It's very good in the flawed way that Freddie likes in The Buried Giant, so I'd be curious to hear his thoughts on it. I'm still at five stars for Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, When We Were Orphans, and An Artist of the Floating World, and a solid four stars for Klara and The Buried Giant. They're both much bigger swings and the ways they miss are so much more fascinating than most living authors can even attempt.
Man, I had a weird reaction (I guess) to Klara and the Sun. I liked its setup and low-key futurism and thought it was pretty well done, but was surprised to go on Goodreads et al. later and find people talking about bursting into tears at the conclusion, and how sad it was that the mean humans were so cruel to the robots, and how Ishiguro could probably make a toaster feel like a well-rounded, multifaceted character.
Klara and the robots freaked me out. They're not human, they don't act like humans, and their existence seems like a cruel joke that causes unnecessary suffering. A kinder world isn't one where people act nice to Klara: it's one where she never has to be built. But I guess it's a credit to Ishiguro that the novel supports both readings.
I know what you mean. I did find myself feeling very sad for Klara and then trying hard to suppress that sadness. Maybe that was part of Ishiguro's point -- that a very high quality AI will make us feel for them and therein lies the danger.
I think a lot of folks read it wrong. The robots are sinister. My goodreads review from May:
“I'm not going to ever rate an Ishiguro novel below four stars, which is a bit a of a curse. Sometimes I wish he was a bit sloppier, took a bigger swing that didn't quite come off but was thrilling to experience. His best work (Never Let Me Go, Remains of the Day) is utterly perfect in its sinister banality. It rewards rereads for all of the clues that the plastic fruit still life is real, and full of worms. His very good work, like this one, feels somewhat less worth rereading, and I'm not sure exactly why.
I wonder if he is trying to be a bit less perfect here. There are moments of awkward phrasing and sentimentality that I won't fully attribute to the broken machine of the narrator. Perhaps his own experiences, maybe as a father or a husband, maybe not, have mellowed the lacerating blue flame of his earlier work. He seems authentically worried about the coming world, maybe even hopeless about it, but not really angry about it. His narrators in his best two books are a festering wound in the myth of modern superiority, particularly a kind of English triumphalism, a belief that the modern world must be better because of what we've sacrificed to make it. In this novel, his narrator's desire for simple solutions, paired with the supreme sophistication required to construct her, reveal not a wound in the modern world but a kind of bug in the system. We're beyond flesh and blood and into some kind of singularity. We've become the AI that we were worried about taking us over.
But if the system has a bug, we could presumably solve it, and I just don't believe that's how humans work. In his critique of the meritocracy and cybernetics, he's finally drained all of the life out of his still life, all of the worms out. I felt like my only option at the end of this book was to smash the plastic fruit, not grow something new.”
I adore Ishiguro but I thought Klara and the Sun was shockingly bad. The dialogue—never his strength, to be fair—was so stiff and stripped of nuance that I wondered at times if I was missing some subtext that every character is actually a robot. Although there were passages that were extremely effective, it never really built up to anything. Reviews were almost universally positive, so either critics were unable to acknowledge that a Nobel laureate could produce an inferior work, or I really am mostly alone in being really disappointed in this one. I should probably give it another read.
That’s an interesting observation that hadn’t occurred to me. Outside of a few favorites (Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe) I haven’t read much SF in the past 15-20 years, but I definitely read a ton in my youth.
I’m not sure I could really articulate precisely why, but my feeling is that Klara in the Sun, despite appearances, isn’t *really* science fiction, just like The Buried Giant (which I loved, by the way) isn’t *really* fantasy.
You're lucky Ursula LeGuin isn't alive or you'd feel teh sharp end of her tongue for that comment. :-) I acttually kind of agree her, there's nothing strikes fear into the heart of a literary writer than the thought of being accused of being a genre writer.
