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    The Unconsoled
    The Unconsoled
    The Unconsoled
    Audiobook19 hours

    The Unconsoled

    Written by Kazuo Ishiguro

    Narrated by Simon Vance

    3.5/5

    ()

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    About this audiobook

    From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize–winning novel The Remains of the Day, here is a novel that is at once a gripping psychological mystery, a wicked satire of the cult of art, and a poignant character study of a man whose public life has accelerated beyond his control.



    The setting is a nameless Central European city where Ryder, a renowned pianist, has come to give the most important performance of his life. Instead, he finds himself diverted on a series of cryptic and infuriating errands that nevertheless provide him with vital clues to his own past. In The Unconsoled Ishiguro creates a work that is itself a virtuoso performance, strange, haunting, and resonant with humanity and wit.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateDec 7, 2017
    ISBN9781977371041
    Author

    Kazuo Ishiguro

    Kazuo Ishiguro is thw author of four previous novels, including TheRemains of the Day, which won the Booker Prize, and An Artist of the Floating World, which won the Whitbread Award. He lives in London.

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    Reviews for The Unconsoled

    3.5/5

    670 ratings50 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I haven't enjoyed many other Ishiguro works; I was left a little cold by Floating World and detested Never Let Me Go, both of which I ploughed through after discovering this gem.Yet this book is truly outstanding. Its winding plot and the general unease it conjured up is reminiscent of Fowles' The Magus, and is one of the most intriguing and enjoyable works in my catalogue.Surreal, fantastical and evocative, I highly recommend this work to anyone looking for a challenging but rewarding piece of modern literature.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      An ethereal novel.
    • 1/5
      Whatever meaning exists in these pages is buried in a monotonous, tedious, bloated mass of words.
    • 2/5
      Ik heb dit boek 200 bladzijden gegeven, hopend dat het dan ergens heen ging, maar kort voor halfweg kreeg ik door dat dit net de "identiteit" van dit boek was: d?t het nergens heen ging, en ook op het einde maar gewoon door zou gaan. Nochtans was dit bijwijlen heel aangename lectuur: de aan Kafka refererende geheimzinnige sfeer, de droomachtige - surrealistische - dialogen en sequenties, de stilistisch prachtig opgebouwde scenes ... het droeg allemaal de stempel van grote literatuur. Maar bij de 20ste keer dat onze gevierde pianist Mr. Ryder werd aangeklampt door een personage en hij zich zomaar liet meeslepen naar een volgende, absurde scene, was het voor mij genoeg. Ik vrees dat ik - ondanks mijn leeftijd - toch nog altijd een Grote Boodschap verwacht van een boek (maatschappelijk, esthetisch, existentieel), en die heb ik hier niet ontdekt. Ooit, als ik nog eens heel veel tijd heb, dan neem ik dit wel weer eens ter hand, gewoon voor het leesgenoegen.
    • 4/5
      While reading The Unconsoled I was reminded of Stephen King’s The Shining. Both rely on the claustrophobic setting of a hotel and in both stories the main character succumbs to pressures. Mr. Torrence loses his mind and Mr. Ryder can not possibly keep all his appointments and commitments. In The Shining you can feel the evil in the wings and in The Unconsoled there is considerable anxiety brought on by Ryder’s impossible schedule…all having some root in a shared past. As Ryder moves in a surreal manner around the town, he seems to be connected to almost everyone he meets. I kept thinking…”You are the caretaker here Mr. Torrence, you have always been the caretaker.” A boy plays a big part in both books and Boris’ chorus of “Number Nine!” is a central to the story as Danny’s “Redrum!” All in all this is a mesmorizing book that keeps the reader in a high state of anxiety through suppression of information and a writing style that is lengthy and heavy. I can’t believe I enjoyed it.. but I did. A really interesting book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5

      Ryder arrives in town and steps into a hotel, ready to check in. And that's the last ordinary thing that happens in The Unconsoled. Ishiguro's narrative gradually descends into something other than reality. First, it's subtle: Ryder seems oddly patient as the hotel bellhop gives an extended monologue about himself and the respect (or lack thereof) accorded to his profession. Time seems to move in fits and starts, as characters whose concerns seem only incidental to the central plot (which surely must be developing by now) elaborate at length about their lives. Ryder attempts to navigate through his day in a linear fashion -- after all, he's a very important person, a celebrity even, in town to prepare for a very important speech and performance -- but distraction piles upon diversion piles upon impediment, as the day and night stretch on.


