Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel

I just read, in ebook form, The Buried Giant, Ishiguro’s just-published novel. Many years ago I read his An Artist of the Floating World, and more recently his The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. As did these other novels, The Buried Giant exerted its magic and compelled me to put some work aside to finish it. Also as the other novels, it is lingering in my mind and will probably do so for quite a while. It made it very easy for me to create a film of the novel in my mind; I would not care to have it disrupted by the movie that will probably be made. I recommend this novel heartily. It’s a deep study in the personal and social functions of memory and its absence.

I don’t have too much to say that will be different from what reviews I have read already said. It’s a departure for Ishiguro to write in Arthurian legend style, but then again to make a career in English literature is a departure for someone born in Japan, to begin with, and his other books have always broken with the styles of their predecessors.

So how dare I read a novel in the middle of the semester? Well, it’s my spring break and I am spending altogether too much of it working and shoveling snow, so I think I earned it!