The Unconsoled

The Unconsoled tells the story of Ryder, an acclaimed pianist, who comes to play in an European town as part as what looks like a tour.And that's -or is it???- about the only clear cut fact of the book.From Ryder's arrival to his hotel, we are -reader and Ryder- embarked in a roller coaster of events, thoughts, interactions, with a narrative following a dream pattern. The sense of time and space are suspended, as are logic and rationality. Streets lead to hotel rooms, minds are read, places magically connect, childhood friends appear, family ties are blurry, to say the least and the anxiety is rising.The dream quickly turns into nightmare as we are trying to make sense of the what, when, who and where. Many parts reminded me of a When we were orphans gone mad, with common themes and characterization.Ryder needs to play a huge part in many events leading to a key performance - the famous Thursday night- but has no idea of any of it. He tries to get a sense of his schedule but is always a step behind, pulled out of his unknown main tasks by constant side line emergencies.Ryder never seems to be acting, but only reacting to external events, pushing him around like a leaf in the wind. No continuity in thoughts or goal is present and he is permanenty jumping from one thing to the next in a chaotic dance that leaves us breathless and on the brink of a claustrophobia attack! That's the teeth grinding bit... Yes, some parts are quite frustrating and you wish Ryder would just suddenly wake up and get on with a "normal" life. Kazuo Ishiguro is literally plunging us in this never ending bad dream and the sense of absolute lack of control is quite something to experience.On the other hand, some parts are downright funny, whether it be the childish -and numerous-outbursts from Ryder (he has so many responsibilities!) or some of the characters' monologues, like Brodsky's.Embodiment of surreal literature, the Unconsoled echoes of course Kafka, but also Sartre and Vian .The main difference though, seems to be that the story symbolic is never truly uncovered. There's no "ah ah" moment here.Moreover, many tantalizing hypothesis seem to disappear as you go on reading.To start with, I wondered if Ryder was in a coma... Then if he was dead and living in his own personal hell. Then if he was in a highly dissociated state and experiencing simultaneously all his personae. And then again, if he was meeting his own self at different stages of his life. Or I f the story was experienced from the perspective of a 2 years old.I hoped the ending would provide some kind of answers, but grew less and less hopeful as I went on reading.And no, it didn't. There is no neat red ribbon tying everything nicely together. The interpretation is only down to us, readers.What is truly masterful though, is that for Ryder, all the events he goes through do not constitute a journey. He seems to be exactly the same at the very end and at the very start. There's no learning. Events just pass through him and he remains unchanged. Upsetting things are forgotten, replaced by what comes next, hurt and emotions give way to present needs. Without spoiling the end, the last few pages are such a vivid demonstration of the latter...The same apply to all the characters, there is NO resolution, they start the story being miserable and end up as miserable, as if they were all acting in a forever circular pattern.When it came to giving it some sense, I chose to think that this work of literature was an allegory of our own mind. That it shows how we get caught up in things lacking utter relevance to help us live our present. How we obsess about trivia and are self obsessed. How we can be prisoner of our own concepts, ways, limitations.That we are made of dozens of contradictory pieces, pulling us in different ways and making clear vision and action difficult. Or may be, it's all about letting go of our mental pieces of luggage, which would put Gustav and his porter job in a interesting new light!So, a very original read, to embark on with an open mind...

