When We Were Orphans: A Novel
by Kazuo Ishiguro
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Book Reviews of When We Were Orphans: A Novel
Book Review: An ode to cardboard cut-outs
Summary: 5 Stars
The edifice of memory, a mere construction. The "detective story" is not thrilling in the everyday sense of the word. It's almost as if we know, as readers, from the very beginning that this edifice will crumble, as so many memories are bound to. Time may be a healer, but it also makes us more fragile to the time-boundedness of memories, of our lives...
Set against the assault of Christopher's memories is his mother's final "beaten" memory-loss, where pain makes forgetting a less painful way out...these are delusions of different kinds...
Banks's "self" too is so "artful" that I felt, more often than not, that Ishhiguro had deliberately made him fictional. Further, the strangely "fictional" quality of the book moves in tandem with the bloody "realness" of the later portions - almost like cardboard cutouts against an underlying tension of a sick, "real" world.
The central "mystery" adds to this fictionality; the protagonist's self-delusions reify it; and the quality of a remembered childhood - that Banks refuses to grow out of - colours the narrative with an impending sense of doomed nostalgia....
It is BECAUSE the "mystery" so seductively promised fails to satisfy that this story works.... For me, it's the frustrated closure/s and the almost foolish hopes that render the book a masterpiece.
Book Review: A 1930's detective novel
Summary: 3 Stars
I was certainly of two minds about what to write. For over 2/3s of the novel, we are plodding along in a rather mundane 1930's detective novel. We are not even treated to full fledged sub-plots. Ishiguro might have won kudos for his previous writing, but I found that this was a slog through rather uninspired drivel.It is only when the narrator ends back in Shanghai, do we realize that the novel turns into something more than very ordinary. We are faced with the fact that the narrator is rather "mad". Perhaps, he never was balanced and the preceeding novel was fiction. I found this more and more reinforced by the fact that Banks (the narrator) knows no Chinese nor does he have an interpreter, but is hell bent on entering into the real Shanghai. Even 1930's novels offer some go-between.
In this, Ishiguro shows his stuff. All bets are off. Banks "the detective" flays away. His detection skills are non existant - other than using a magnifying glass at the strangest moments.
Ishiguro presents an English gentleman of the period, coloured as an "upper class twit". I found that it took the novel a good deal of time to get to this point. In a post-colonial world, this is an interesting take on what the colonies had to endure in the nature of well-meaning ladies and gentelmen.
Book Review: Not a stable world, not a stable narrator
Summary: 5 Stars
"When We Were Orphans" is a very difficult book because it moves from the main character's past -- Banks', an English boy growing up in Shanghai in the early 1900s --, which is clear, vivid, and credible, to his adulthood and later return to Shanghai. The object of his return is twofold: (1) to explore and clarify the disappearance of his mother and father when he was nine; and (2) to save the world from evil, i.e., WWII. More and more, he becomes unable to see how childlike and overwrought he is to think that he can "save" the world; more frightening, he becomes absolutely convinced that his parents are still alive and just waiting to be rescued. This malaise of confusing the likely with the possible and with the probable or the improbable (or, really, the just about impossible) realities does not "stick" to him alone: the whole outside world crumbles; everything seems to submit to his fantasies. Shanghai under Japanese fire merges with the traps of his own psyche, making it impossible to tell what is real and what is projection. I, too, was hoping for a definite denouement that would expose him as loopy. This does not happen. What does happen is a series of "events," each of which the reader has to judge for their possible truth-content. A difficult book. Very like Kafka.Book Review: Fiction Is Not Reality
Summary: 4 Stars
It's not just a case of Christopher Banks being an unreliable narrator. Kazuo Ishiguro is an unreliable author, and I mean that as a compliment.
Think of the book as a musical ... no one walks out of "Rent" complaining that the narrator was unreliable as people don't break into song. It's a convention.
Ishiguro has created a world in which detectives really are celebrated, where police and governments are eager to work them, and where there are enough celebrated detectives that it is possible to bump into a few at a party (the best sort of party, of course). This isn't Bank's unreliable narration: it's the given milieu of this fascinating novel.
I suspect readers are flummoxed coming to this after "Remains of the Day," rather than coming to this after the even more absurd and dream-like "The Unconsoled." Characters in this book are absolutely not going to behave the way people would in our world, and I, for one, are delighted ... there are thousands of books making the attempt to recreate reality (more or less effectively), so it's a treat to read an incredibly beautifully-written book that has no intention of trying.
It's a fantasy, set in a world that only ever existed in books. Enjoy it for what it is.
Book Review: Maybe I just didn't get it...
Summary: 2 Stars
The actual prose is good, no doubt, but I found there were so many problems with this book:
-A celebrated detective? How? Why? It would have been nice if the author provided a little more background on just how and why Banks became a "celebrated" detective.
-To reiterate another review, why was Akira's English so bad, whereas many of the Chinese speakers seemed to speak fluent English? Okay, I LIVE in China, and trust me, VERY few Chinese can speak English that well, and now English is mandatory in most schools.
-There was a war going on and Banks still insisted on finding his parents in some fabled house he thought they might have been taken to, what?, like 20 or 30 years before? What "celebrated detective" in the world would believe that the abductors of his parents would keep them in the same place for over 20 years?
-Banks basically yells at various Chinese police and soldier officials to take him to the house, even though it is in a dangerous zone and a war is going on. I would have told him to go to hell, but apparently, the Chinese officials were not busy enough trying to survive and somehow made time to accomodate the demanding, boisterous, monolingual Englishman.
But other than that, it was good.