The unconsoled

The Unconsoled itself is beautifully controlled, even-paced, deadpan in spite of all extravagances. Its determined equanimity of tone makes you drowsy, and sometimes you wonder if you'd notice if you dropped off to sleep while you were reading. But there is finally something haunting, even

alluring, about the proliferation of obstacles and stories in this book.

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Description

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.

Language

English

Original language

English

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User reviews

LibraryThing member sturlington

The Unconsoled plunges the reader into an off-kilter, dreamlike world that is like a combination of Alice in Wonderland, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and something from Kafka. As the book opens, a famous concert pianist named Ryder is arriving at his hotel in an unnamed European city,

scheduled to perform in a couple of days. Soon everyone he meets is confessing personal details about their lives to Ryder and asking him for one presumptuous favor after another, all of which he agrees to do. These favors lead him on a surreal journey around the city and to more encounters and more favors asked.

Space and time seem distorted in this city. The landscape abruptly shifts from urban to rural, from busy streets to deserted ones. Buildings that were far apart turn out to be connected to each other. Time passes either too quickly or too slowly. All of this Ryder accepts without much protest or confusion. In fact, he seems to suffer from a strange form of amnesia, which makes him forget important people in his life until he illogically encounters them all in this same city. At the same time, Ryder seems to know things about people that he shouldn’t and witnesses conversations where he is not actually present.

My best explanation for all this is that the story actually represents all of Ryder’s life, compressed into three days and melded together in the way that memories become entangled and combined. This would explain why Ryder is struck by childhood memories at times, and why he keeps encountering people from various times in his life. Indeed, three of the main characters could be seen as Ryder himself at different life stages: the young boy Boris, struggling to deal with his parents’ strained relationship; the young man Stephan, just starting out as a pianist but unable to secure the approval of his parents; and the old man Brodsky, at the end of a failed musical career. These characters all struggle, in various ways, with the issues that seem to preoccupy Ryder but which he cannot resolve: issues with his parents, who he continually looks for but who never appear; with a failed relationship, represented both by Boris’s mother Sophie and by Miss Collins, Brodsky’s ex-wife, with whom he is trying to reunite; and the responsibility of celebrity in a city in the midst of some cultural crisis, whose citizens alternately despise Ryder and excessively adulate him.

If we approach the book as if it is taking place in Ryder’s mind, compressing a lifetime of memories into this rambling narrative journey, the more illogical sections begin to make a certain kind of sense. When Ryder knows things he shouldn’t, it is because he makes assumptions about what people have said about him or what took place between them after the fact, concocting scenarios in his mind the way we all do, which may or may not be accurate. The vagaries of memory would also explain why the city’s geography is ill-defined, why time passes oddly and even why, when Ryder goes to see one of his “favorite” movies, 2001: A Space Odyssey, he remembers it as starring Yul Brynner and Clint Eastwood.

The Unconsoled is a challenging book. Paragraphs often stretch over one or more pages, and the confusing narrative has the effect of leading the reader feeling off-center, as if the book is only our dream. There is no real plot, no satisfying conclusion and no explanation offered by the author for the unusual events. (Perhaps your interpretation may differ from mine; Ishiguro certainly does leave it up to us to each decide for ourselves what the book means.) But I think the effort required is worth it.

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LibraryThing member AndrewBlackman

Have you ever had one of those dreams where you are trying to get somewhere but things keep going wrong? You get on the wrong train, get off and go back in the other direction but it takes you somewhere else, then start walking but the streets don’t go where they’re supposed to?

I’ve had

those, mostly at times of stress, when I had a lot on my mind and my life felt out of control. This book is one of those dreams, described in detail for 500 pages. It sounds like a nightmare, quite literally. I think in most authors’ hands, it would be. But Kazuo Ishiguro is a natural storyteller and somehow he pulls it off. In many of his books, things are left unsaid or unexplained. His narrative style is subtle and understated. He’s the perfect person to write this kind of book.

The main character is a famous concert pianist called Ryder who arrives in an unspecified town somewhere in central Europe to give a recital. The book covers the three days of his stay in the town. As he stays, more demands are made on him, demands that he can never seem to satisfy. He never has enough time, he is always late, always tired, always disappointing people. His life feels out of control.