      As Ryder experiences the people and events around him, mostly being pulled along, the narrative feels like a dream. Amazingly so, actually. Ishiguro captures the feeling of those anxiety dreams in which we know we have to be somewhere, do something, but there's no straight path between here and there, we can't seem to get there, and can't seem to keep our minds on it...


      I kept expecting to lose patience with The Unconsoled -- after all, how much of this unreality can one take before a certain longing takes hold for a linear plot, a sense of progression, of our protagonist actually doing things instead of having things done to him? Yet I found myself enjoying the book. I don't pretend to know what the author's intentions were, but by the end I was reflecting on this world full of people and how our lives intersect, each of us moving according to our own interests, desires and whims. What if we wore all those internal motivations on our sleeves, and explained them at great length? What if everyone did that, except for one poor visitor from some far away place?


      At the same time, Ishiguro seems to have had in mind a meditation on the nature of fame and celebrity. Ryder's reality and his very nature seem mutable, defined by the preconceptions of those around him, changing with each new encounter. What is left of Ryder but the public perception of the man?


      And there you have The Unconsoled. Twisting, dreamlike, frustrating, and ultimately, strangely rewarding.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Try as he might, Ishiguro could not completely forsake bubbles of coherence if not resolution. Whatever one's personal reaction to this unique book, it maintains its dream-like conceit far beyond the talent of most writers.
    • 4/5
      Starts off sensibly but slowly devolves into a daydream with the narrative jumping around like episodes in a dream just barely linked together. Geography bends to accommodate the narrative, the characters appear in nonsensical places.
      I'm sure you can read it differently but the way I understood it is this single visit to an anonymous European city compresses the whole life of the narrator into a few days. The characters he meets are his friends, family and others that he met throughout his career and also himself at different times of his life and the bizarre events are echoes of real life experiences distorted and exaggerated through time.
    • 2/5
      I bought this book because the author won the Nobel Prize, and the bookseller told me it is a good book.
      However, while this may be an allegory on people fascinated by celebrity, and an allegory of celebrities whose lives are out of control, it is also a book with no tale.

      It went on and on and on, and then stopped. Methinks, the author ran out of ink, or imagination. Or he just got tired of writing. I huffed and puffed my way through the book and felt relieved when it ended.
    • 3/5
      I gave it 3 stars not because it was disappointing, but because it was so challenging. Characters go into ridiculously long monologues that make you want to throttle them. The passive-aggressiveness is so over the top that it is often hilarious. The absurdist tone keeps you on your toes as the plot moves tangentially forward.
    • 4/5
      This is probably one of the weirdest books I have ever read.

      It's also probably one of the best.

      The Unconsoled, featuring in the 2013 edition of Boxall's 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, tells the story of world-famous pianist Ryder, who has travelled to a European city to undertake one of the most important performances in his life; the success or otherwise of the concert could make or break the host city.

      The most important aspect of this book is the dream-like manner in which events are recounted. The usual parameters of time and space are thrown on their head. Locations are travelled to by lengthy car journeys, and returned from by a short corridor. The protagonist Ryder is able to recount in detail events that have occurred out of his ear-shot. He stumbles across people and objects from his early life in Worcestershire. Throughout this, Ryder himself seems to exist outside of the real world, his schedule ignored, as he moves from situation to improbable situation.

      I have seen, in other reviews, Ryder's behaviour attributed to amnesia, or to Alzheimer's. Personally, I think that is giving too much of a 'real world' reason to a book that is written in this dream-like manner.

      But that is actually the beauty of this book. Every reader can interpret the story in their own way, and take from it what they want.
    • 4/5
      This book is like a horrible nightmare, only great.

