Krishna
This book is definitely weird. I will tell you why.
Mr Ryder reaches a nondescript hotel where the manager was expecting him. The elderly porter is Gustav, who is trying to keep up the standards of the porter profession. His daughter Sophie is going through a rough patch and he looks after his grandson Boris occasionally.
It seems to float merrily and when Ryder meets Sophie, he seems to ‘remember’ a relationship with her! Remember? Frustration sets in and you remember why you don’t like to read very artsy novels in the first place. None of the people even seem remotely resolute! Ryder hesitates to tell the convener of an event that he has not even got the agenda for the event! Fudges his answers. Why?? He is not Mr Bean, is he? You know what takes the cake? He suddenly remembers that Sophie is his wife and that Boris is his son!
It is worse. They also sound a wee bit demented as well. They all go to Sophie’s house but get lost. Even the boy does not know the way to his own house and keeps muttering about a ‘Number 9’ a player in Foosball board. You feel like screaming, ‘focus’ so that he can get on with showing Ryder the directions to his home.
A college hero childhood friend of Ryder is a failed bum later in life. All soooo boringly told.
Geoffrey Saunders, an old friend who tidied up the house so that Ryder can visit him, is another bizarre character.
Ryder loses Sophie, wanders all over town with the boy, goes back to the hotel only because the manager’s son comes by a car, and when she calls, he is angry with her! If you can see any sense in it, let me know. I cannot.
Then the porter decided to stop talking to his eight year old daughter ‘for three days’ for no apparent reason! It is excruciatingly illogical all the way.
The charlatan Christoff (a cellist) and his pretty wife Rosa have now been exposed for the frauds that they are and the town is aghast that they were taken in for so long! They also want to reinstate Brodsky, who was unjustly sidelined because of that fraud, Christoff.
My God, everything is so unnatural.
Everyone thinks Mr Ryder is a genius, including the hotel manager, and seem ready to toady up to him no matter what he wants. The manager of the hotel is almost a slavish fan. His son did not live up to the expectation of his parents and son prepares to redeem himself by playing a piece by La Roche right in front of Mr Ryder, in a welcome ceremony.
The mother and father do not talk to each other (don’t even get me started on that one) but the mother hates it and wants the son to play Kazan. How does she tell him? She does not! She hints to father by reading a book on Kazan? (This is also a guess). The father? He tells nothing to the son until it is too late but tells him anyway when it is too late. Come on! Is there anyone who behaves normally in this crap-shoot of a town?
According to some other reviewers, this is all heavily surreal and symbolic and some claim that this is the best book Ishiguro has written. I, though, agree with another critic who said ‘As you read more and more, the urge increases to take the heavy tome and bash someone on the head with it’.
Ryder comes across as a sucker who lets everyone talk him into anything, breaks appointments and promises all the time, never even remembers appointments… is this great story writing or portrayal of ultimate incompetence? And since the story is told in the first person from Ryder’s viewpoint, it looks like this highly incompetent person is surgically attached to you, and you are unable to escape and forced to watch him climb to greater heights of incompetence.
Believe it or not: It just gets worse. He apparently forgot that his own aged parents were coming to the town and he was supposed to meet them! It is like introducing random stuff in the story by the narrator, Ryder, and then saying that it slipped his mind. First he forgets the purpose of the visit, then he forgets who his wife and son are, third he does not recognize his father in law. Fourth he does not recognize the way to the house of his wife, fifth, he forgets to make a speech, sixth, he forgets his parents are expecting to meet him, seventh, he forgot he accepted an invitation from the dissenters! For God’s sake… a five year old child could manage his or her affairs better.
Then he is hijacked (no, wait, another previous commitment that Ryder forgot!) by the discredited musician Christoff and he, Christoff, in turn makes a fool of himself. Weird town, populated fully by imbeciles.
When at one point Mr Ryder, the narrator, leans dangerously from a balcony high up, you kind of are hoping he will fall so that he can stop narrating!
He continues to make a mess of everything, even his own introduction by a childhood friend to two snobbish women. Why? He was so worn out and did not like how his face looked in the mirror that he was struck speechless – unable to say ‘Hi I am Mr Ryder”
He goes blundering on, insulting his wife and kids on the only day they wanted with him, raging on other guests in a dinner he attended and so on.
More rubbish about a Mrs Collins and Mr Blosky – the blather continues. Descriptions about nothing in particular. Cannot feel empathy with anyone. Everyone behaves like an idiot. Then we see the first principles of first person narration violated. Mr Ryder tells the story but at least twice, when Mr Brodsky and Ms Collins walk away for a quiet walk in the park, we know what they spoke. Then, when Brodsky is waiting surreptitiously outside as Mr Ryder plays the piano, he seems to know all the thoughts of Brodsky just by listening to some digging like sounds emanating from the outside. Oh, well; at this point, you stop being surprised by anything.
You might as well hear the rest.
He makes a fool of himself at a funeral to which he was uninvited. He bumbles on…Given all this evidence, I expected him to bungle his primary purpose of piano recital in a huge conference and of course he did not disappoint.
As if it is not enough, people keep repeating their sentences at least ten times as if talking to another idiot who cannot understand what they are saying the first time. Where does it occur you ask? Throughout the book, everywhere with everyone!
To cap it all off, Mr Brodsky reveals that he has lost his leg long ago and – get this – he does not remember how or when because it was “such a long time ago”. Can you believe this crap?
At the end Brodsky goofs up, but the hotel-keeper’s own son redeems himself, even though the parents leave before he can even start, thinking he will be no good.
Then the book really gets into surreal crap (as if everything so far was not surreal). Ending is aweful. If it is meant as a reference to the state of the world or telling a story through a main character who does not see it at all but you infer the hidden meaning of everything through the reaction of others, I don’t get it at all.
Who can understand a man who, when his father in law is dead, thinks of piling his plate with food and eating merrily, with “steadily improving spirits”?
All in all, a disaster of a book – Let us say 1/10
– – Krishna