One thing I liked was that it was never made obvious that it was a dream. Nothing really outlandish happened - the narrator didn’t suddenly start flying across rooftops (another mainstay of my dreams) or confronting big green monsters or anything like that. The effect of a dream was created through confused logic - events narrated as if they made sense, but with a big contradiction in them. For example, an old porter who carries his luggage at the hotel talks about his daughter and grandson. He’s worried about them and wants Ryder to go and meet them. When Ryder does meet them, the daughter is now his wife or at least lover. The contradiction is maintained through the book and never explained logically. At several times, simple geography is distorted. Ryder goes all the way across town to a party at a country house, and then when he wants to go back to the hotel he discovers that he is actually already back there - he just came in by a different entrance and didn’t recognise it. A ticket inspector on a tram turns out to be an old childhood friend from England. Like everyone else, she expects a lot from him and he lets her down.

I realise that it probably still sounds like a nightmare of a book. It’s hard to explain quite why I liked it. I suppose the premise was so difficult that it was good to see Ishiguro pull it off so artfully. There were also a lot of interesting subplots about the people in the town - an alcoholic old conductor, Brodsky, who’s trying to resurrect his career and win back his wife; a hotel owner Hoffman and his son who wants to be a pianist but only disappoints his parents; Ryder’s relationship with Sophie and the boy Boris; the old porter Gustav and his friends who meet in the Hungarian Cafe. I was interested in these people partly for themselves, and partly because if the whole thing is a dream, then they are clues to the dreamer’s personality: figures from his past, people he feels guilty about treating badly, or perhaps different incarnations of himself at various points in his life.

Despite all the good points, the book did feel very long after a while - the action is deliberately repetitive and circular, and I thought that it could have been shortened quite significantly without losing much of the overall meaning of the book. But I still felt compelled to read on, even though I knew really where it was all going. And at the end of it all, I had that warm feeling of satisfaction that comes from having read a really good book.

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LibraryThing member emily_morine

Having loved all his other novels, I finally got around to reading Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, and boy, was it strange and wonderful. I'd heard a vast array of opinions about this book, from "It is one of my top ten novels of all time" to "I loved it in a tense, uncomfortable way" to "it was an

unmitigated train wreck." It's always intriguing to me when a book attracts such a wide variety of reactions, so I was looking forward to The Unconsoled for that reason. It also just so happens that I read Ishiguro in what you might call "increasing order of weirdness," and I had heard that this is indeed his weirdest book. There is something deeply satisfying about continuing my trajectory in this way, although at this point I doubt it's sustainable any longer - it would be quite a challenge to write a stranger book than this one.

Of course, many of its strange qualities have been explored before. The surreality, the language of dreams and nightmares in which the protagonist tries in vain to accomplish simple tasks, the sudden and confusing shifts in setting and perspective, the garbled rationale and bizarre priorities of the natives in a strangely familiar city: all of these elements have been combined and recombined to create the "Kafkaesque" genre. That said, this book does all of these things in a way that seems more tense and fluid than many other dreamlike stories I've read. Ishiguro really captures the shifting sands of perception that mark a dreamlike consciousness. At the same time, he manages to maintain cohesion within the narrative - just barely, at times, but he manages it. Sometimes the balance between the surreality and the sense of coherent character and voice, feels like a virtuosic juggling act that the performer is just barely pulling off; the audience is poised at the edge of their seats, transfixed at the intricate patterns traced by the juggled objects, and simultaneously nervous that they will, at any moment, come crashing down on the performer's head.

Appropriately, then, the main character of The Unconsoled IS a performer: Ryder, a famous English pianist revisiting a city which may or may not already be familiar to him, where he is supposed to give a performance which may or may not be very important in a variety of ways. One of the things I loved about this novel was the unique way that relationships slid in and out of focus; a few pages after seeking out the daughter of an acquaintance in a café, Ryder will gradually "remember" more and more details about her. Although it is at first implied that they have just met, they are soon having conversations that suggest a long history of mutual resentments and shared hopes, attacking and reassuring each other in a manner reminiscent of a (dysfunctional) long-term relationship. Ryder's own emotions and thought processes regarding the happiness and mental health of the woman's son, Boris, achieve a level of intensity more appropriate to a stepfather than a chance acquaintance, and Boris' own reactions to Ryder indicate a deep desire for approval reminiscent of a neglected child. At the same time, the closeness of Ryder's relationships with mother and child is never explicitly stated, and seems to wax and wane unpredictably throughout the novel.

