6 reviews found

Back when this came I know there was a lot of hullabaloo about whether or not it was fantasy, and whether or not Kazuo Ishiguro wanted it to be seen as fantasy or liked fantasy or whatever. It’s true that Ishiguro, much like Margaret Atwood, has a certain literary cachet that allows his books to escape genre ghettoing—Never Let Me Go is science fiction like it or not, not that I’m going to spoil…

Kazuo Ishiguro's superlative skill lies in his ability to expose the introspection of his characters on the page. A Pale View of Hills is essentially Etsuko's somewhat jumbled reminiscences of her life in Japan, surrounded by some musings set in the present day following the suicide of her older daughter Keiko. Etsuko's memories of Sachiko offer a contrast to the younger Etsuko's insistence that she is happy as she is, where she is, a fact…

I picked this up off the library shelf based solely on the fact that I’ve enjoyed the other works of Kazuo Ishiguro that I’ve read—particularly the stellar The Remains of the Day. Music doesn’t capture me in the same way that it does many of my friends. That is to say, I find music powerful and compelling, but stories about music don’t always hold the same allure for me. Bel Canto stands out as…

I have long had a somewhat unhealthy admiration of British humour, which is somehow superior to most other forms of humour in its unique blend of intelligence and absurdity. And no institution, as it is portrayed in fiction, epitomizes British humour better than that of the British butler. Think of Blackadder (in Blackadder the Third) or Batman's Alfred. These unflappable, infallible men serve their employers with a grace that almost defies description. Even in…

When I first started reading this book after borrowing it from the library, I did a double-take. I had this book down as being recommended by one of my favourite science fiction blogs, yet the book's description mentioned nothing that made it sound like science fiction! So I had to go back and read the article that mentions this book before I realized what was going on (the Library of Congress cataloguing information also…

Kazuo Ishiguro and I go way back to 2009, a year after I started writing these reviews, when I read Never Let Me Go. While I adored that book and his best known The Remains of the Day, each of his subsequent works didn’t do much for me. So when Klara and the Sun kept shining down upon me from various bookshelves and corners of the internet, I was hesitant. Why keep reading…