A Pale View of Hills: Kazuo Ishiguro

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To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Even if the “memory” theme is more or less convincingly established in the novel, the second theme of copying with trauma by dissociation/mistaken association requires quite a big imaginary leap on the part of the readers.

An Artist of the Floating World has really stayed with me, I think because when I read it, it genuinely was unlike anything else I’d ever read. She is very black and white about things, in the way people are while young and still experiencing life as a challenge to be conquered, rather than as an existence to make peace with. Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. Take Sachiko’s description of how a woman during the war drowned her own baby, and how Mariko witnessed the drowning.If I could go from one passage to the next according to the narrator’s thought associations and drifting memories, I could compose in something like the way an abstract painter might choose to place shapes and colours around a canvas. Some major clue is left behind at the end of the novel, but it is not nearly enough or too late to interest and intrigue. Etsuko remarks that her daughter has little understanding of what happened “those last days in Nagasaki”.

I could place a scene from two days ago right beside one from twenty years earlier, and ask the reader to ponder the relationship between the two. You wrote an accurate and objective review, which really gives an insight of what I presume to be most people’s thoughts on this novel. I have read all of Kazuo Ishiguro's other novels/short stories but for some reason this, his debut, I left until last. If anything, it shows how much promise he had as an author and how much he could offer the literary world as he honed his skills. Etsuko’s final memory of Mariko raises a question about the reliability of her narrative and whether what she remembers is a story she’s telling herself to cover over the truth of what happened with Keiko.

Anyone narrating his or her past uses a lot of confabulation, engages in make believe, but let’s say you live through having an atomic bomb dropped on you, as Etsuko has. I am actually a big admirer of Kazuo Ishiguro (that’s why it pained me to criticise this debut of his) and if I were to recommend his writing at its best it will be his best novel “The Remains of the Day” – it is subtle, moving, unforgettable. Now living in England in the early 1980s, Etsuko makes believe her way through a retelling of one summer in Nagasaki. The pregnant Etsuko, who narrates, lives with her husband Jiro, in a new concrete residential building along the river.