This is an unusual novel, written almost as if it were a dream narrative, with all the frustrations of a bad dream. I would like to discuss three aspects of the novel; the use of a dream narrative to form the basis of the novel, Perl's dream theory, and the modern sense of anxiety and neurosis.The narrative of this novel is dream-like in many ways. A dream has its own sense of time and space and sequencing of events. Oftehn in a dream the sense of time is distorted and space is bent and shortened. That is certainly the case in this novel. The anxieties of everyday life are taken into the dream and thus the dreamer feels a sense of emergency or urgency around nonsense in a dream. Logic,which follows rules in the real world, no longer follows those rules in the dream world. There were wonderful clues to this process throughout the novel. For example, early in the novel Ryder and Boris try to keep up with Sophia as she walks through a maze of old-town streets. No matter how they try to hurry, she always turns a corner ahead of them and they become anxious trying to catch up to her. In another scene, Ryder goes to a movie but the movie seems to be a conglomeration of several films including 2001: A Space Odessey as well as a Clint Eastwood western. In another scene, Ryder responds to an emergency in his bathrobe, ends up in a formal partly, is invited to speak, and when he does the bathrobe opens exposing his nude body. All of these images tell the reader that he is in the world of the dream. Dreams don't necessarily resolve issues. They usually only point to problems and hint at answers. In the Jungian approach the hints are big. However in our modern existence, when we search for a myth to live by, the sense of anxiety becomes the predominant feature of the modern dream. Jung's dream theory indicates that dreams can be used to enrich or existance whereas Perl's dream theory indicates that the anxiety and dread experienced in dreams are symptoms of a larger neurosis, caused by the conditions, pace, relationshis of modern life, to say nothing of the need in modern existance to find meaning in life since we can no longer rely on the dominant forces of the church or state to define our reason for living.I think the dream theory developed by Fritz Perls and revealed in his Gestalt Psychotherapy would shine light on the meaning of this odd novel. Perls would say that everyone and everything in the dream is actually a part or aspect of the dreamer. One way to interpret this is that the young boy Boris reflects Ryder's childhood, the young pianist Stephen reflects the artistic awakening of Ryder, and the elderly drunken Brodsky reflects the despair and end of the artist, no longer able to produce with vitality and creativity. Another piece of evidence that everyone in the dream reflects some aspect of Ryder's personality is the similarity of voice of many of the male characters in the story. They had this extremely polite way of manipulating. Perl's thought that uncertain vague anxiety was a symptom of neurosis, the psychological state of modern man. This dream was full of the anxious dread characteristic of neurosis.Which comes to the point of my review that if a dream reflects the anxiety of modern existence and a novel should reflect modern existence, then the novel should be as anxious as a neurotic dream. This aspect of the novel obvious drove many readers and reviewers to distraction, as evidenced by their scathing reviews of this novel.But what is the source of the anxiety? This novel would indicate that it is our inability to be all things to all people. Ryder is continually asked by strangers to help with this issue or that issue, all of which divert him, cause him discomfort, and yet always help him understand himself better. When modern man is in the state of anxiety, he looks for authoritarian answers. Ryder, a great musician, is seen by others an a wise authority figure and Ryder knows that he has not real expertise in the live and troubles of others.Another interpretation may be that Ryder is a rider, that he is the human soul, continually bouncing from one illogical and nonsense experience to another.Ryder has dream amnesia, not clinical amnesia, since he easily flows from situations where he has no member to a realization that he is familiar with the situation and the persons and flows back into uncertain illdefined relationships with the other characters.Who are the unresolved? I think the unresolved are the vast range of characters, searching for the expert, the wise old man, the artist, the star to in some way address their issue and solve their problem.I did not give this book 5 stars because I found it overly long and overly frustrating. It got on my nerves, as it was suppose to do.

The friend who urged me to read this novel praised its "tongue-in-cheek Kafkaesque humor." I can see what he meant but, to me, it seemed like 535 pages of memorably uncomfortable anxiety in the form of a literarily self-conscious nightmare. If a book could take Valium, I'd prescribe such a cure for The Unconsoled. Okay, so art can be painful and profoundly disturbing. This book is disturbing without much profundity. Artistically, it achieves its effects in the first 200 pages and adds nothing thereafter. If anything, it becomes less and less convincing. I began to suspect that Ishiguro was too much a best-selling writer and not enough a human who has experienced angst and alienation first-hand. The characters are constructed rather than encountered. Some chapters are brilliant - particularly those recounting the narrator's childhood solitudes - but many are mere "writing." The various bits in reference to fictitious modern music are especially hollow and implausible. Ishiguro owes the reader some substance if he chooses to dally with a subject, but he obviously has no knowledge of music. As an alternative to this heavy reading assignment, I'd suggest any book by WG Sebald, whose VERTIGO bears close comparison in content and style and whose "emotional honesty" is vastly more convincing.

Ishiguro escreve muito bem, mas esse é o pior livro dele que já li. O tema é chato, os desconsolados, e nada dá certo, tudo se atrasa, todos os personagens ficam dando voltas e não conseguem nada. Se não fosse admiradora dele não teria lido até o fim

Once you have read the first chapter you can get a thrilling insight when you realize that what is going on in the book is very much the same as what you can experience in a dream where you continuously get lost.Then the whole book repeats itself chapter after chapter which makes it very boring unless you have an autistic diagnosis. In such a case the book can provide you with a mirror of your own life.

This is the most extraordinary literature that I have ever read. I should say incomprehensible. It seems as if the author has finished each scene, asking himself “What is the most illogical and ridiculous thing that could happen now?” And then answering himself by putting it to paper. It is a structure that I have never come across before. It must be unique and is obviously meant to be, creating a new “ism”. It will without doubt generate an endless flood of theses in the future and literary circles and university café customers will talk of of nothing else. That said , unless you are a masochist I would hesitate in purchasing it.