In a similar vein, the life stories of different characters start to mirror and imitate one another in eerie and intriguing ways. Having been drawn into a conversation with the hotel porter, Gustav, about how Gustav has fallen into the habit of never speaking directly to his daughter, Ryder gradually adopts the same practice toward Boris, his sometime-son. Witnessing the fraught relationship between the hotel manager Hoffman and his son Stephan either suggests to or reminds Ryder of his own nebulous connection with his parents, who may or may not be arriving in the unnamed city to hear him play the piano for the first time in many years. The reader is never sure the extent to which the conversations and stories going on around Ryder create his perceived world, the extent to which he is extrapolating his own story outward onto those around him, and the extent to which a more complex dynamic is at work. The primal fears involved in many of these interactions (rejection by parents, arriving unprepared for important performances, the sudden realization that one's actions have been wildly inappropriate) add another level to the question of what Ryder is "half-creating" and what he perceives; there is a sense that we may be caught in an uncontrollable spiral, continually creating the worlds we dread through the very act of dreading them.

This sense of inappropriate behavior is a constant throughout The Unconsoled, and it runs the gamut from exhilarating to horrifying to surprisingly unexceptional. Nobody seems to notice, for example, when Ryder shows up to a fancy dress event in his dressing gown and slippers, and Ryder himself is strangely nonreactive when a journalist and photographer who are interviewing him commence talking about him as if her weren't present, planning how they will flatter and distract him into making unwise publicity decisions. On the other hand, he is horrified when the mourners at a funeral stop their sobbing to flock around him and deluge him with manic adulation, searching their pockets for refreshments to offer him and castigating themselves for having only a small piece of cellophane-wrapped cake. In one of my favorite scenes in the novel, Ryder and his wife-or-maybe-just-casual-acquaintance Sophie attend a late-night showing of 2001: A Space Odyssey - an alternate-universe version of the film involving interstellar gunfights between Yul Brenner and Clint Eastwood, who star as the astronauts who must dismantle HAL. The atmosphere in the theater is depicted as almost carnivalesque, with people laughing, talking, playing cards in the aisles, and, most bizarrely, rolling onto their backs with their legs in the air, shrieking with mirth, whenever anyone needs to inch by their seats. This is the flip-side to the terrifying or disconcerting abandonment of logical behavior in other sections - a giddy, liberating feeling which pervades the theater and lets the locals, as the hotel manager puts it, "unwind."

But the strangest narrative quirk of The Unconsoled is the way in which Ryder occasionally takes casual notice of a long, complicated back-story just by looking at a person, in the same way that he might notice a runny nose or a lipstick smudge. The first time this happens, as Gustav is showing him around his hotel room, I found the trick strangely disorienting, and actually doubled back to see whether I had missed a small phrase such as "I found out later" or "he would go on to tell me." But as I went on with the novel and similar incidents followed, it struck me as a very clever way to play with narrative. Readers are already familiar, after all, with narrators who notice small physical details about people they're observing, and even make assumptions or draw conclusions based on those observations. The next (il)logical step, in a novel of surreal perceptions taken to grotesque heights, is the ability to simply perceive another person's thoughts, feelings, past or present actions simply by looking at or thinking about them. So, for example, Ryder can take casual notice of Gustav's preoccupied air in the hotel room, and also casually notice that the porter is worried about his daughter, who has been handing off her son on certain days so that she can do errands, and then (Gustav has reason to believe) not doing the errands after all. Similarly, he can be waiting in the car with Boris while Stephan Hoffman runs an errand at a woman's apartment, and tell us how he watches Stephan climb the stairs and ring the bell, then recount his conversation with the woman as he enters the apartment and follows her down the hall, recounting the interior design as well as the conversation. Then, in case the reader is thinking that Ryder must have followed Stephen into the apartment after all, he writes that his attention was recalled by a noise made by Boris, and goes on to interact with the boy within the confines of the car. The liquidity of perception here is masterfully done, and once I cottoned on to this unique little trick, I quite enjoyed the experience of having the narrative stretch and balloon in unexpected and sometimes humorous directions.

Just as Ryder describes audiences reacting to the ultra-modern musical pieces performed in the novel, I loved The Unconsoled on a purely aesthetic basis. I'm not sure what lasting messages or morals I'll take away from it, beyond a sense of the universality of human fears and fallibility, but the tense, intriguing mood and skewed, shadowy universe it created are still tangible to me days after closing the covers.

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LibraryThing member sisyphist

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.

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LibraryThing member ninahare

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!