      Nothing actually scary or horrible happens in this book but reading it made me feel vaguely creeped out and uncomfortable, anyway. The whole thing is like a bad dream, with incomprehensible geography, sudden appearances of ex-acquaintances and the general worry that you've forgotten something important all the way through it. It was actually quite hard work, but I'm glad I read it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Eh. Ishiguro manages to confound and bewilder as gently as sleep in this weird weird book. His prose is so clean and his emotional control of the reader so subtle I admire the book without much liking it. Not his best but an internally successful, if questionably intended, attempt.
    • 5/5
      This book was exhausting. Each of the characters lives in a bizarre social isolation such that they all interact without ever really seeing or paying attention to each other, so they bare their souls at each other in long, drawn out conversations, but most of these conversations are disjointed, since they are never really listening to each other. The main character is a famous pianist, though his seeming fame in the small town where he's arrived seems a bit overblown, and makes the whole town seem more pathetic and petty and small. Meanwhile the pianist, despite his vague disorientation on arriving in the town, seems to know a lot of the residents, from his childhood anyway, and he even has a girlfriend, though he seems not to remember at first that he even knows her. The whole book is like a dreamscape, in that the characters slip through doors that magically land them in totally different locations, and time passes a bit non-linearly, so that the few days the story spans seem like a lot longer. At over 500pgs, this is a tiring book, but it was still rather good.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      THE UNCONSOLED. Kasuo Ishiguro remains one of my favourite contemporary writers. His books are imaginative, inventive, strongly crafted and push the boundaries to the very edges. This my favourite of his novels, all of which I've read. It's a slippy book, disorientated in time and space and drenched in music. The book sank like a stone, which didn't surprise me, its messages are subtle, and unlike the feted Ian McEwen, who can do no wrong with the critics, I fancy Ishiguro is less liked - and I do (secretly) wonder if that is because he is less English. Unlike his previous books, including, of course, Remains of the Day, and his subsequent books, especially Never Let Me Go, now a film, The Unconsoled sank like an anchor after receiving universally bad reviews at the time of its publication. The Telegraph review said it was a sprawling, almost indecipherable 500-page work and the Guardian said it left readers and reviewers baffled. One literary critic said that the novel had invented its own category of badness. Meanwhile, I was reading it with intense absorption and enjoyment, understanding exactly what he was getting at...at least I thought I did...clearly a reader's interpretation is their own. The Unconsoled is set over three days in the life of concert pianist Ryder, who has come to an unnamed European city to perform. His memory seems patchy and selective and he drifts from situation to situation as if in a surreal dream, unable to totally understand what is going on.
      I'm glad to say that by 2005 literary critics were beginning to agree with me...they voted the novel as the third best British, Irish, or Commonwealth novel from 1980 to 2005, and The Sunday Times placed it in 20th century's 50 most enjoyable books, later published as Pure Pleasure; A Guide to the 20th Century's Most Enjoyable Books.
      One scene in the book has never left me; Ryder is in his hotel room when he notices that the rug is similar to the one he played soldiers on when a child. Suddenly, he realizes that the room is actually his old bedroom; he's back in his childhood. What follows is a tender, almost cherishing memory of better times which seems totally part of Ryder's life now. At the time I had just finished nursing my mother, who'd died of the advanced stages of a particularly psychotic form of Alzheimer's disease, and Ryder's problems and experiences reminded me of the twilight world she'd lived in, where real life probably invaded her dream world in unpleasant ways...she was happiest when imagining I was her sister, Beatrice, and that we were both in our twenties and living together before Mum married my father (Beatrice never married – in fact she came to live with the newly-weds!) Listening to Mum's mad conversations with herself gave me a wonderful insight into what life was like before the second world war (my mum was quite old when I was born).
      I would recommend Ishiguro to anyone who hasn't yet read him...all his books. But The Unconsoled has a special place in my heart and will never leave my bookcase...so get your own copy!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      When I first read, "Remains of the Day", I felt that I had just read the consummate English novel, the perfect pinnacle of a mountain with E.M. Forrester, among others, in its foundation. I felt The Unconsoled was also perfect, but in the way that it kept me maddeningly entwined in a dream that is insane. Insane in the way it provides a complete framework for the mind, yet no sense.

      I remain in awe of this book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      There was something that disturbed me as I read this novel, and I didn’t put my finger on it until I was almost done. Going into the final chapter, I realized that it felt like I was returning to a nightmare. The lives of the people, in particular the main character Ryder, feel like nightmares – the kind where you keep trying to accomplish something and just can’t get there. This almost perfectly sums up Ryder. Whether the thing he is trying to do is the right thing or not, other things (much like that nightmare) get in the way.

