The Unconsoled
The Unconsoled
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1995 (Fiction) 535 pp.
A New Yorker review characterizes The Unconsoled as “a gripping psychological mystery, a wicked satire of the cult of art, and a poignant character study of a man whose public life has accelerated beyond his control.” It takes place in an unnamed Central European city. A renowned pianist returns here for the most important performance of his life. The New Yorker review continues, “Instead, he finds himself diverted on a series of cryptic and infuriating errands that nevertheless provide him with vital clues to his own past.” I have to say that this is perhaps the best work of fiction I've ever read. I remember this book again and again as I go about my life. Not the plot, not even the characters, but the amazing way it shows how stories, characters, events and all appearances arise and pass.
In my opinion this is a spiritual book (although I found no mention of this in other reviews). If you follow Buddhist teachings, or advaita teachings, or the mystics of any of the non-dual Christian, Sufi, Jewish etc. paths, you have heard that the world of objects and perceptions is not "real," that the "self" is a fabrication. If that is so, then how do they arise? How do they seem to be so real? How does the story hang together?
Ishiguro hands us a model of how this might transpire. He gives us phantasmal characters morphing into one another, changing direction, motivation, histories at each step. The world he creates perfectly portrays the mechanism of samsara, a nuts-and-bolts model of how the story-of-I could arise and be interpreted. I don't know if he intended this, or if he was just expressing subconscious spiritual insight, but I found this novel an inspired spiritual teaching.
It took me most of the book to understand it as such. Until that point I found it — as various other reviewers did — frustrating, tedious, irritating; but now, seen in this way, it illuminates and exemplifies. I heartily recommend it.
-- reviewed by Mora Fields