Only the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day could have created this daring and stunningly inventive new novel. The Unconsoled gives readers ...
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Only the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day could have created this daring and stunningly inventive new novel. The Unconsoled gives readers what is at once a riveting psychological mystery, an acute satire of the cult of art, and a poignant character study of a man whose public self has taken on a life of its own. "Ishiguro writes with his characteristic grace and off-beat pungency".--Los Angeles Times.
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Description: Good. 0679735879 Former library item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned. Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items.
Description: Good. 0679735879 Former library item may have library binding and show stamps, stickers or other marks. Items not meeting quality expectations may be returned. Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items.
Description: Acceptable. 1996-Paperback---Used-Acceptable. Hall Street Books proudly ships from Brooklyn, NY. All orders are processed and shipped within 24 hours, M-F. 100% money back No-Worry guarantee with expedited delivery and delivery confirmation available.
Description: Good. 1996-Paperback----Used-Good-Hall Street Books proudly ships from Brooklyn, NY. All orders are processed and shipped within 24 hours, M-F. 100% money back No-Worry guarantee with expedited delivery and delivery confirmation available.
Description: As New. As new and evidently unread, square and solid, cover clean and shiny, spine and rest of book in all-around perfect shape--you'll shimmy merrily when this book gets to you! ! !
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Minor shelf wear, otherwise pages are clean & unmarked. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 544 p. Audience: General/trade.
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 544 p. Audience: General/trade. Book is in excellent condition. Cover has light crease on upper corner. Pages are clean, binding is tight. We ship daily, Satisfaction Guaranteed.
Description: Very Good. Very Good + Condition. Binding tight, pages clean. Lightest edge-wear. Tiny crease at bottom right corner of cover. Very nice copy!
"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."
"This novel is hard to review. While the writing was excellent overall, I felt that the characters were often poorly conceived and all too similar. They all spoke in the same ornately apologetic fashion and though it was mentioned several times that they were not speaking English (to the supposedly English narrator) language didn't seem to be an issue.
The concept of the novel (which has been discussed at length in other reviews here) is an interesting one, but I did feel that the book had 100 too many pages (specifically 400-500 in my edition). Nothing additional was accomplished there that advanced the story...just belaboring the point that the narrator is living in a dream-like state.
I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Kafka (esp. The Castle) and fans of Mr. Ishiguro. Certainly read Never Let Me Go or Remains of the Day first though."
"Something is amiss with this narrator. At first it just felt a little quirky, but I'm starting to think something is rather...off with him... possibly even something sinister. I can't put my finger on it but there seems to be maybe a Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense-esque thing possibly afoot. His conversations with people are weirdly disjointed - at least their responses to him are. He has a strange relationship to his own memory and, I suspect, others' histories. Everyone he meets wants something from him, which, while no doubt a dreary daily feature of being famous, seems a little excessive in number and nature so far. Is he psychic? clairvoyant? some kind of ghoul who takes on the shape/characteristics/personality desired by his interlocutor? I sat up screaming shortly after dozing off, after reading this just before bed, and I don't even know why. Something creepy is going on.... or maybe Never Let Me Go has just made me paranoid.
ETA I've had nightmares like this when stretched in too many directions by too many expectations and responsibilities. That unpleasantness ultimately outweighed my enjoyment of the surreal time/place/space-twisting. But props for evoking that maddening frustration so well."
"I wanted to get Remains of the Day but the library was out of it. So I got this instead. I read his book "Never Let Me Go" a few years ago and liked it, but I really didn't like this one at all. I was never quite clear about what exactly was going on and why. There was a certain event that was alluded to be of dire importance to this town where the story was set, but it was never adequately explained. The main character was supposedly the father of this boy, but then the boy's grandfather acted like he didn't know the man at all...weird things like that. I like a certain amount of ambiguity but this was just annoying. There were these odd shifts in perspective- it was mostly in first person (I did this and I did that) but then it would shift to relating some other character's memories or a conversation that the main character clearly could not be privy to unless they had somehow become invisible and were hovering overhead or something. I like surrealism/magic realism, but there were things in here that were just bizarre and didn't work, like the character being in one place that he drove in a car to get to, and then walking through a door or a passageway and finding that he was somehow back in some other building that was miles away.
The writing was good enough to keep me intrigued, hoping that it would all somehow come together. Too bad it didn't. "Never Let Me Go" had a similar feeling- at the beginning I didn't know what the hell was going on, but eventually it all made sense and was satisfying. I think that experience led me to expect a similar resolution from this book and I was frustrated when it never came."
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