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LibraryThing member michaeldwebb

A horrible, haunting, work of genius, this book isn't right, isn't normal, and I'm sure it will stay with me forever.

Let me try to explain. The book is halfway between a dream (or nightmare) and reality. It's the story of a composer arriving at in a town, having to give a performance that will

rejuvinate the town, although he doesn't know where he is or when he agreed to it. That may make is sound like a mystery book of some sort, and I guess it is to some degree. The problem is that world is just not quite right. This is pretty hard to explain - it's a long, slow book. It's not quite surreal, but in that general ballpark, but it's pretty unique - you really have to read it to get the full picture. Some examples - doors connect to rooms even though they can't really be connected, relationships don't follow any logic, nightmare things happen (he exposes himself whilst giving a speech and nobody minds).

I'm guessing I haven't really conveyed the essence of this book at all. Let me just say again that it is utterly unique, engaging, and yet left me feeling really horrible. Why is that a recommendation (it is intended as such)? Because sure the purpose of art is to make you feel - thats why, and surely it doesn't always have to be nice.

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LibraryThing member JimmyChanga

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.

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LibraryThing member seekingflight

Ryder is a concert pianist who arrives in an unnamed Central European city for an important concert. His experiences have a dream-like quality – geography seems distorted, he overhears conversations he shouldn’t be able to hear, and he knows things about characters he’s supposedly just met,

who may or may not be experiencing life events that parallel some of the experiences of his own life. Everyone he meets seems to want something from him, and he becomes increasingly anxious about his own concerns, and yet continues trying to fulfil the expectations of everyone around him. I felt like I should have liked this more than I did. It had the same wonderfully understated and ambiguous tone as Ishiguro’s other books, the same concerns about unreliable narrators, and the fallibility of memory. Each dream-like scene on its own was delightfully readable. And yet when put together, I unfortunately just found this novel hard-going, overly long, and difficult to persist with.

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LibraryThing member dczapka

I finished Ishiguro's longest tome, The Unconsoled, and thought to myself, "I THINK I know what he was trying to do here." In the intervening time since I completed it (it must be four or five months now, at least), I've given a lot of thought to my initial reaction, and I'm not entirely sure it's

positive. A book of great density, misdirection, and ambition, it strides along with Ishiguro's trademark confident pace, but I don't feel like it hits all the marks it wants to by the end.

For 500+ pages, Ishiguro takes us through three days in the life of a pianist named Ryder, who has arrived in an enigmatic and unnamed European city to speak and perform for a very important purpose. Meanwhile, he gets sidetracked on numerous errands, most of which seem entirely frivolous, to the point where he can barely recall what he was supposed to do or how he got to where he was.

That's the short version of the story. The long version is that the book's intent, at least to my view, is to be maddening. Ryder is so uncomfortably self-conscious that he cannot say no to anyone, and when he does resist, he feels so badly that he acquiesces to an uncomfortable degree. Meanwhile, he is surrounded by characters that, almost universally, feel a sense of entitlement and disquieting politeness, as if they all believe they can demand moments of Ryder's time merely if they are nice to him. This pattern works early, but as the novel wears on, you will likely want to scream at the pages and demand him tell someone no for once.

Of course, if we assume this is Ishiguro's intention, then we have to admit that he is succeeding in spectacular fashion. The problem is that the novel also hinges on the intricate details of all these side errands, the elaborate backstory that is being constructed one act at a time, and the function that Ryder's apparent amnesia plays in the proceedings. (For instance, does he just lose track of where he is? Or are the locations he needs to be at really spontaneously appearing right when he needs them to?) I wouldn't mind the misdirection so much if there was a satisfying resolution to these issues, but the (as-spoiler-free-as-possible) truth is that I wasn't. I dare say I felt a bit cheated by not knowing, after 500+ pages of investment, most of the details of what the hell exactly just happened.

But as I've said all along, maybe that's besides the point. Maybe Ishiguro wanted us to be maddened and frustrated, to feel as observers what Ryder should feel but, somehow, can't. And again, if that's the intent, then bravo, sir, because you've nailed it. I just wanted to like The Unconsoled more because, as much as we're invested in Ryder's story and what he learns during these three long days, when we leave with him at the end, he still feels too much like a stranger. Like it's the reader himself who ends up ultimately unconsoled.

