The Unconsoled

THE UNCONSOLED is the most frustrating book I've ever read. It's also one of the most rewarding. It wasn't until I reached the end that I began to understand it, and I would never have reached the end at all if I hadn't listened to the audio version. David Case delivers an excellent narration, his calm, dry approach highlighting the emotions in each situation and his analytical, english accent well suited to the book's formal, elaborate tone.Mr. Ryder, a world renowned pianist, has just arrived in an unidentified city for reasons he can no longer remember, except it seems he has some moral duty to help the city's occupants and he is to give a concert and speech on the coming Thursday night. Since Case uses a slightly Germanic accent for the city's people, one can assume the unnamed city is in Germany. The city is apparently a cultural and musical center that has fallen on hard times after idolizing the wrong musician and now has its hope of redemption pinned on another, ailing musician, Mr. Leo Brodsky. The entire city is coddling Brodsky along in the hopes he will manage a spectacular performance on this important Thursday night.Every character Ryder encounters greets him most obsequiously while begging of him some small favor -- critiquing a piano piece, visiting a particular restaurant, studying some albums -- until he (and the reader) is overcome with exhaustion. Yet Ryder always feels the need to listen to these longwinded concerns and to try to offer some help, for he has both the sense of having been brought here to make things right and of his own overblown self importance. Although he feels a stranger to these people, it becomes obvious he isn't -- he has been to this city before and has a life with a woman, Sophie, and her small boy, Boris.Ryder isn't suffering from amnesia exactly. Sometimes he can remember things. Sometimes he can't. Sometimes his memories change. Often they are distorted, such as when he believes his motel room is actually his old bedroom or an old abandoned car he finds is actually his family's vehicle from his childhood. At other times memories will come back to him in the strangest ways, for occurances he did not personally witness.Time is badly warped -- thirty minute discussions take place during ten minute trips -- and all the while there is a terrible sense of urgency, of always being too late or in the wrong place or unable to get from here to there. Often Ryder finds himself back where he started, even though he traveled a long way from point A to B. Doors in dinner halls open back into his hotel; during a lunch date he discovers he's in the same cafe where he ate breakfast. Farms and forests and grassy hills with huts appear in the middle of the city. Once a brick wall blocks his path, built right across the road for no apparent reason. At one point Ryder wears a dressing robe to an evening party, yet no one notices (even when it falls open). The people are too involved in a discussion concerning Mr. Brodsk

Review by Dr. Gregory O'DeaUC Foundation Associate Professor of English, UTCThe Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel since the internationally accalimed The Remains of the Day (1989), is by turns a stunning and startling work. In a narrative that suggests nothing so much as an absurd and unsettling dream, the author creates a portrait of an artist who can no longer measure the distance between his public and private selves. Ryder, the novel's narrator, is a celebrated pianist who arrives in an unnamed European city to give an important concert. But as the story proceeds it becomes clear that Ryder recalls very little about the reasons for his visit, and more, that he is expected to perform not merely a concert but a miracle: nothing less than the recovery of the city's aesthetic and spiritual being. During the three days preceding the climactic evening Ryder becomes enmeshed in the lives and incessant demands of myriad (apparent) strangers: a hotel manager and his dysfunctional family, a porter and his distant daughter and grandson, a drunken orchestra conductor and his estranged wife, various prominent citizens and endless others, including improbable figures from his own past, all of whom pop up and disappear like grotesque apparitions in a carnival fun-house. In these surreal experiences, Ishiguro represents the artist's public life as hopelessly entangled in the fabric of a dream. Over the course of impossibly elongated time-frames (but always in a desperate hurry) Ryder navigates broom closets that open onto cocktail parties, dark forests in city centers, and urban back alleys that dissolve into abandoned farmyards. He attends a banquet only to discover he's wearing nothing but a bathrobe. His hotel room bears a vague, uncanny resemblance to his childhood bedroom, and the rusting wreck of the family car from his boyhood turns up in the parking lot of an art museum. And the people he meets, distorted, nonsensical, incongruous, absurd, bend Ryder's ear in hypnotic speeches that reveal the intimacies of their lives: their hopes, their despair, their sense of having been forgotten or left behind in a city that has misplaced its soul. But somewhere in this massive novel, between its lines, in its margins, perhaps in the very fibers of the pages themselves, another story lies and waits to be told, one all too common and deadening in its reality: the story of an unloved, neglected child who has failed to meet his parents' expectations. In a magical process of revelation, the characters in The Unconsoled gradually come to resemble distorted projections of Ryder himself, his mother and father, and his childhood fears and desires, while the city's labyrinthine landscape and slippery sense of place suggest the hidden contours of Ryder's own unconscious mind. These impossible strangers are, eerily, the ghosts of Ryder's psyche, and the soul of the city they want him to save is, we come to feel, also his own. However bizarre they may seem in hindsigh

