The Unconsoled [Hardcover]

Kazuo Ishiguro (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 1995

From the universally acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day comes a mesmerizing novel of completely unexpected mood and matter--a seamless, fictional universe, both wholly unrecognizable and familiar. When the public, day-to-day reality of a renowned pianist takes on a life of its own, he finds himself traversing landscapes that are by turns eerie, comical, and strangely malleable.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

With this stunning new novel, cast in the form of a postmodern nightmare, Ishiguro tells a powerful story in which he once again exploits a narrator's utter lack of self-knowledge to create a devastating deadpan irony. A celebrated concert pianist identified only as Mr Ryder arrives at an unnamed European (seemingly Germanic) city not only to give a concert but also, it seems, to address the townspeople and help them surmount a communal sense of crisis that stems from the city's inability to nurture a musical artist of outstanding creative talent. Strangely, the economic, social and psychic health of the community depends on its regaining its self-image in the wake of a dreadful past mistake, when the city fathers lionized a musician with the "wrong" artistic values. Ryder intuits this situation gradually, for he is curiously disoriented; he can't really remember what he's supposed to be doing there. In fact, through Ryder's confused perceptions, the reader is immediately plunged into a surrealistic landscape that has the eerie unpredictability, claustrophobic atmosphere and strange time sequences of a dream. Everyone in this town presents a false image to the world. Each person Ryder meets addresses him with fawning obsequiousness and asks him for a small favor which turns out to be an egregious intrusion into his time. Yet Ryder, infused with an inflated sense of mission, feels a need to console them: "People need me. I arrive in a place and find terrible problems, and people are so grateful I've come." Although he initially thinks he's a stranger in the city, it slowly becomes obvious that he's been here before. In fact, he has been the lover of a woman called Sophie whose little boy, Boris, in many ways replays the pivotal events of Ryder's own life. With dream logic, many of Ryder's childhood friends from England turn up in this inhospitable place, and it becomes obvious that most events are replicas of ones that have occurred before or that fulfill Ryder's fears about the future. As in Ishiguro's previous books (The Remains of the Day, etc.), almost every turn of the plot concerns a failure of communication and a stifling of emotional responses. Children are profoundly wounded by their self-absorbed and insensitive parents; lovers alienate each other across an emotional abyss. The culture-obsessed inhabitants of the city don't recognize true talent when it appears; they disapprove of creativity when it doesn't fit their expectations. Sustaining the nightmarish atmosphere of this tale?its tone alternately sinister and farcical?for more than 500 pages is a tricky business, especially since all the characters express themselves in long, dense monologues. Yet, so adroit is Ishiguro in maintaining suspense that one is as ensnared in the nightmare as is Ryder. The story seems to be a journey through life: its purpose never entirely clear, its events capricious and inexplicable, its destination undoubtedly "the vast, dark, empty space" of the soul's extinction. 75,000 first printing; BOMC and QPB selections.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

As stylistically distinctive as his acclaimed The Remains of the Day (LJ 10/1/89), Ishiguro's newest work offers a different kind of protagonist. While Remains's butler was at odds with himself (without knowing it), prominent concert pianist Ryder is at odds with his surroundings. Ryder arrives in an unidentified European city at a bit of a loss. Everyone he meets seems to assume that he knows more than he knows, that he is well acquainted with the city and its obscure cultural crisis. A young woman he kindly consents to advise seems to have been an old lover and her son quite possibly his own; he vaguely recalls past conversations. The world he has entered is a surreal, Alice-in-Wonderland place where a door in a cafe can lead back to a hotel miles away. The result is at once dreamy, disorienting, and absolutely compelling; Ishiguro's paragraphs, though Proust-like, are completely lucid and quite addictive to read. Some readers may find that the whole concept grinds too much against logic, but the pleasure here is that Ishiguro doesn't do anything so ordinary as trying to resolve events neatly, instead taking them at face value. Highly recommended.
--Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 535 pages
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; 1st edition (October 3, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679404252
• ISBN-13: 978-0679404255
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6.2 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (152 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #346,859 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Kazuo Ishiguro is the author of six novels, including the international bestsellers The Remains of the Day (winner of the Booker Prize) and Never Let Me Go. He received an OBE for service to literature and the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London with his wife and daughter.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

126 of 132 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I'm still screaming, May 6, 2003

By 

Anna Klein - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Unconsoled (Audio Cassette)

THE UNCONSOLED is the most frustrating book I've ever read. It's also one of the most rewarding. It wasn't until I reached the end that I began to understand it, and I would never have reached the end at all if I hadn't listened to the audio version. David Case delivers an excellent narration, his calm, dry approach highlighting the emotions in each situation and his analytical, english accent well suited to the book's formal, elaborate tone.