      All that being said, I am still struggling with how to absorb this novel. As I read it, I kept getting impressions of other authors/novels. First it was Camus – the protagonist who seems to let life make his decisions for him. Then it was Flann O’Brien’s “The Third Policeman” – surreal situations that are just accepted (such as doors that seem to lead to rooms across the city, Ryder hearing conversations that were impossible for him to hear, and the description of “2001: A Space Odyssey” starring Clint Eastwood and Yul Brynner.) Finally, it was Carson McCuller’s “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” (and the last I read that was in high school, so this may not be accurate) – the protagonist as the father confessor.

      If the preceding does not indicate there are various unusual things going on in this novel, nothing will. Yet, it is all engrossing. Ryder shows up in the city and is, for all intents and purposes, as tabula rasa as the reader. He knows he is there for a performance, but seems to have no other details. And, as events draw him further and further away from the expected course (as indicated above, he is always being drawn away from what he intends to do) we learn he is much more familiar with the city and its inhabitants than even he at first remembers. It is as though he has no knowledge of his past and only just remembers it at the same time we are discovering it. This might seem off-putting, but in the surreal world Ishiguro has built it almost seems to flow logically. (At least, as logically as anything is in this story.)

      There is a lot going for this story, but, by the end, I was getting tired of it all. These are disturbing people and, over time, they began to wear on me. By the end, I really felt ambivalent to all of them and had lost much of my desire to see how it all ended. But those same people are still haunting me. And, as I previously mentioned, I’m still absorbing what occurred in this book. I have a feeling my appreciation for this book will grow over time.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I'm having a hard time figuring out what to say about this book... It was boring and fascinating all at once. If I was reading it alone it wasn't uncommon for me to curse and yell at it in frustration. Some sections seemed to last forever, and others held my attention so deeply that I could read 100 pages just like that. I hated just about every character at least once, and then pivoted and really enjoyed them, or vice versa. Especially Ryder and Mr. Hoffman. All things considered, I'm quite glad I finished the book. As flawed as it is, it suited me. However, It's definitely not for everyone, and I would have a hard time recommending it to anybody else.
    • 4/5
      (Original Review, 1995-12-12)



      I'm pretty respectful of other people's opinions and durable literary reputations. Reading Ulysses was bliss for me, but I have no harsh words for people who don’t like it. It is obviously something that has engaged reader’s minds, hearts, and souls, and perhaps more importantly influenced and engaged writers across generations, and I wish I could figure out why the rest of the world does not like it. As a reader one needs a little humility about one's little opinion, especially if it is “I like” or "I don't like".

      Poetry has been a long uphill battle for me, and I don't think I still get very well what many folks take to be its essence. Rhyme tends to annoy me, and I can barely hear meter, read or spoken, and saying 'the accumulation of hard consonants with contrasting soft vowels throughout the line creates and effect of ....' is usually rather meaningless to me, as personal experience. I don't mind puzzling out poetry, if I can, and have learned to love poetry, but for me, in general, it just has to make sense (that’s why I love the German Romantic Poets: Rilke, Hölderlin, etc.). If I have to go to an interpretive text fine, but if I think the interpretive text finds no better, or little better, sense in it than I do, I tend to think it is time to abandon said poetry. Sometimes the interpretive text outweighs the poetry itself. I enjoyed Bettina Knapp's discussion of Stein's "Tender Buttons", but find "Tender Buttons" itself unreadable. YouTube has made spoken poetry available on an unlimited scale, but still I prefer to read it. And one can also listen while reading the text (which is often my preference).

      I am shooting a little from the hip here, but my memories of Dylan Thomas poetry are that it is just incomprehensible to me, and since I personally have a hard time reading page after page of what is to me gibberish, I stopped reading it. "Milkwood" though, again from memory fumes, I remember as a grand work. I am a GREAT believer in individual sensory ratios AND that we can work on them if we choose rather than hunker down within our predispositions. I cannot tell how much reading the poetry I have read has enriched my life (a single person tipped me into it in midlife) and how making the effort to alter/overcome my own sensory/cognitive ratios/preferences, in so far as they succeeded, was very, very much worth the effort.

