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The Unconsoled begins with Ryder, a famous pianist, arriving in an unnamed European city to perform a concert. Through more than five hundred pages of prose, much of it quoted speech, the hapless Ryder meets with continual delay and frustration as he approaches the night of this concert. He encounters a number of at best eccentric people in the city, some of whom he has known long ago. He learns that a civic group has invited him to perform, hoping his presence will help the

One of the features of Ishiguro’s Unconsoled is that it makes use of two forms of narration. The story begins with close first-person character narration with the protagonist, Ryder, describing things strictly from his perspective. Example, please. “The taxi driver seemed embarrassed to find there was no one—not even a clerk behind the reception desk—waiting to welcome me.” However, near the end of the first chapter, as we’ve described before, Ryder becomes omniscient, in tha

When I began this blog almost three years ago, I set out to write about particular features of stories I enjoyed, their narrational structures, themes, the way they developed plot and character. I did not want to do a sort of book report or review, “This book was very…good. The story was …interesting.” I’m making fun, but I wanted to write about books I’d already read once so I could focus on less obvious features and get away from a strictly emotional reaction. Thus, what pa

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, just who are those who are unconsoled? The definition of the word “unconsoled” is a person or group who is not consoled, consoled meaning to comfort (someone) at a time of grief or disappointment. So who in the story has experienced a time of grief or disappointment? Ryder, the protagonist, is an obvious candidate. There are suggestions that he has indeed had a traumatic past, and they become more explicit as the book goes on. However, he g

My friends, what of the narrational style of The Unconsoled? After all, that’s what I typically write about. Most simply put, Unconsoled is told in first person, simple past tense. In contrast, critics have pointed out how Ishiguro’s other novels employ different modes of narration—within the same—usually first person–story. Thus, Remains of the Day makes use of a sort of travel brochure narration—an imitation of the kind of prose used in travel books—as well as an “oratorica

This week, a new story, best beloved, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 novel, The Unconsoled. It is, essentially, the story of a concert pianist, Ryder, who has come to an unnamed Central European city to perform a concert. I first read Unconsoled twenty years ago after enjoying Ishiguro’s other books and found it amazing and challenging. Some initial reviewers were rather negative—notably James Woods and Michiko Kakutani—but over time, the book’s strengths have become clear to most. It

Last week, due to constraints of space and time, we interrupted our discussion of Cellists, the last story in Nocturnes. Let’s continue where we left off. In September, Mr. Kaufman says there’s an opening at a hotel in Amsterdam for a cellist, with “light housekeeping duties.” Tibor asks for a couple of days to decide. His hesitation makes the fellas in the band angry. “That woman’s turned him into an arrogant little shit.” So the fellas are perhaps jealous/envious. They thin

In Cellists, the fifth and final story in Nocturnes, we return to the city of Venice but with new characters. The complex narrative structure involves the story of a young musician, Tibor, told by a first-person narrator, another musician who is an unnamed saxophonist, although it could be someone who played with Jan in Crooners. It begins with the narrator telling a story about how he was performing in the piazza and saw a man whom he recognized from seven years earlier, Tib

The fourth story in Nocturnes is entitled Nocturne and is the longest of the five contained therein. Does this have meaning? I don’t know, my friend. I don't know. Some things don’t. Nocturne concerns a first-person narrator, Steve, who is a professional saxophone player, which satisfies at least two of the requirements for stories in this book—that they present first-person narrators who are musicians. Steve tells a story to his narratee that begins: “Until two days ago, Lin

In the third story of Nocturnes, Malvern Hills, we immediately come on a first-person narrator who is never named. “I’d spent the spring in London, and all in all, even if I hadn’t achieved everything I’d set out to, it had been an exciting interlude.” We learn that this fellow feels the weeks are “slipping by” and that he’s “vaguely paranoid about running into his former university friends, asking “how I was getting on since leaving the course to seek “fame and fortune”…with

The title of the next story in Nocturnes contains another musical reference, Come Rain or Come Shine, the title of a famous American song standard. It is narrated by Ray, who, like Jan in Crooner, is someone living abroad, away from England, his country of birth. The story continues to incorporate motifs of music, evening, immigration, and portals. It begins with Ray describing how he’d become close with a couple, Emily and Charlie, in university days, apparently twenty-five

Last week, we began to look at Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, specifically the first tale, Crooner. I cut the diamond in stating that I thought the narrator, Jan, was underreading vs. underreporting. Let’s look at this more closely. (whiny voice: Why is this even important?) For a deeper understanding of the story. Please settle down. James Phelan talks about this distinction in depth. To review, underreporting is when a character narrator does not admit to his narratee what bot

This week a new book, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2009 Nocturnes, originally published in Britain and then by American publisher Knopf in the same year. It is dedicated to Deborah Rogers, Ishiguro’s long time literary agent. Nocturnes is a collection of five stories that Ishiguro himself has said were conceived of as a whole, like a piece of music with five movements. It is not a short story collection, as, to Ishiguro, a short story is complete unto itself, and these tales are not. Ind

The last chapter of Remains is entitled Weymouth. It begins with Mr. Stevens sitting on a pier, or boardwalk, by the sea, waiting for the evening lights to be turned on. Light and darkness as metaphor for revelation and repression play an important part in the story, and this is a fine example. He then recounts the content of his meeting two days prior with Miss Kenton, which in many ways is the climax of the book. James Phelan, in his book Living To Tell About It, presents a

Although Mr. Stevens spends considerable time reflecting on the past during his journey, he is at times confronted by people from the present who challenge his beliefs. On the afternoon of the second day of the trip, Mr. Stevens has car trouble and encounters a man identified as a servant or batman, who in the course of assisting Mr. Stevens, learns he was employed at Darlington Hall. “Then his voice changed noticeably as he inquired: “You mean you actually used to work for t

What is the plot in Remains? Well, what is plot? “The main events of a play, novel, movie, or similar work, devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence.” But this definition leaves a lot out. Do these events flow from the actions of the characters or are they the work of an external entity, like fate? (or the implied author—heh, heh, heh!) Do the characters themselves transform or do they cope with the confines of living in a plot? Is the plot the work of

In a 1986 Guardian interview, (pre-Remains), Ishiguro writes that he was dissatisfied with his early novels because he judged them as being too much like screenplays with sections of dialogue followed by explanation. During an illness, he read the Combray section of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and saw how he could write in a less linear way by following the characters’ memories and thoughts to link together sections. At the risk of all sorts of legal trouble, I’m going t

Last week, I began our discussion of The Remains of the Day by saying that we’d sniffed out another unreliable narrator—Mr. Stevens, the butler of Darlington Hall—who is shown narrating the story of his six-day journey by car to the West of England in 1956. During the trip, he presents a labyrinthine tale of his days so far at Darlington Hall, employed in large part by Lord Darlington, a wealthy man, now deceased, who has been vilified as a traitor to Britain because of his a

This week, a new story, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1988 The Remains of the Day. (Whiny voice: This week, a new story, Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat and—ow! Sounds of struggle, a crash. Something seems to strike a microphone, and feedback ensues). ‘Kay. Everyone settle down. I want to apologize—get him! Don’t let him get away!. (indistinct yelling). I first read Remains in 1995 when I was living in Chicago. My wife and I had seen the wonderful 1993 Merchant/Ivory film version starring