That’s fair, but my interest is not in policing genre boundaries, or in lionizing literary fiction and ghettoizing genre fiction—I’ve read plenty of the latter that’s brilliant and plenty of the former that’s execrable. Ishiguro, maybe more than any other living author I can think of, truly is a genre unto himself, and (setting aside the man’s own feelings on the question) my point was that The Buried Giant and Klara and the Sun are much more Ishiguro novels than they are fantasy and science fiction novels.
I think you're right about it. The world-building was also very poor, clearly not something Ishiguro cared about, but I as a reader did. (Basic issue: if you can build a humanoid robot with near-human level AI that is inexpensive enough to sell to an upper-middle-class family as basically a toy, there are a ton of other things you could do with that tech that would utterly transform society. In particular, people would not still be driving their own cars around, something that happens a lot in this book.)
I remember thinking, what even is this? But I persisted because my husband (who is a big fan of sprawling fantasy novels) loved it. Poignant, devastating. So good.
I did enjoy the Buried Giant, it was actually the first of his I read. I guess you don't want to edit this since it's something you dug up, and I'm sure you know this, but the book is called Never Let *Me* Go.
I loved this book and found the end incredibly moving. What I find amazing is his ability to keep you guessing until the very end and then at the end it is completely clear that that was how it was going to end. [Edited to remove a spoiler.]
I read a really stupid review of it that said it was not nearly as good as other fantasy novels and I was, like, it's not a bloody fantasy novel you idiot!
I remember reading an interview with him when he first wrote the book. Supposedly his wife hated it? Coming off Never Let Me Go, I had high expectations and at first I was a little disappointed. But the themes in the story stuck with me over time and reminds me of that historical tension between the expressions "those who forget the past are destined to repeat it" vs "Those who do not bury the past are condemned never to escape it."
This was the first Ishiguro book I read and it was because of your recommendation, Freddie, and I absolutely loved it. Since then I've been diving into him, including taking a seminar this past fall through The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, focusing on his earliest novels. They've all been great to varying degrees but I have to strongly recommend _The Unconsoled_. It was utterly unlike anything anything I've read before. It's over 500 pages, so it's not a casual read, but it's well worth your time. People often describe a work as "dreamlike" when it has weird things like a talking cat or something, but this book, this is the closest I've ever seen to actually replicating what a real dream is like. Specifically, it deals so beautifully with anxiety and parental love. Completely life-changing for me.
My God this is a beautiful piece of writing. What spiritual void enabled both the NYT Magazine and the LA Review of Books to pass on its publication? Thank you for showing it the light of day. You are likely to be owed credit for turning more than a few of your readers into Ishiguro readers. I can vouch for one.
Haven't read any of his books but I thought the story in the flawed movie version of "Never Let Me Go" was great. (And that British spiderman guy is one the most underrated young-ish actors who've sold their soul to Marvel. He was great in The Social Network and more amazing with Adam Driver in Scorsece's similarly underrated masterpiece "The Silence". But I digress).
I'm gonna' have my wife buy me both this and Klara and The Sun (I have a daughter named Clara).
NOTE: It's Never Let ME Go, not "You". And it was written in 2005, not 2011. (My editor invoice is in the mail. Ha!)
I also read this book based on your recommendation, stuck to the end based on your recommendation, and was totally shattered by the ending. I think it's a profound work, and the way it touches on the topics of forgetting and remembering historical crimes and traumas will always be timely for the country I live in.
I read it based on my previous enjoyment of several of his books. Liked it but it moved a little too slowly for my taste. But boy did I love the ending, very emotional for me (and I’m not “that kind” of reader normally).
Thanks for the review. Also loved The Buried Giant, though I didn't read it until quite recently. As a result it is paired closely in my mind with The Green Knight.
I've got a half baked theory in my head that both are expressive of a renewed importance of mythical forms of storytelling. From this POV, maybe the reception The Buried Giant received was the result of it being a little ahead of its time. When it was released many of us felt secure in an Obama-era consensus of sorts on what the world is and how we navigate it. Ishiguro's treatment of memory, historical trauma, fractured understandings of the world, etc all seem better suited to now than then.