Mr. Ryder, a world renowned pianist, has just arrived in an unidentified city for reasons he can no longer remember, except it seems he has some moral duty to help the city's occupants and he is to give a concert and speech on the coming Thursday night. Since Case uses a slightly Germanic accent for the city's people, one can assume the unnamed city is in Germany. The city is apparently a cultural and musical center that has fallen on hard times after idolizing the wrong musician and now has its hope of redemption pinned on another, ailing musician, Mr. Leo Brodsky. The entire city is coddling Brodsky along in the hopes he will manage a spectacular performance on this important Thursday night.

Every character Ryder encounters greets him most obsequiously while begging of him some small favor -- critiquing a piano piece, visiting a particular restaurant, studying some albums -- until he (and the reader) is overcome with exhaustion. Yet Ryder always feels the need to listen to these longwinded concerns and to try to offer some help, for he has both the sense of having been brought here to make things right and of his own overblown self importance. Although he feels a stranger to these people, it becomes obvious he isn't -- he has been to this city before and has a life with a woman, Sophie, and her small boy, Boris.

Ryder isn't suffering from amnesia exactly. Sometimes he can remember things. Sometimes he can't. Sometimes his memories change. Often they are distorted, such as when he believes his motel room is actually his old bedroom or an old abandoned car he finds is actually his family's vehicle from his childhood. At other times memories will come back to him in the strangest ways, for occurances he did not personally witness.

Time is badly warped -- thirty minute discussions take place during ten minute trips -- and all the while there is a terrible sense of urgency, of always being too late or in the wrong place or unable to get from here to there. Often Ryder finds himself back where he started, even though he traveled a long way from point A to B. Doors in dinner halls open back into his hotel; during a lunch date he discovers he's in the same cafe where he ate breakfast. Farms and forests and grassy hills with huts appear in the middle of the city. Once a brick wall blocks his path, built right across the road for no apparent reason. At one point Ryder wears a dressing robe to an evening party, yet no one notices (even when it falls open). The people are too involved in a discussion concerning Mr. Brodsky's dead dog.

As the sense of rush and desperation increased, I got the feeling the whole book was a maze from which Ryder (and, incidentally I) could not escape. It reads like one of those nightmares where you're moving in slow motion, unable to stop the events around you, unable to speak, powerless to reach your destination. And, as in those nightmares, people from the past keep cropping up where they have no reason to be. Ryder's old schoolmates, his childhood girlfriend, they show up with their own curious demands. In fact, everyone Ryder meets becomes more and more demanding of him, while seemingly unaware of it. Their moods shift rapidly (so do Ryder's), and while they view Ryder as a god-like figure, they also seem to secretly despise him and be laughing at him, as when he is in the company of a journalist and photographer and the two shout over his head to each other about how vain and conceited he is. Incidentally, Ryder hears everything they say, then proceeds to do exactly what they have just predicted he would. As the book progressed I grew to dislike Ryder intensely, especially for his willingness to give other people advice that he could not follow himself and for his totally callous treatment of Boris.

By the end of the book it seemed to me that certain people -- Boris; the hotel manager's twenty-some-year-old son, Stephan; and Mr. Brodsky -- represent Ryder himself at different periods in his life (this somewhat explains the unreliable narration). Boris is struggling to attract his father's attention, Stephan is struggling with parents who refuse to recognize his musical gifts, Brodsky has reached the end of his career, a shell of former glory. The entire story seems to be a dreamlike life journey, a fusion of past and future events into one surreal present. I found the ending incredibly sad; I was touched by the way Ishiguro highlights the futility of life, the farce lying beneath every society, the way people do not want to change.