In The Remains of the Day Ishiguro perfected the writing style he had begun in his first two books, and after its success he proclaimed his desire to write something different, 'rougher'. The Unconsoled is the product of five years' work by this acclaimed writer, and 'rough' -- as in difficult -- is indeed a word that might be used to describe it. First of all, it is a massive book. Secondly, it has no plot. Thirdly, it doesn't make any sense. Huh? If you've read Kafka (especially The Castle) the solution to this riddle will be easy to explain: The Unconsoled is a modern-day Kafka-esque dream-world social commentary on the individual and society. As with Kafka, the theme is alientation of the individual from society, others, and himself. Ishiguro delves into the question of why we are often so incapable when it comes to interacting with the people we care most about. In the words of a song from the musical Chess the theme is: 'How can I love you so much, yet make no move?' Ishiguro's cast is comprised of parents and children, husbands and wives, who because of their own human weakness find it almost impossible to say the simplest of things, or make the simplest of actions, and thereby allow their relationships to deteriorate -- slowly, frustratingly, continuously. The setting is an unspecified central European city in decline, whose citizens view the protagonist, the famous pianist Charles Ryder, as a kind of saviour who will revive their city's fortunes. But of course, no external solution is possible, and Ryder must fail, even as he watches his own personal life crumbling before his inactivity. Neglecting his wife and son, he is mindlessly self-centred, interested only in achieving self-validation by having his parents attend one of his concerts so they can see him perform before he loses his skills. Despite the fact that they never come, he makes preparations for their arrival and retains a futile hope that can only be called pathetic. Fortunately (since there is no plot), Ishiguro combines his powerful message with stunning dream-like imagery and a good dose of side-splitting humour. Ishiguro has an incredible sense of the absurd (as readers of The Remains of the Day will well know) and he places Ryder in the most agonizing and embarassing of situations, to which we all can easily relate. This humour is welcome in what is a hard and rather depressing, yet immensely well-written and powerful, book. If you can handle a struggle, or (better ye

I read this book last year after completing a high school English assignment which included the reading of Ishiguro's Remains of the Day. After being astounded by the literary merit and quality of this work, I just had to read another. Well, as those of you who have read both can attest to, I was definitely surprised. The Unconsoled centers around Mr. Ryder, a renowned pianist who comes to play in a small European town (which incidentally, remains unnamed). Right from the start, the reader learns that through his performance, he is somehow expected to save the city from their own cultural degredation. How he is supposed to do this, we don't really know. This confusion remains throughout the book, and it is not for the faint hearted. Ishiguro spares no expense in describing the frustration that Ryder is feeling, creating a suureal dreamworld setting, in which time and space have no meaning (as we know them). Consider an elevator ride in a hotel up 2 floors in which an entire 10 minute conversation is held. Consider doors popping up all over the place that lead Ryder back to his hotel, even though he may have driven a great distance to get there. Consider a wall, strectched across the street for no apparent reason, which simply hinders Ryder from getting to where he wants to go. All of these are described with such a sense of reality and matter-of-factness that they are made to appear like normal ocurrences. Ishiguro's novel is a masterpiece in that it draws the reader in. It is not just about Mr. Ryder -- it is about the reader as well. It is about the frustrations and about the dreamlike quality that everyone's life takes on at times. It is about art, and the power it has over a society. It is about artists, and the enormous cultural burdens and responsibilities they experience. If you are ready for a challenge to both your mind and your sanity, pick up the Unconsoled. Stick with it through all the frustrations and absurdities, and you may just find something deep inside.