Yay, book review! I still haven't read Buried Giant, but I like Ishiguro a lot. Despite getting the Nobel, I still think he's weirdly underrated as a stylist and a builder of existential conundrums, maybe one of the best since Dostoevsky. He's also got a fantastic range--of genres, periods, protagonists--in a period when fiction is increasingly becoming autobiography by other means.
While most of those names get relegated to their niches, I think posterity will look kindly on Ishiguro.
Thank you for sharing! Very excited that so many of your readers also love Ishiguro. This almost seems like it could be an introductory post for a book club pick someday ;)
I read The Buried Giant back in 2016 or so while knowing nothing about it. A friend invited me to Read a Book in One Sitting Day* (an idea from one of their friends), and I stumbled on it somehow, possibly from a list of fantasy books at the library and a vague feeling I should read something more recent than the 70s.
It feels wrong to say I enjoyed it, but I got lost in it, and it stuck with me. I recall feeling even as I read it that I was missing something, that it was perhaps too deep for me, but finishing made it clear and I was glad I had read it. Now, on reading this review, I want to go back, read it with a better idea of what it's saying from the beginning.
In conclusion, a great book. I don't pay any attention to what the modern literary world is doing, but I'm glad I picked this one up.
*No, I did not finish The Buried Giant in one sitting. The true peril of ebooks is not having any idea of how big the book you're reading is.
His new new book “Klara and the sun” is also very good!
It's very good in the flawed way that Freddie likes in The Buried Giant, so I'd be curious to hear his thoughts on it. I'm still at five stars for Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, When We Were Orphans, and An Artist of the Floating World, and a solid four stars for Klara and The Buried Giant. They're both much bigger swings and the ways they miss are so much more fascinating than most living authors can even attempt.
Man, I had a weird reaction (I guess) to Klara and the Sun. I liked its setup and low-key futurism and thought it was pretty well done, but was surprised to go on Goodreads et al. later and find people talking about bursting into tears at the conclusion, and how sad it was that the mean humans were so cruel to the robots, and how Ishiguro could probably make a toaster feel like a well-rounded, multifaceted character.
Klara and the robots freaked me out. They're not human, they don't act like humans, and their existence seems like a cruel joke that causes unnecessary suffering. A kinder world isn't one where people act nice to Klara: it's one where she never has to be built. But I guess it's a credit to Ishiguro that the novel supports both readings.
I know what you mean. I did find myself feeling very sad for Klara and then trying hard to suppress that sadness. Maybe that was part of Ishiguro's point -- that a very high quality AI will make us feel for them and therein lies the danger.
An excellent and (to me anyway) original take by Erik Hoel on why it's morally bad to pursue human-level AI: https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/we-need-a-butlerian-jihad-against
I think a lot of folks read it wrong. The robots are sinister. My goodreads review from May:
“I'm not going to ever rate an Ishiguro novel below four stars, which is a bit a of a curse. Sometimes I wish he was a bit sloppier, took a bigger swing that didn't quite come off but was thrilling to experience. His best work (Never Let Me Go, Remains of the Day) is utterly perfect in its sinister banality. It rewards rereads for all of the clues that the plastic fruit still life is real, and full of worms. His very good work, like this one, feels somewhat less worth rereading, and I'm not sure exactly why.
I wonder if he is trying to be a bit less perfect here. There are moments of awkward phrasing and sentimentality that I won't fully attribute to the broken machine of the narrator. Perhaps his own experiences, maybe as a father or a husband, maybe not, have mellowed the lacerating blue flame of his earlier work. He seems authentically worried about the coming world, maybe even hopeless about it, but not really angry about it. His narrators in his best two books are a festering wound in the myth of modern superiority, particularly a kind of English triumphalism, a belief that the modern world must be better because of what we've sacrificed to make it. In this novel, his narrator's desire for simple solutions, paired with the supreme sophistication required to construct her, reveal not a wound in the modern world but a kind of bug in the system. We're beyond flesh and blood and into some kind of singularity. We've become the AI that we were worried about taking us over.
