Angie Sijun Lou at the Paris Review:
The first book I tried to read by Kazuo Ishiguro was The Remains of the Day. I was disturbed by how convincingly Ishiguro adopts the voice of a midcentury English butler: politely deferential, with tediously long descriptions of his pleasant, unremarkable days. Stevens’s curated inner life made him feel like a mirage of a person.
Years later, a friend lent me his copy of The Unconsoled, a five-hundred-page anxiety dream about a pianist, Ryder, who travels to a quasi-mystical town to play a career-defining concert only to be stymied by a web of endless errands. Ryder is asked to mediate feuds between people he barely knows and gets lost every time he leaves his hotel, perpetually failing to rehearse for his recital as he navigates an elusive and shifting schedule of appointments. Many critics panned the book as among the worst they’d ever read, but I was obsessed with its sense of refusal. “It’s never my intention to be willfully obscure,” Ishiguro tells Susannah Hunnewell in his Art of Fiction interview. “The novel was as clear as I could make it.”
more here.
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