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The first words to come out of my mouth when I finished this book was: WHAT. THE. HELL. What did I just read? Did what I think happened really happen? Is my copy missing another 200 pages or something BECAUSE I NEED ANSWERS!!
My first Ishiguro. This is such a quaint and quiet novel. Inane to the point of enjoyability. I look forward to more monotony.
A short but very extraordinary booklet. When you start reading it, it seems to be a rather conventionally brought story, told by Etsuko, a Japanese woman living in England, whose daughter has just passed away. The bulk of the book is a flashback to the time Etsuko lived in Nagasaki, a few years after the nuclear bomb, and was expecting her first child. She has strong memories of her friendship with a remarkable woman that lived in shabby circumstances with a little girl, in a cottage near the ri...
Surprise, surprise! The brilliant mind that concocted “Never Let Me Go” (which is, by the way, indubitably on my top ten list) first brought this masterpiece to a readership whose last brush with (this is no exaggeration:) PERFECTION was reading Mr. Graham Greene (“The Quiet American”). The novel is tight, 75% dialogue, exquisitely concise, devoid of flowery sentences/descriptions, no bullshit and beautiful. Ishiguro is a (n enviable) genius, a poet, one capable of expelling tears and tugging at...
Some books you really just have to read (at least) twice. Never before have I read a work of literary fiction more carefully than I would read an Agatha Christie novel. What can I say? I was determined to figure it out the second time around, reading for details instead of for an explanation, and as it turns out these characters actually have a special place on my heart, especially Etsuko and Ogata-san and their teasing relationship. What was I smoking the first time around? I just wanted answer...
(Book 274 from 1001 books) - A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo IshiguroA Pale View of Hills (1982) is the first novel by Nobel Prize–winning author Kazuo Ishiguro. During a visit from her daughter, Niki, Etsuko reflects on her own life as a young woman in Japan, and how she left that country to live in England. As she describes it, she and her Japanese husband, Jiro, had a daughter together, and a few years later Etsuko met a British man and moved with him to England. She took her elder daughter, Keik...
Every once in a while, a book surprises you on the way to its ending. After the first few pages of this book, I figured I knew what to expect - a well written realist novel about a displaced Japanese woman in England who reminisces about her youth while contemplating the choices her children have made. And for most of the book, that impression is borne out. It nicely describes the two countries, how people act and react, and what life has been like for this character throughout her time in both
A Japanese-born woman in England reminisces with her daughter about the woman’s memories of life in Japan in Nagasaki after the war. The woman had two daughters by two husbands. We learn in the first couple of pages that the oldest daughter, born in Japan to a Japanese husband, recently committed suicide in England. She was solitary and anti-social, even to her family. The second daughter’s father was British and the woman moved to England where her visiting daughter was raised. We don’t learn w...
Right now, my mountain view is worse than "pale". I can't see a damn thing for the smog that has made its way to Vancouver from the forest fires in the interior of British Columbia. The hills around me are unseeable, which makes the timing of reading Kazuo Ishiguro's slim debut novel quite poignant.When you look out and can't see clearly, it's disorienting. By day, the sun burns red through the haze. Nighttime doesn't settle into darkness. It's eerie. The world isn't as it should be. Mysterious....
I have a friend here on Goodreads who reads the books of the authors he fancies chronologically. I admire his tenacity and discipline. Even if I have all the author's works in my bookshelves, I still always pick first his most famous work. My reason is that if I die soon, at least, I've already read the author's masterpiece.I think I liked Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (4 stars) and Never Let Me Go (4 stars) that almost all of his other works seem to be mediocre. It's like that I've fallen i...
Didn't work for me, unfortunately. I need more than subtle hints at mystery to keep me interested. I was annoyed that virtually the entire novel was told through dialogue. Worse, so much of the dialogue seemed irrelevant. Filtering out the nonsense to find intrigue took too much work. Still, there were some well-crafted scenes so it wasn't all bad. And, thankfully, it is a very slim novel. I'm sure some readers will love it, but beware if you aren't a fan of subtle.
The story starts with Etsuko, a Japanese woman living in England, remembering her life in Japan before and during the pregnancy of her first child. A small part of the book is set in present day England when her younger daughter is around 20yrs old, the rest of the story remembers a different life in Japan, during the 1950s, when life was still very much affected by the bombing of Nagasaki.The story set back in time focuses on Etsuko who is newly married to Jiro and befriends a woman older than
4.5 Historically, I am a big fan of Mr Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day is one of my favourite novels and I admire his straight-forward yet deceptively elusive writing style.There are a few gaps in my Ishiguro reading and his debut novel, published in 1982, was one of them. A Pale View of Hills thematically foreshadows much of the work Ishiguro will subsequently produce. His exploration of the deceptions and vagaries of memory, is a project begun in this novel and polished into a masterpiec