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LibraryThing member jburlinson

I read this book nearly two years ago, but, in memory, it still exerts the resonant power that I felt from the second page of the text on to the final. Ishiguro has created a near perfect fictional analog of what it's like to experience the fantastic quality of the quotidian.
Aside from Ryder, the

narrator, all of the book's many characters emerge fully formed and, essentially, unchangable, on their first appearance. There's the worrywort, the bitter spouse, the cynic, the crusading idealist, the disapproving parents: stock characters of every stripe. And yet, somehow, these characters exist in a gelatinous world where everything is in flux. What changes, though, is Ryder's attitude towards one or the other of them -- in turns bored, angry, guilty, supercilious, unctuous. Although all of these characters are introduced as if they were strangers to Ryder, some of them apparently have some sort of history with him and others, even on brief acquaintance, assume an emotional signficance to him out of all proportion to their status in the "action." His contradictory, even schizophrenic, feelings are usually unexplained and unjustified; merely described, as if they're the most natural reactions in the world -- even if his attitude toward, say, the "young striver", is completely different on page 204 than it was on page 193.

But here's the wonderful thing: Ryder's various states of mind always seem "right". They always correspond to instantly recongizable responses that we all experience every day when we deal with those exasperating characters from central casting known as "other people." Sometimes we yearn for them, sometimes we mourn for them, and sometimes we just wish they'd go away.

Ishiguro has created a world which is at once patently unreal and uneasily real, both pathetically sad and absurdly funny.

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LibraryThing member figre

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.

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LibraryThing member mattviews

Disclaimer: I can vouch you will like The Unconsoled even more if you like When We Were Orphans. While Kazuo Ishiguro's latest release has weathered a gale of bashing reviews, The Unconsoled, released in 1995, seemed somehow overlooked by readers. If you do not like "When We Were Orphans", please

do the author a favor and don't even touch the book, let alone making bashing comments on it. This book can be very frustrating.
Keep this question in mind: Who is (are) unconsoled?

In spite of the many layers and implications, the plot is delightfully straightforward and simple. Mr. Ryder (the protagonist and narrator), a world-renowned pianist, arrived in some European city he could not identify to give a performance he simply failed to recall agreeing to give. What followed was a finely tuned narrative that punctiliously chronicled Mr. Ryder's three eventful (but not necessarily productive) days in town. Upon his arrival at the hotel, the pianist encountered a diverse cast of townspeople who overwhelmed him with their inexplicable knowledge and inexorable expectations of him. Only when he out of politeness engaged in paltry conversations with them one by one did Ryder find himself stuck in their lives and their problems.

Gustav was a respectable porter who determined to implement some personal measure in order to improve the overall image of porters in town. The old man asked Ryder to have a little word with his sulky daughter Sophie who had not spoken to him for years. Her son Boris was portrayed as though he was a lonely orphan (I wonder why?) who muttered to himself. The pianist then stumbled on to Hoffman, the hotel manager whose wife Christine had scrupulously kept a scrapbook full of Ryder's cuttings, even those that mentioned the pianist in passing. Stephen, Hoffman's 23-year-old son who always had such low esteem and thought his mediocre talent had let down his parents, asked Ryder to comment on his piano rehearsal for the big night opening recital. Hoffman himself constantly dreaded his marriage that turned cold and all that left behind was underlying tension. Brodsky, an ex-orchestra conductor, sought to rebuild his fame and reconcile with Miss Collins after being "drunken" for 20 years. The town saw its own crisis in cultural degradation as though Ryder was the only possible rescue. ... ...

This book is meant to be humorous though the title might have suggested otherwise. Each of the characters, including Ryder, could recount dozens of sad incidences-how loneliness had blighted lives, how families despaired at the realization that they had taken happiness for granted. The town and its people (merely strangers really) ludicrously demanded more and more out of Ryder who hardly had a good sleep. At one point Ryder threatened to live the town at once and cancelled his speech and recital. It's hilarious that Ryder lost control over his schedule whenever he brushed shoulders with someone who would mutter their problems.

Landscape and time are key in the novel. About a quarter into the book one would encounter rapid swerve of landscape (this can be annoying and confusing at first). Ryder might one-minute walk into the hotel atrium but quickly found him in a path that led to a wood. Landscape change as such occurred sparsely throughout the book enough to cause confusion. As I read on I realized these changes might have hinted at the many memory fragments Ryder had envisioned in his mind. Once you have persevered through the narrative that seemed to have rambled on so indecipherably, everything began to make sense. The actual time-span of the book was 4 days but Ryder recounted on a montage of memories that might have lasted years. The notion of time was warped repeatedly. A casual elevator conversation could stretch to an hour, drifted to far-gone memories and remote places. In the end, when the compelling prose manifested the threads between Ryder and all the people whose lives he was led in and out for the past few days, you can only appreciate and praise the raconteur in Kazuo Ishiguro.

