, ethereal, and slightly creepy style...but for no real good reason. Why was Etsuko so obsessed with Sachiko and her daughter? The obsession part was great, but as reader, I was not satisfied with the WHY. Why did Jiro leave Etsuko? I can guess, but unlike other novels, I don't get the sense that "there are no wrong answers." Why did Keiko kill herself? Are she and Mariko the same person? Is this whole novel a dream sequence of Etsuko where she is actually Sachiko and imposing her own thoughts and regrets onto a second character? The novel was beautifully written, in terms of tone, word choice and topic. I love that Ishiguro sets his novels admidst world-altering events - whether it be WW2, or the discovery of human cloning, or the atomic bomb destroying Nagasaki. But what I liked about "Remains of the Day" is that he used the event magnificently in the plot, revealing how Lord Darlington was actually a Nazi sympathizer but the butler did not really want to see that because he was such a subservient person. In "Pale", I wanted him to use the backdrop of the bomb drop more powerfully. It seemed that he was trying to draw a link of the Japan of the past with the Japan of the now, describing that tug of remaining a traditional, proud, and proudly Japanese society, against the desire of the younger generation to explore beyond Japan's borders and re-build post-war, and not focus its energies on making Japan a great military power. But where "Remains" was a mystery of the soul, of the character, of love, with the butler's relationship to his master serving as a perfect allegory for fascism and the war, this book - as well as Never Let me Go - for me did not do enough with the amazingly rich backdrops in which the writer decided to set these stories. He wrote fairly mundane plot lines set in completely life-altering time periods and topics, without giving enough of a nod to those explosive times and subjects. That said, Ishiguro's greatest gift as a writer, in my view, is in setting the tone. The tone of all three novels I have read - Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, and A PaleView of Hills - were positively gorgeous in their overarching sense of dread without ever quite becoming truly dreadful, and description of characters' expressions and interactions with each other. It's the plot development that I had an issue with in this novel. But I still want to read more of this truly gifted author.
What do You think about A Pale View Of Hills (2005)?
I really hesitated before doing a review of this book - it left me out of my depth in so many ways - but then I thought 'heck - I really want to do reviews of the books I've read.' So I am going to crack on.This is a story about Etsuko, a Japanese woman who experienced the horrors of Nagasaki when the bomb was dropped, and who is now living in England. The daughter of her second marriage (to an Englishman) comes back to stay with her mother for a few days. This is her daughter Niki. Her older daughter Keiko - a girl of of pure Japanese descent - is mentioned in passing - as having committed suicide.For a large part of the book Etsuko reminisces about her earlier life in Japan. About life with her Japanese husband Jiro, especially when his manipulative father, Ogata-San, comes to stay and the restrained fireworks that marks the relationship between them. She also reminisces at length about her friendship with the strange and dysfunctional woman Sachiko,who lives nearby, with her young daughter Mariko, who is more or less allowed to run wild. Sachiko is nourished by a fantasy of going to America with her GI lover Frank, but time and time again this is shown to be an unrealistic dream.The war and the bombing is barely hinted at, except through Etsuko's friendship with Mrs. Fujiwari,who runs a local noodle shop. She used to come from a successful family, but lost everything, including all five members of her family, and leaving just her oldest son. But even this reference to the war is very underplayed.There are many reasons why I should not have liked this book - most of them being a large number of unanswered questions...* When did Etsucko split up with her Japanese husband Jiro? Why did they split up?* What happened to Keiko? Why does she come into the book with the enormous fact that she committed suicide, when nothing else is written about her? Why mention such a dramatic incident just in passing?* What happened to Etsucko's English husband? Who is he? How did she get together with him? Why isn't he around now?* How could Etsucko have been so taken with and loyal towards Sachiko? That woman virtually had horns and a tail. Okay, so maybe she just hung around because she was concerned for Sachiko's daughter's welfare. But it seemed more than that. There seemed genuine friendship on the part of Etsucko. Why? * What happened to the ending of the book? I kept turning over the last page, hoping to find closure in the next few pages, but the book had ended.Now, given the above reservations I should really have disliked this book..... but I didn't. Really, I don't know why, but I found it utterly compelling. If anyone has any ideas as to why, I would be most interested to hear them.
