The Return of the Amazing Dr. Funkenstein and his Psychedelic Paraphernalia

This is my book review of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. It's appearing in The California Literary Review at the time the book was first released, 1995/6.

Here's a sample review from CLR, about Haruki Murakami's After Dark.

Now enjoy my review. (Or else!)

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Unconsoled
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Vintage, 535 pp.

CONSOLE ME

Our narrator and protagonist, known only to us as Ryder, arrives at his hotel for the start of the most important concert tour of his career and finds no one, not even the staff, there to greet him. The rest of Ryder's stay is just as anticlimactic and comical.

Kazuo Ishiguro's new book The Unconsoled is set in an indistinct European city and acted out by a man who doesn't always remember where he is and what he's supposed to be doing. The plot tends to meander. Imagine, if you will, a book that is the rambling of a mind going about his business. How does one get through a dense book where not a lot of exciting stuff is happening?

Readers familiar with his Booker Prize-winner The Remains of the Day, will recognize Ishiguro's charming narrative style. (At times it's this alone that make this over-five-hundred-page book readable.) There are paragraphs that are four or five pages long, but Ishiguro makes them interesting enough to an engaged reader. But you're either an Ishiguro fan, or you're not. Be prepared for a literary experiment that is part James Joyce and part Franz Kafka.

Ryder's wild ride is both (or neither) psychological realism and absurd fantasy. Ishiguro seamlessly blends together the zaniness of a madman and the mundane qualities of perusing the Tuesday newspaper. The result is a study of consciousness. What type of consciousness in particular, however, is hard to tell. What condition is the brain that's telling us this tale? Is Ryder an amnesiac? Suffering from multiple personalities? An insomniac zombie? Or just an "absent-minded professor" type? Just how we are supposed to read this, Ishiguro never clues us in on.

The landscape Ishiguro paints is dreamlike and surreal. To borrow a term from Freud, there's a lot of condensation going on. We're in a small city in Europe that might be in Germany, or Austria, (or Paris for all we know)--a town that Ryder has never been to--but yet we are constantly meeting people from his past in England, including a possible mistress and child.

Ryder is at times confused by what's going on, and at other times a vital part of the confusion. For instance, Ryder does find it strange when Mr. Hoffman, the manger of the hotel, calls him down to the lobby to tell him about the death of Brodsky's dog. But when Hoffman suggests they must get moving along, Ryder leaves for the party in his dressing gown. He then arrives at a fancy dinner party in his night clothes and prepares to give a speech which he thinks of starting "collapsing curtain rails. Poisoned rodents. Misprinted score sheets." Ryder later flashes the guests when he gets up to make this speech and no one seems to mind. There is a logic at work in the events of the book that is never fully defined, but fully consistent.

The Unconsoled doesn't really climax. The story does deliver on it's promises (and Ishiguro on his experiment) but Ryder seems unchanged. That doesn't really bother Ryder--the reader lacks closure. We want Bob Barker to reveal what's behind door number three. Perhaps it is the reader who is unconsoled.

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Unconsoled
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Vintage, 535 pp.

UNCONSOLABLE CONSCIOUSNESS

Our narrator and protagonist, known only to us as Ryder, arrives at his hotel for the start of the most important concert tour of his career and finds no one, not even the staff, there to greet him. The rest of Ryder's stay is just as anticlimactic and comical as we visit an interesting form of consciousness in Kazuo Ishiguro's new book, The Unconsoled. The story is told from the perspective of a man who's, to say the least, a little absent minded. Ryder doesn't always remember who's who or what he's supposed to be doing--and the reader experiences all things as colored by this insomniac-Mr. Magoo-zombie.

The results come out as a mixture of drollery mixed with surreal comic moments that make this 500-plus-page book entertaining. Readers familiar with Ishiguro's Remains of the Day will recognize the charming, yet purposeful, writing style that allows Ishiguro to get away with having paragraphs that run on for several pages in Ryder's amnesiac brain. A perfect illustration of this occurs within the first chapter (after the hotel staff finally comes out of hiding) and the porter is taking Ryder's bags to his room. He notices the elderly porter (later to be known as Gustav) struggling to keep the bags off the floor, "glowing red with the effort," causing Ryder to say

"'You know, you really ought to put those down.'"
"'I'm glad you mention that, sir,' he said"

The porter then goes on for five pages of solid text, revealing the moral obligation of portering and the code of ethics he developed, after a vacation to a different hotel in Lucerne, as a way of making the profession of porter a noble thing. And that not holding at least two bags in the elevators would cause the townsfolk to ridicule the porters.

The absurdity of moments like these is what gives The Unconsoled its humor. But it's a comedy that comes from real life. Who hasn't, let's say, been trapped by the clerk at Dunkin Donuts because he strikes up an impromptu conversation about coffee and won't stop. In this way the book is just as much psychological realism as it is absurd fantasy, with Ishiguro's writing often mimicking real life speech patterns (i.e. "'There's a very long way to go yet, that's true, but we've often talked it over - we meet every Sunday afternoon at the Hungarian Cafe in the Old Town, you could come and join us, you'd be our most welcome guest, sir - well, we've often discussed these things and each of us agrees, without a doubt, there have been significant improvements in the attitude towards us in this town.'").

Ishiguro is not for everyone. However delightful he might be, he does meander and get cryptic at times. The Unconsoled is an exercise in comprehension, the way that Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse and James Joyce's Ulysses demand a certain fitness of the reader. You have to do those intellectual pushups because the text rambles on in a way that is part Mark Twain's "Story of the Old Ram" and part Seinfeld banter but is entirely delightful when you're up to the challenge--you just have to get through the intellectual matrix first.

To borrow a term from Freud, there's a whole lot of condensation going on. The landscape Ishiguro paints is dreamlike and surreal. We're in a small city in Europe that might be in Germany, or Austria, (or Paris for all we know)--a town that Ryder has never been to--but yet we are constantly meeting people from his past in England, including a possible wife and child. (Gustav, the porter from the hotel, is his father-in-law.) People always seem to talk to Ryder as if he has a full knowledge of what's going on with this city and its inhabitants and, of course, he goes along with it because that's the thing to do. These condensations and confusions are gaps in Ryder's mind that Ishiguro reflects in the text that certainly make reading this book... interesting.

There is a logic at work in the events of the book that is never fully defined, but fully consistent. Ryder is at times confused by what's going on, and at other times a vital part of the confusion. For instance, Ryder does find it strange when Mr. Hoffman, the manger of the hotel, calls him down to the lobby to tell him about the death of Brodsky's dog. But when Hoffman suggests they must get moving along, Ryder leaves for the party in his dressing gown. He then arrives at a fancy dinner party in his night clothes and prepares to give a speech which he thinks of starting "collapsing curtain rails. Poisoned rodents. Misprinted score sheets." Ryder later flashes the guests when he gets up to make this speech and no one seems to mind.

What Ishiguro lays out in The Unconsoled is straight from the brain of his protagonist. There is no clean resolution to the plot, no unveiling of what is really going on with Ryder's brain. Bob Barker only reveals what's behind door number one--there is no behind the scenes tour. But that's the mind, isn't it? Ishiguro planned this out as an experiment in thought. The consciousness of Ryder is unconsolable, but rather a masterful execution and a fun read. So sit back, let Bob Barker make his little monologues, and enjoy the experience.