It is hard to review this book without giving away some of its surprises. You may want to look away now...Some books are hard to read because the language is difficult or the plot is convoluted. This book has clear language and its episodes are easy to follow. However, the world of the book is strangely different from ours. Clint Eastwood and Yul Brynner star in 2001 A Space Odyssey; nail-bitingly drawn-out distractions seem to have taken no time at all; distant parts of the landscape connect to near parts; cringingly inept social behaviour has positive consequences.Science fiction and post-modern literature deviate from reality in their own ways, but both generally preserve some aspects of narrative structure -- Gravity's Rainbow has a clear sense of place and time, and its logic follow understandable rules; Lord of the Rings is not about our world, but it is very much about some world. In contrast, The Unconsoled is closer to historical and geographical reality -- characters before around 1900 are all real, but far more disturbing in its logic, spatial and temporal dimensions.Reading this book is a deeply disturbing experience. Digression nests within digression and the reader is expected to keep track of multiple layers of narrative, some of which simply disappear without trace. The narrative voice is generally first person (Ryder) but at many points you realise the narrator is describing something that Ryder himself could not possibly be witnessing. A sense of panic pervades the book -- there is so much to do and so little time while distractions follow distractions -- yet appointments are met. The flow of time is so awry that long car journeys away from the city result in no time elapse at all; nighttime sequences see-saw between early evening and the following morning and back again.Characters in the book have a static quality, as if they represent different views in time of the same person. Memories of events in the book do not match the events themselves. Post-hoc justification of actions turns into memory.The arts are massively important in the book. Artists, particularly musicians, can make or break society. On the surface, this appears as intellectual snobbery, but I don't think that is the point. This is a virtual world, created within a book, so of course it is the arts that support it.When you read a book with a first-person narrator, you enter the book's world in a different state from the narrator who represents you. The narrator has previous experiences and memories, and recognises the other characters in the book, whereas the reader must pick these up as she reads. An unwritten convention for authors is that the book contains a world which is logically consistent; the narrator moves through and interacts with the world and the characters in it; as a side-effect of this narration, the reader learns more and more about the world until she is at one with the narrator, following his journey with his knowledge of the world and its characters.This book breaks those conventions. At the start of the narrative, the narrator (Ryder) seems to know as little about his own history and relationships as you the reader. Memories mysteriously appear, the way they do for the reader of any book.Many books have subplots and parenthetical action, but they maintain the fiction of a narrator who travels through the plotline with a clear point of view and timeline. The Unconsoled breaks this convention too. Ryder seems able to follow the action the way the reader does, even though his character is stuck in a car outside the building where the action is.Most books have plots where good actions result in good consequences, and mistakes result in disasters. The Unconsoled breaks this convention too. Ryder misses appointments, staggers through the plot with no schedule, fails to hit his principle goal, yet none of this seems to matter in the end. In most books, decisions by the reader have no impact on the action, who can watch while the narrator's decisions have good or bad consequences. In The Unconsoled, decisions and delays by the narrator have no impact on the action.The Unconsoled blurs the boundary between narrator and reader. The narrator interacts with his virtual world in the same way that the reader interacts with her world of the novel, learning about characters and relationships at the same time as him, while he can follow sub-plots and have privileged information in the same way as her.So what is The Unconsoled about? Most importantly, it is about the novel and the roles of reader and narrator. By undermining these roles, Ishiguro forces us to reexamine them. Reading The Unconsoled can make you grow as a reader, no longer blind to the conventions that tie you to the book you are reading. Through the novel, Ryder is tormented with panic, things undone, unavoidable digressions, yet he ends the novel in a state of serenity, in a loop like the end of an LP. The same happens to the reader -- reading this book is hard work, but it can bring you to a state of deeper understanding.

Non mi ha annoiato come molti altri romanzi che raccontano storie in modo lineare. Complesso? No, per nulla. Originale. Basta usare la propria testa, invece che sedersi a leggere come se si andasse al cinema a vedere un blockbuster con i popcorn in mano. In realtà questo libro è tale e quale tutti gli altri libri dell'autore, ci sono sempre gli stessi leitmotiv, le stesse pulsioni di fondo. È solo lo stile ad essere più radicale. Ma se non capite questo libro, allora non avete capito nessun altro libro di Ishiguro (anche se pensate di averlo fatto).