At this point, it's inappropriate of me to further comment on the novel as such comment will only spoil one's reading pleasure. The take home message of this review is that all the characters contribute significantly to the making of Ryder. Readers should never take each nuance lightly. Every meaning and gesture will add to the understanding of the book. The Unconsoled left behind many open ends that one would for sure have to wrestle with it. Ishiguro's writing once again proves he to be one of the finest prose stylists of our time. Engrossing read.

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LibraryThing member RoySkinner62

I just finished this book. I did not read the cover. I should have. I became so frustrated while reading it. I was telling a friend of mine about the bizarre time and distance problems, and the character's relationships to each other. She said that it sounds like a dream to me. It was revelation to

me. I just read the cover and the other reviews here on Library Thing. Dreams all right, very very strange dreams.
I can't believe that none of the reviewers mentioned the story of Gustav and his comrades in the Hungarian Cafe. This is a wonderful story of honor and courage. His friends and grandson saw him as invincible and he had so much courage and determination he did not let them down even though it led to his death. For me, Gustav is the hero of the story. That story made all of the pain and frustration of reading the book very worthwhile. It just too bad he had such a bad relationship with his daughter.

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LibraryThing member Estramir

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.

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LibraryThing member Eoin

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.

LibraryThing member mbmackay

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.

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LibraryThing member petercal94

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.

LibraryThing member MarcusTullius

Too much the product of creative writing courses, Ishiguro spins a purposeless prose - so tightly constrained even in its Kafkaesque fantasy (where ordinary boundaries of time and space dissolve). Churning through over 500 pages left me decidedly 'unconsoled'.

LibraryThing member murunbuchstansangur

I'm glad so many reviewers have enjoyed this novel. I've just finished it and have regraded it as a four rather than a three star read. It was, as people have already said, full of pathos and humour (Bruno was "the greatest dog of his generation!")and sucked me deeper and deeper into Ryder's world

with every page, from the 'Is he dreaming? He must be dreaming!' feeling of the first chapter, through to not wanting him to wake and the dream to end at the finish. This is the second Ishiguro I've read, and like the previous one (Remains of the Day) it's left me wanting to read it again, immediately. Perhaps I'll give it five stars next time.

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LibraryThing member c.clarke

I remember reading this after a colleague told me it was 'unreadable'. Yet the initial frustration one has at its circular, repetitive narrative eventually becomes almost hypnotic.

LibraryThing member nbsp

Okay, it effectively evoked the feeling of a dream. A very frustrating dream, the kind I don't ever want to be reminded of again. I hated this book. I am only giving it a half star to be sure that my bad feelings about it are recorded for posterity. This is apparently the lowest rating available to

me.

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LibraryThing member kazzablanca

I really wanted to like this book, as it was recommended reading, but found that I really couldn't. It was undoubtedly very clever and certainly succeeded in evoking the dream-like feeling that the author was looking to achieve; however it was a dream that I wanted to end. The characters were

mostly self-indulgent and often more than a little arrogant - the types of people that you try to avoid at dinner parties or in the neighourhood - and yet I was subjected to one tedious monologue after another. It didn't take long to realise that the likelihood of any resolution to the plotline, or explanation of the chaos, would not be forthcoming. So frustrating!

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LibraryThing member BookMonk

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...

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LibraryThing member sirih

Too long, self-indulgent. I get it. But I am not going to finish it because, so far, it is simply more of the same. Verbosity is not a crime, but it is when it shows no sign at all of getting to the point. Ishiguro needs an editor.

LibraryThing member pamplemousse

Perhaps I shouldn't review this -- because I was unable to finish it (in fact I barely made it through the first third. Not, I hasten to add, because of any defect in the writing -- this is quite obviously the work of a master writer. The story reads like someone relating a dream, but this is a

dream that goes on and on. As I do much of my reading in bed, prior to sleep, this book had a most peculiar and disturbing effect upon me -- the narrator's voice got into my head and I found myself continuing his story in my own dreams. I found this so distrubing, in fact, that I preferred to give up and try something less demanding. Perhaps I will try again, sometime.

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