Theirs is a narrow world, deprived of the richness that broader knowledge of it would provide. The kind of less that a land full of ravaged personal and collective memory would produce. Seeing life from their vantage point makes visceral what it would be like if there was less. While crafting The Buried Giant, though, here’s one question I imagine Ishiguro asking: is it possible to portray a concrete, specific, real-feeling world, when that world’s past has been stripped away? Under such circumstances, should an author even try?Īxl and Beatrice are a loving elderly couple that the narrative follows as they travel to their nearly forgotten son’s village. He has tackled it in a variety of ways in previous works. Having read the book through, one dilemma rose above all others: how can, or should, denial and memory be addressed in fiction? This is not a new issue for Ishiguro. The oddness of Ishiguro’s story space, spare to an extreme, is what lived with me most, chapter to chapter. I read no articles or advanced reviews, so when the beautifully designed, author-signed first edition arrived at my local independent bookstore, I had no idea what to expect beyond, that is, the unavoidable buzz: how Kazuo Ishiguro ventures into the world of fantasy with his latest novel, The Buried Giant.
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