But if the system has a bug, we could presumably solve it, and I just don't believe that's how humans work. In his critique of the meritocracy and cybernetics, he's finally drained all of the life out of his still life, all of the worms out. I felt like my only option at the end of this book was to smash the plastic fruit, not grow something new.”
I also agree about Clara, very dissapointing.
I adore Ishiguro but I thought Klara and the Sun was shockingly bad. The dialogue—never his strength, to be fair—was so stiff and stripped of nuance that I wondered at times if I was missing some subtext that every character is actually a robot. Although there were passages that were extremely effective, it never really built up to anything. Reviews were almost universally positive, so either critics were unable to acknowledge that a Nobel laureate could produce an inferior work, or I really am mostly alone in being really disappointed in this one. I should probably give it another read.
That’s an interesting observation that hadn’t occurred to me. Outside of a few favorites (Philip K. Dick, Gene Wolfe) I haven’t read much SF in the past 15-20 years, but I definitely read a ton in my youth.
I’m not sure I could really articulate precisely why, but my feeling is that Klara in the Sun, despite appearances, isn’t *really* science fiction, just like The Buried Giant (which I loved, by the way) isn’t *really* fantasy.
You're lucky Ursula LeGuin isn't alive or you'd feel teh sharp end of her tongue for that comment. :-) I acttually kind of agree her, there's nothing strikes fear into the heart of a literary writer than the thought of being accused of being a genre writer.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/08/kazuo-ishiguro-rebuffs-genre-snobbery
That’s fair, but my interest is not in policing genre boundaries, or in lionizing literary fiction and ghettoizing genre fiction—I’ve read plenty of the latter that’s brilliant and plenty of the former that’s execrable. Ishiguro, maybe more than any other living author I can think of, truly is a genre unto himself, and (setting aside the man’s own feelings on the question) my point was that The Buried Giant and Klara and the Sun are much more Ishiguro novels than they are fantasy and science fiction novels.
I think you're right about it. The world-building was also very poor, clearly not something Ishiguro cared about, but I as a reader did. (Basic issue: if you can build a humanoid robot with near-human level AI that is inexpensive enough to sell to an upper-middle-class family as basically a toy, there are a ton of other things you could do with that tech that would utterly transform society. In particular, people would not still be driving their own cars around, something that happens a lot in this book.)
Sounds brilliant. Great review!
I remember thinking, what even is this? But I persisted because my husband (who is a big fan of sprawling fantasy novels) loved it. Poignant, devastating. So good.
I did enjoy the Buried Giant, it was actually the first of his I read. I guess you don't want to edit this since it's something you dug up, and I'm sure you know this, but the book is called Never Let *Me* Go.
I loved this book and found the end incredibly moving. What I find amazing is his ability to keep you guessing until the very end and then at the end it is completely clear that that was how it was going to end. [Edited to remove a spoiler.]
I read a really stupid review of it that said it was not nearly as good as other fantasy novels and I was, like, it's not a bloody fantasy novel you idiot!
I remember reading an interview with him when he first wrote the book. Supposedly his wife hated it? Coming off Never Let Me Go, I had high expectations and at first I was a little disappointed. But the themes in the story stuck with me over time and reminds me of that historical tension between the expressions "those who forget the past are destined to repeat it" vs "Those who do not bury the past are condemned never to escape it."