      Shakespeare is hard to generalize about because he is so singular. Once again, earlier in life I was tipped into it by a single individual, a college professor. I find that Shakespeare is simply different on the page than in the ear. I, like many people, can watch/hear a play and both understand what is going on and appreciate the language too. But to get deeper into it, for me anyway, I have to read it. Same thing with poetry. And of course it is not an either/or choice. One can, I must, do both, but especially read. And then the next time you see it, it is all the more wonderful.

      I wonder if the most adamant advocate of the ear doesn't rely on line by line reading to understand something like “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” I would bet 90% of such advocates DO perform, and rely on, such (multiple) readings.

      So really it just takes me around and back to what Literature is for me. I have to try to understand it so it makes sense to me, however quirky and subjective that sense is. When I read Ishiguro's “Unconsoled” it seemed to me to be an original and text book case of my theory of readership (which it helped immeasurably to evolve). If I could ask Ishiguro if he intended that at all, I’m sure he’d categorically say 'no'; that it was all about something else. But if I had to write a thesis about it, I would write what I still think of as its principle merit which is to have created and incarnate, in its protagonist, a conceptual double of a 'reading self', or “ones-self” as a reader. And that is how I approach literature; what would I say if I were writing a thesis on “Ode on a Grecian Urn” or “Milkwood?” And if I could write nothing because I didn't understand two words of it, then I tend to disregard it, while acknowledging there are valid approaches to 'pure abstract language' or the 'pure music of language'.

      What people say about poetry, I would say about Literature: it is a way of looking at the world that should inform you about the world and in the process surprise, delight and possibly change you and the way you look at the world. In a very real sense obliqueness is the enemy of true poetry. Which is why, in part, I tend to be dismissive of genre, but keeping in mind some genre writing transcends it. Genre writing is generally not: a way of looking at the world that should inform you about the world and in the process surprise, delight and possibly change you and the way you look at the world. Some prose texts are, some aren't. It's like 'verse' versus poetry.
    • 4/5
      An unusually different book, "The Unconsoled" is one prolonged dream. It takes place entirely in the mind of the narrator Ryder, a pianist visiting an un-named European city. That said, nothing is certain, not Ryder's true identity, or who his family members are. The world Ishiguro creates is soft and malleable, Ryder travels large distances by tram or car to get to his assignations, only to find a previously unseen doorway leading straight back to his hotel. The densely populated town of his dreams has a deep need for a musical saviour and lauds him with respect. Ryder's huge ego is evident, he seems certain of himself, but he appears perpetually lost, late for an appointment, and in need of rest. The idea that many of the characters are in fact Ryder himself at different points in his life could be helpful in understanding it.
      There is no doubt about it, this is a difficult book, not everyone will like it. If you like Kafka's 'The Castle', then you will probably enjoy it. I think it's brilliant, unconventional and a fascinating portrait of the inner mind. And fans of Ishiguro will find many parallels to his other works. Also it shows the authors very subtle sense of humour.
    • 2/5
      Ik heb dit boek 200 bladzijden gegeven, hopend dat het dan ergens heen ging, maar kort voor halfweg kreeg ik door dat dit net de "identiteit" van dit boek was: dàt het nergens heen ging, en ook op het einde maar gewoon door zou gaan. Nochtans was dit bijwijlen heel aangename lectuur: de aan Kafka refererende geheimzinnige sfeer, de droomachtige - surrealistische - dialogen en sequenties, de stilistisch prachtig opgebouwde scenes ... het droeg allemaal de stempel van grote literatuur. Maar bij de 20ste keer dat onze gevierde pianist Mr. Ryder werd aangeklampt door een personage en hij zich zomaar liet meeslepen naar een volgende, absurde scene, was het voor mij genoeg. Ik vrees dat ik - ondanks mijn leeftijd - toch nog altijd een Grote Boodschap verwacht van een boek (maatschappelijk, esthetisch, existentieel), en die heb ik hier niet ontdekt. Ooit, als ik nog eens heel veel tijd heb, dan neem ik dit wel weer eens ter hand, gewoon voor het leesgenoegen.
    • 1/5
      this is the most extraordinarily irritating book with one of the least likable 'heroes' i've ever come across... i am - literally! - struggling to push through to the end.
    • 1/5
      The first book in many a year that I failed to get into - discarded after about 50 pages.
      The book has the main character in a dream-like state - he doesn't quite remember where he is, and what he has to do. An interesting creation, and probably worth persisting with, if you have the endurance. But after checking reviews, I have decided that I am not going to get a lot more from the next 450 pages than I got from the first 50. So, put aside until I'm in traction and have run out of books.
      Not read Feb 2015.
    • 3/5
      There are those who consider this book a masterpiece, there are those who loathe it, and there are those who find it intriguing but overlong. I'm in the latter camp.
    • 5/5
      A great novel says more about the reader than the book itself, and the wide breadth of reactions to this one certainly shows that to be the case. To me, this book is a work of comic genius that laughs at human beings who take themselves seriously (which is most of us). It has a playful Zen quality of no boundaries in time or space and is free of a structure and plot which is likely to annoy some readers. Each scene is like an out-take from a comedy sketch show – Monty Python, perhaps. This novel can only be appreciated if approached with a sense of the absurd and a willingness to discard conventional expectations; if you can do that you are in for a treat...
    • 1/5
      aggravating and awful, foggy and unclear, too long for its own good.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      I found The Unconsoled a challenging read, not that the prose is especially difficult, for it is not, but because of how long it took to become intelligible for me.
      The book is heavy on dialogue and for the first couple of hundred pages at least I was irritated with the length of the spoken passages and how unrealistic they seemed. Every conversation is one sided and uses a hundred words of trivia where ten would not only suffice but be normal in real world usage. Let's be honest, if someone was droning on at you repeatedly in such a way, you'd drift off, look for any excuse to get away, and so it was in the reading of the early passages, and yet the urge to be patient, and to persevere was also strong and eventually it became clearer that this was indeed a purposeful feature of the substance of the story, not merely the style of the writing.