—Caroline
I picked this up a while ago in the B&N used books section, just because I saw the name “Ishiguro” and knew I’d love it (having loved Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go). In anticipation of his newest novel, Buried Giant, I decided to read PVoH and boy oh BOY was I not disappointed. This was Ishiguro’s first novel, and you can already see his mastery of subtlety and a kind of hushed narrative that draws you in until you don’t realize that you’re reading anymore. You become a part of the story. And the complicated twist at the end nearly sent me off my chair, it was so creepy and well-done. Oh, and it’s about a middle-aged Japanese woman living in 1970s/80s England, thinking about her past in Nagasaki just a few years after the bomb. While one of her daughters is visiting her from London, they talk around the fact that the older daughter only recently committed suicide. It’s a beautiful and tragic story that Ishiguro raises to the sublime. — Rachel CordascoFrom Best Books We Read in December- http://bookriot.com/2015/01/06/riot-r...
—Book Riot Community
This is the third Kazuo Ishiguro book that I've had the pleasure of reading. Last year, Never Let Me Go made it to my personal list of best reads, and The Remains of the Day , another one of Ishiguro's more popular novels, also with a film adaptation (like Never Let Me Go ) to prove it, left its mark on me, albeit not in the way that Never Let Me Go did. Both novels propelled their author into favorite-dom in my book, and I couldn't wait to get my hands on another Ishiguro novel. And so imagine my happiness at having been gifted with a copy of A Pale View of Hills by my book club buddy, Angus, last Christmas. It was meant to be my first read for 2012, but something else caught my attention at the time. But here I am, with hardly a wink last the other night, in my desire to finish reading it and find out what Ishiguro has got up his sleeve this time around. The blurb on my Faber Firsts copy reads: “Etsuko is a Japanese woman now living alone in England. Retreating into the past, she finds herself reliving one particular hot summer in Nagasaki, when she and her friends struggled to rebuild their lives after the war. But as she recalls her strange friendship with Sachiko – a wealthy woman reduced to vagrancy – the memories take on a disturbing cast.”Reading A Pale View of Hills reminded me once again why I love Ishiguro's works. The pace would usually start out slow, continue on in the same manner, in some parts even bordering on dull and boring, but you just have to keep at it until something actually happens. I would even daresay the plot would meander and appear to be heading in no particular direction, but really, it isn't like that. For some people, this would be quite a turnoff, especially to those who prefer clean, definite paths to the story, or who prefer their mysteries solved very neatly in the end. This style, however, which I've now associated exclusively with Ishiguro's works, never fails to take me for a loop. To Ishiguro's credit, he knows how to sustain a reader's interest, dropping little hints at every chapter's end or leaving something suspenseful to look forward to in the next chapter, just to keep you reading. That's always what happens with me, at least. For me, Ishiguro is a master at storytelling; I was completely absorbed with A Pale View of Hills from beginning to end, and I just couldn't wait to get to The Big Twist. Another thing that I love most about Ishiguro's writings is the fact that he will leave the reader to formulate his own conclusions, to challenge his recollection of everything that he has previously read and connect it to the ending presented. If you've read Never Let Me Go and was totally appalled shocked not expecting and affected by the ending, and you felt the need to reread the book just to see if you can pick up clues along the way that seemed pretty mundane when you first read about them, then that's the way it was with this book. As I closed my copy, my mind automatically went on rewind, plucking bits of information and scenes I read about in the previous chapters that even remotely suggested that this was actually how things were in the end. My mind drew complete blanks.After three books from Ishiguro, and enjoying each one of them immensely, there is no more scintilla of doubt left in me that I will read the rest of his written works. Next up: Nocturnes . ;)My copy: a Faber Firsts TPB from Angus. Thank you! Also posted here.
—Monique