Rating THE UNCONSOLED is difficult. If I judge it by how boring and frustrating certain portions were, it gets two stars. But if I judge it by what Ishiguro ultimately accomplished, it gets five stars. Because the ending brought it all together for me, I have settled on the latter, a hopefully fair rating for a book I will never read again, but one I will certainly never forget.

46 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enjoy a challenging read? Funny, profound, difficult., November 1, 2000

By 

Nessander - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Unconsoled (Paperback)

In The Remains of the Day Ishiguro perfected the writing style he had begun in his first two books, and after its success he proclaimed his desire to write something different, 'rougher'. The Unconsoled is the product of five years' work by this acclaimed writer, and 'rough' -- as in difficult -- is indeed a word that might be used to describe it.

First of all, it is a massive book. Secondly, it has no plot. Thirdly, it doesn't make any sense. Huh?

If you've read Kafka (especially The Castle) the solution to this riddle will be easy to explain: The Unconsoled is a modern-day Kafka-esque dream-world social commentary on the individual and society. As with Kafka, the theme is alientation of the individual from society, others, and himself. Ishiguro delves into the question of why we are often so incapable when it comes to interacting with the people we care most about. In the words of a song from the musical Chess the theme is: 'How can I love you so much, yet make no move?' Ishiguro's cast is comprised of parents and children, husbands and wives, who because of their own human weakness find it almost impossible to say the simplest of things, or make the simplest of actions, and thereby allow their relationships to deteriorate -- slowly, frustratingly, continuously.

The setting is an unspecified central European city in decline, whose citizens view the protagonist, the famous pianist Charles Ryder, as a kind of saviour who will revive their city's fortunes. But of course, no external solution is possible, and Ryder must fail, even as he watches his own personal life crumbling before his inactivity. Neglecting his wife and son, he is mindlessly self-centred, interested only in achieving self-validation by having his parents attend one of his concerts so they can see him perform before he loses his skills. Despite the fact that they never come, he makes preparations for their arrival and retains a futile hope that can only be called pathetic.

Fortunately (since there is no plot), Ishiguro combines his powerful message with stunning dream-like imagery and a good dose of side-splitting humour. Ishiguro has an incredible sense of the absurd (as readers of The Remains of the Day will well know) and he places Ryder in the most agonizing and embarassing of situations, to which we all can easily relate. This humour is welcome in what is a hard and rather depressing, yet immensely well-written and powerful, book. If you can handle a struggle, or (better yet) enjoy being challenged, The Unconsoled is masterful modern literature, well worth the read.

45 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Truly Amazing, Fascinating, and Frustrating, December 11, 1997

By 

[e-mail] (Providence, RI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Unconsoled (Hardcover)

I read this book last year after completing a high school English assignment which included the reading of Ishiguro's Remains of the Day. After being astounded by the literary merit and quality of this work, I just had to read another. Well, as those of you who have read both can attest to, I was definitely surprised. The Unconsoled centers around Mr. Ryder, a renowned pianist who comes to play in a small European town (which incidentally, remains unnamed). Right from the start, the reader learns that through his performance, he is somehow expected to save the city from their own cultural degredation. How he is supposed to do this, we don't really know. This confusion remains throughout the book, and it is not for the faint hearted. Ishiguro spares no expense in describing the frustration that Ryder is feeling, creating a suureal dreamworld setting, in which time and space have no meaning (as we know them). Consider an elevator ride in a hotel up 2 floors in which an entire 10 minute conversation is held. Consider doors popping up all over the place that lead Ryder back to his hotel, even though he may have driven a great distance to get there. Consider a wall, strectched across the street for no apparent reason, which simply hinders Ryder from getting to where he wants to go. All of these are described with such a sense of reality and matter-of-factness that they are made to appear like normal ocurrences. Ishiguro's novel is a masterpiece in that it draws the reader in. It is not just about Mr. Ryder -- it is about the reader as well. It is about the frustrations and about the dreamlike quality that everyone's life takes on at times. It is about art, and the power it has over a society. It is about artists, and the enormous cultural burdens and responsibilities they experience. If you are ready for a challenge to both your mind and your sanity, pick up the Unconsoled. Stick with it through all the frustrations and absurdities, and you may just find something deep inside.