About this title: In Kazuo Ishiguro's fifth novel, Christopher Banks is an English boy growing up in Shanghai. His parents disappear and are eventually presumed dead, and Christopher is raised in England by an aunt. As an adult, he becomes a prominent detective who returns to Shanghai to try to find out what happened to his family. The fateful year of his return is 1937, when the Japanese massacred 250,000 Chinese, and things become perilous for Banks as he searches through his parents in what has now become a war zone. In the end, he discovers a fact about his past that threatens his entire way of life. As a ...
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Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Date Published: 2000
ISBN-13:9780375410543ISBN:0375410546
Description: Good. No dust jacket. A moderate amount of wear on Cover and interior pages. (W2) Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 352 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Good. This book has medium cover wear, light cover lift, spine creases, light spine tilt, light creases on covers, light page edge wear. read more
Description: Fair. Purchasing this DVD supports the North Central Regional Library. Thriftbooks and NCRL have partnered to help raise additional funds for the library system. Library ID found on DVD and case. Ex-Library book-will contain library markings. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Description: Good. Light shelf wear and minimal interior marks. Millions of satisfied customers and climbing. Thriftbooks is the name you can trust, guaranteed. Spend Less. Read More. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Date Published: 2000
ISBN-13:9780375410543ISBN:0375410546
Description: Very good in very good dust jacket. hard cover, sb4, minor shelf/edge wear. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 352 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
"I personally liked the book because of the details used to portray the characters. However, the beginning of the book was a drag. Only the ending of the book was decent."
"This was one of the rare occasions that I didn't read the blurb for the book before starting to read it. It turned out to be fortuitous. For the first half of the book, I enjoyed following the life story of a somewhat believable character. His own viewpoint of his past and his place in society didn't always coincide with other people's memories or ideas and at times it was clear that he was romanticising his childhood. However, these are fairly common traits in a lot of people. Halfway through, however, things started to get quite odd. The character seemed to become quite delusional. It was then that I read the blurb only to find that the life he was presenting was, in fact, very distorted. The rest of the book becomes increasingly unreal as conversations and events are twisted by the main character's fantasies. I think I enjoyed the book all the more for not knowing from the outset the character's state of mind. It came as a slow realisation and, I believe this was the author's intention. With hindsight, it was easy to see the clues in the preceding chapters.
The book is narrated by the main character, Christopher Banks. He is a celebrated detective living in England but is haunted by one unsolved case - that of the disappearance of his parents during his childhood in Shanghai. As always, Ishiguro writes beautifully. The language is simple but each sentence is beautifully crafted."
"I'm trying to be tough on my rating. I just finished reading this but it was really a matter of disappointment to me. Actually, after reading "the Remains of the Day" my expectations from Kazuo Ishiguro had been intensified. I expected much and got less. It's like he's written this one with this intention that one day somebody would write a script of it for a Hollywood movie, which generally speaking is not very satisfactory. Basically I am not very much into books that are very adventurous and so many things happen in them. They sound a bit too insane to me. This one is definitely one of them. Things happen one after the other without any special reason. You can just put them away and what will be left is still a complete story. So many people get lost and then found out of blue, exactly on the path the first person is taking. The narration pattern gets boring when in almost the first half of the book you just read a memory of the narrator which points to something for which to be explained you should read another memory which in turn is very evolved with some others. The second half is so stretched that drives you crazy with all the nothing that happens in it. And at the end, in one or two very dense chapters you are flooded with information about peoples destinies and that would be all. I don't regret reading it; actually I don't regret reading any book. (Except the damned "Demian" of course.) But if you want my word, you won't miss a thing if you exclode this one from your "to be read" list."
"This story of a deluded and emotionally-stunted individual in search of his lost parents and his vanished childhood left me frustrated and disappointed. Ishiguro is an amazing writer but in this work his talent lets him down. He has the rare ability of capturing an entire character through the narrative voice he creates for him. His writing is always to clear and evocative. He displays this talent again in this book, but it is not enough to save it. As the book begins, we meet Christopher Banks growing up in the International Settlement in Shanghai with a father working for a British company and a mother passionately opposed to the opium trade. I should note here that Ishiguro's depiction of pre-war Shanghai I found not particularly evocative as compared say to J.G. Ballard's "Empire of the Sun." Christopher makes friends with a young Japanese boy his own age, Akira. (WARNING, SPOILER AHEAD). Later, at the denoument of the book, they meet again in a scene that is particularly unsatisfying. I'm not sure if Akira was supposed to be a symbolic character. if so, I was unable to grasp his symbolic significance and as a flesh-and-blood character he falls short. Christopher's father disappears and is suspected to have been kidnapped. A little later, his mother also vanishes. Christopher, then about 10, is shipped to boarding school in England.
As he recounts his schooldays, we become aware that Christopher is an unreliable narrator. He obviously thinks he fits in as a perfect little Englishman. We become aware that he obviously stands out. When people slight him, he's oblivious or pretends to be oblivious. Christopher grows up to become a "detective" in the Sherlock Holmes mode and imagines himself a fighter in the frontline against evil. His chosen profession, invoked in a deliberately old-fashioned and unrealistic manner (he seems to spend his time on his stomach peering through a magnifying glass) is evidently an attempt to compensate for the unsolved mystery of his parents' disappearance. Christopher also meets Sarah Hemmings, a fellow-orphan and similarly unmoored character. The two seem attracted to one another but also both too emotionally stunted to connect. Sarah's role in the story is strange. She doesn't seem to fit in, except as an example of Christopher's inability to find a proper place in the world. Finally, Christopher travels back to Shanghai to solve the mystery of his parents' disappearance. The city of engulfed in fighting as the Japanese threaten to take over. Christopher seems to believe that his success in clearing up his own mystery would be a decisive blow against "evil" that could somehow stave off the coming World War. In this part of the book, the plot becomes entirely unmoored from reality. I am an admirer of this author but I felt reading this book that he was trying too hard to duplicate his previous success. As a protagonist, Christopher is all too similar to Stevens from "The Remains of the Day." But this book lacks the emotional resonance of the earlier effort, which looks back ruefully on a life, a way of life and an entire empire. Ishiguro cannot keep returning to this well. He needs to find a new wellspring of inspiration. "When We Were Orphans" shows too clearly that the old well has run dry."
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