Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro - image from his FB page A pretty good novel. I thought it was outstanding until the back quarter. Renowned London detective Christopher Banks was raised in the International part of Shanghai, sent to England after both his parents disappeared. He is smitten with a social climbing siren who figures in his adventure when he returns to Shanghai intent on solving the mystery of his parents’ disappearance. Of course the Sino-Japanese war, two decades of change in Sh...

Many reviews here have commented on Ishiguro's unreliable narrators (let's let that classification stand, whether or not it is entirely valid or really applies to all of his work), as if this aspect of his fiction is so obvious, or that it has been so exhaustively mined, that there is little to nothing left to say about such a narrative strategy.Christopher Banks, When We Were Orphans' narrator, is certainly unreliable, yes. But our relationship to him as an unreliable narrator is a strange one,...

This is my 7th Ishiguro and I am happy for two reasons: (1) I am now an Ishiguro completist and (2) unlike a couple of his earlier books, I actually liked this one. I almost rated this with 4 stars but I could not do that because I found the first half of the book unbelievably boring. However, Ishiguro managed to make the book’s last 50-70 pages truly engaging that I thought I was able to squirt some tears from my eyes when the boyhood friends were back together. It was one of the most poignant

4.5 stars ... and already it felt like something consigned to a past era, something I need not remember if I did not wish to. A superbly crafted narrative that is elliptical and opaque (is that why is has so many so-so reviews?) but which I also found profoundly emotive and deeply knowing about issues of loss, self-delusion (both personal and national) and denial. There are numerous mentions of memory and recall - in fact the book is structured through a series of recollected moments when the...

I listened to audio version of this book and kept thinking I was missing chapters or I had somehow obtained the abridged version because the plot wasn't making any sense. So mid-way through the audio, I got the book and read it, and then started reading it again, NOT because I liked it, but because I have never read such a strangely constructed work of fiction. I am still at a loss. Was this a satire on British Imperialism? Was it meant to be a fantasy? I kept thinking there was going to be one

When We Were Orphans made me realize that one can be deceived not only by people but also by books! Honest to God I thought this book was about solving a mystery. The protagonist being a celebrated detective added more fuel to the deception. No wonder I was disoriented by the middle of it trying desperately to understand what the mystery is all about. Well I'm not saying there was no mystery element; of course there is a touch of that, but not the way I expected. So there, I was deceived by a bo...

The first thing I noticed about this book was that the narrative voice - belonging to Christopher Banks, a successful detective in 1930s England - is remarkably similar to that of Stevens, the protagonist of Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. While at first this drew me in (I loved The Remains of the Day), I soon began to find it offputting. I had assumed Stevens' voice was unique, so it was a bit of a disappointment to find that what I assumed were facets of that character are actually features...

Eh, this isn't great. I enjoyed maybe the first 50ish pages but once the plot actually begins it just becomes a mess. It gets the extra star because I enjoyed those 50 pages. Even Ishiguro himself thinks this is a weak novel. It's overall poor.

I read this novel after I read Never Let Me Go, by the same author. I was surprised that the narrators' tones sounded so similar. But now I guess that's just a how the author writes, in a formal and almost stilted voice.The ending of this book irritated me to no end and I actually had to go back through the story to see if I missed something--was the narrator seriously retarded (and I'm not trying to use that word in a disparaging way, but a descriptive way). I was baffled, not by just the behav...

Kazuo Ishiguro’s enigmatic novel, When We Were Orphans, is as complex and baffling a work of fiction as I have ever encountered. Christopher Banks, our narrator, is not so much an unreliable narrator as a naive narrator who believes in the internal world he has created and acts upon it as if it were truth. Through so much of the novel I kept asking myself why he could not see the illogical conclusions he was drawing, but of course that is what this novel is about, his inability to leave his chil...

Second reading. Ishiguro's novels are nothing if not enigmatic. There's disorientation; the reader is never quite sure where he stands. When We Were Orphans is a quasi-Bildungsroman or coming of age/detective story. It is set over a period of fifty years or so in London, Shanghai and then back in London again.Narrator Christopher Banks is born of English parents with whom he lives in the International Concession in Shanghai. Around 1915 or so they disappear, when he is about nine, and are believ...

When We Were Orphans explores a wide array of political and personal themes, but its main focus is on memory, nostalgia, and the luxury of innocence. In the final sequence, the novel veers away from strict realism, into somewhat surreal, dreamlike territory. I felt the novel really reaching for something interesting here, and though it seemed to try a few ideas on, it didn't really settle on anything altogether concrete. Yet the surprising, unsettling quality of this latter section was my favour...

| | blog | tumblr | ko-fi | | “I had always understood, of course, that the task of rooting out evil in its most devious forms, often just when it is about to go unchecked, is a crucial and solemn undertaking.” As much as it pains me to admit this...I didn’t particularly care for this novel. While it is written in Kazuo Ishiguro’s trademark prose, which is both eloquent and introspective, the more I read and the less invested I felt in the story and in particular in Christopher Banks, our nar...