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.
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.
What do You think about The Unconsoled (1995)?
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 tired, he couldn't fulfill most of his promises. His lack of backbone drove me nuts....Yeah, anyway. Good book. Need to read more from this author.
—Casey
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 likely fail. I can understand there's something frustrating about that, but to me the text was about creating a reading experience that is open to you if you want it, as long as you are willing to suspend any preconceptions about what a novel 'is' or 'is not' going to be like. Maybe you can't understand the story as a particular set of cause and effects laid out on the page, but you can still let it sweep you away, as an experience, similar but not perfectly equivalent to the experience of listening to non-vocal music with high composition values. Plus, the novel highlights that the human brain does not remember or experience things in orderly ways. Memory and thought and our perceptions tend to be muddled, changeable and transitory, not perfectly logically structured. You see one thing and suddenly remember another, but it's not clear how the two things are linked. Something's in vision, but you're seeing something else. Memories get confused with time, and things you thought happened become memories that you are certain really did happen. I'm not against a novel that has some fun with acknowledging that we're a pretty perceptually confused kind of species. It's commonly suggested the hero might be a concert pianist on a tour in Vienna, but I personally take the view that the whole point of the novel is that you're encouraged to think he is both everywhere and nowhere - and is both anyone and no-one.
—Alison Brown
This is the second novel I have read this year that truly fit the description "amazing." The Unconsoled is unlike anything I have ever read. It tells the meandering, dream-like story of Ryder, a famous concert pianist who has agreed to perform in an unnamed European city. Upon arrival, Ryder meets various characters who each make various and largely unreasonable demands of him that seem likely to derail his performance. Other than this brief overview, I feel at a loss to give this novel an accurate description. The boundary between present and past, memories and imagination, dream life and reality, and even the between the minds and thoughts of separate characters are constantly crossed and recrossed throughout this book. Ishiguro creates an atmosphere wherein I often felt as lost, confused and frustrated as Ryder. And yet I was totally happy to get lost in this book. Like the other "amazing" book I read this year (Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin), this book probably isn't for everyone. But if you can be a patient reader, willing to completely give yourself up to a story and a world that feel both real and unreal, you may find yourself amazed as well.
—Elizabeth