      The early apparently amnesic state of confusion of the central character, Mr Ryder, a world renowned concert pianist, was bemusing, he not seeming to know where he was or why, yet recognising small details and memories, though seemingly unable or unwilling to simply ask anyone the obvious questions to give him the answers, drifting from one frustrating situation to another.
      Then other characters appear without explanation of their familial relationship to Ryder, and it takes some time for these ties (wife, father in law, son) to become apparent.
      Once evident however, together with other, often Freudian, clues too bizarre to be real, with illogical shifts in time and space, the true dreamlike nature of the writing becomes tangible and very slowly the story begins to have meaning.

      I interpreted the book as being a combination of dream and conscious states, seamlessly interwoven so as to be impossible to tell them apart, dealing with the fears of a man used to being independent and in total control of his affairs, developing alter ego characters as mere representations of himself such as Stephan, his younger self desperate to impress the most demanding of parents, and the misunderstood, drunken, Brodsky being what he would fear he may become should he lose control or slip from his pedestal.
      Then, not untypical of certain successful yet often lonely people there is subconscious envy of the common man with his simpler life, yet even those situations are convoluted with Ryder's own sense of his status and self importance.

      In the final stretch of the book everything starts to unravel and all of the stresses and strains of dealing with the domestic constraints of marriage and fatherhood, of demands placed on his time and energy through being a celebrity back on home turf, painful adolescent memories stirred and fear of failure, are blissfully and dreamily washed away as Ryder nears his departure for his next engagement in far off Helsinki.

      My experience of reading The Unconsoled is that I very nearly gave up on it after in the first third and would have struggled to rate it a one or two stars, in the middle section the narrative solidified, characters and relationships crystalising with the dream sequences now making more sense yet I was at times aghast at how much more of the book was still to read, and yet in the final third I had to reevaluate everything that had come before and started to enjoy the book only to find myself surprisingly, and gratefully, satisfied with the finale and conclusion.

      Days after finishing The Unconsoled I found myself pondering the experience fondly and it could have been so different had Ishiguro failed to pull and tie the threads together so tightly in the end, or had I elected follow my inclination to bail out at half time, and so I elevated my rating from 3 to 4 stars.
    • 5/5
      By far the most bizarre novel I've read in years. I really enjoyed it.
    • 3/5
      I bailed out about half-way through. Scene after scene in which nothing happens to move the narrative forward. Apparently the guy was in dream.