This was the first Ishiguro book I read and it was because of your recommendation, Freddie, and I absolutely loved it. Since then I've been diving into him, including taking a seminar this past fall through The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, focusing on his earliest novels. They've all been great to varying degrees but I have to strongly recommend _The Unconsoled_. It was utterly unlike anything anything I've read before. It's over 500 pages, so it's not a casual read, but it's well worth your time. People often describe a work as "dreamlike" when it has weird things like a talking cat or something, but this book, this is the closest I've ever seen to actually replicating what a real dream is like. Specifically, it deals so beautifully with anxiety and parental love. Completely life-changing for me.
My God this is a beautiful piece of writing. What spiritual void enabled both the NYT Magazine and the LA Review of Books to pass on its publication? Thank you for showing it the light of day. You are likely to be owed credit for turning more than a few of your readers into Ishiguro readers. I can vouch for one.
Haven't read any of his books but I thought the story in the flawed movie version of "Never Let Me Go" was great. (And that British spiderman guy is one the most underrated young-ish actors who've sold their soul to Marvel. He was great in The Social Network and more amazing with Adam Driver in Scorsece's similarly underrated masterpiece "The Silence". But I digress).
I'm gonna' have my wife buy me both this and Klara and The Sun (I have a daughter named Clara).
NOTE: It's Never Let ME Go, not "You". And it was written in 2005, not 2011. (My editor invoice is in the mail. Ha!)
I also read this book based on your recommendation, stuck to the end based on your recommendation, and was totally shattered by the ending. I think it's a profound work, and the way it touches on the topics of forgetting and remembering historical crimes and traumas will always be timely for the country I live in.
Re: the ending. Me too. Also surprised by my emotions.
I read it based on my previous enjoyment of several of his books. Liked it but it moved a little too slowly for my taste. But boy did I love the ending, very emotional for me (and I’m not “that kind” of reader normally).
Thanks for the review. Also loved The Buried Giant, though I didn't read it until quite recently. As a result it is paired closely in my mind with The Green Knight.
I've got a half baked theory in my head that both are expressive of a renewed importance of mythical forms of storytelling. From this POV, maybe the reception The Buried Giant received was the result of it being a little ahead of its time. When it was released many of us felt secure in an Obama-era consensus of sorts on what the world is and how we navigate it. Ishiguro's treatment of memory, historical trauma, fractured understandings of the world, etc all seem better suited to now than then.
I read Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun last year. I had to read the Remains of the Day in secondary school.
I was unsure whether this was worth reading but I might give it a go now.
Yay, book review! I still haven't read Buried Giant, but I like Ishiguro a lot. Despite getting the Nobel, I still think he's weirdly underrated as a stylist and a builder of existential conundrums, maybe one of the best since Dostoevsky. He's also got a fantastic range--of genres, periods, protagonists--in a period when fiction is increasingly becoming autobiography by other means.
While most of those names get relegated to their niches, I think posterity will look kindly on Ishiguro.
Thank you for sharing! Very excited that so many of your readers also love Ishiguro. This almost seems like it could be an introductory post for a book club pick someday ;)
I read The Buried Giant back in 2016 or so while knowing nothing about it. A friend invited me to Read a Book in One Sitting Day* (an idea from one of their friends), and I stumbled on it somehow, possibly from a list of fantasy books at the library and a vague feeling I should read something more recent than the 70s.
It feels wrong to say I enjoyed it, but I got lost in it, and it stuck with me. I recall feeling even as I read it that I was missing something, that it was perhaps too deep for me, but finishing made it clear and I was glad I had read it. Now, on reading this review, I want to go back, read it with a better idea of what it's saying from the beginning.
In conclusion, a great book. I don't pay any attention to what the modern literary world is doing, but I'm glad I picked this one up.
*No, I did not finish The Buried Giant in one sitting. The true peril of ebooks is not having any idea of how big the book you're reading is.
I had the exact same experience - I told people I loved it - but I didn’t think I understood it.
I felt like I got it by the end, but it was definitely a journey getting there.
What you need to do is find out how long the audio book is.
Great, great. Adding to my large and overwhelming pile of must-read books. THANKS, Freddie.