The Unconsoled

If I didn't already know Ishiguro had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, I definitely wouldn't be surprised by the fact after reading The Unconsoled. It's an exhausting, accurate, and weird portrait of the familiar feeling you get when responsibilities multiply faster than you can meet them, everyone needs something from you, and you're failing at things you don't understand.

A famous pianist named Ryder arrives in an unnamed city for a concert that everyone treats as momentous. What follows is 500+ pages of anxiety-dream logic. Strangers know intimate details of his life. Rooms, streets and landscapes shift without warning. Ryder is always late and distracted, and he's sure that once he gets through the next obligation, everything will settle down. I won't spoil whether it does ;)

The many deadpan speeches and people calmly accepting the impossible end up being pretty hilarious. One character apologizes for proposing a romantic meeting in a graveyard: "I'd forgotten St Peter's Cemetery was a cemetery." Underneath the comedy, this is a book about parental approval, guilt, vanity, and trying to justify a life through achievement.

The novel's a bit too long and some stretches seem designed to wear you down, but when you stop treating it as a puzzle and just live inside it, it becomes remarkable, especially in how Ishiguro makes memory, guilt and ambition distort space and time in a way that still feels emotionally true. This is Ishiguro at his most radical and least interested in pleasing the reader. It isn't his most accessible or best constructed novel, but it's the one that will likely stay with me longest.

Too long and uneven to be perfect, but too strange, accomplished and unforgettable for a flat four. 4.25/5