/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18144878]

I was not impressed by this. Written by a Nobel laureate and it reads like a YA novel.

[Anonymous No.18144885]

>>18144878
He's too anglicized to say anything interesting.

[Anonymous No.18144906]

>>18144878
I agree with you but The Remains of he Day and The Unconsoled are both masterworks of different style. The Buried Giant was also unique but not an enjoyable read

[Anonymous No.18145030]

>>18144878
>Written by a Nobel laureate and it reads like a YA novel.
That's because it essentially is a YA novel. That said it can be a useful gateway to people who usually read YA or genre fiction to start tackling some more mature themes (the inevitability of mortality, the search for meaning, etc).

As >>18144906 says, Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled are tremendously good. I would also put "Artist of the Floating World" up there too (perhaps not quite so high, but close).

[Anonymous No.18145237]

>>18145030
Just about to finish artist floating world. It’s a pleasant read but unless the last 10 pages make me nut it isn’t his best. How was orphans? They have that at my library too

[Anonymous No.18145318]

>>18145237
Artist is I think Ishiguro's most subtle work. It doesn't hit nearly as hard as any of his others, but at the same time I think it's a bit more realistic/true to life in that way. Most of us who practice some form of self deception (i.e. probably most of us) never come to any great realization about it.

Orphans is comfy but not great and is on the whole something of a misfire. The setting is super comfy, but beyond that I would say it's skippable.

[Anonymous No.18145838]

>>18144906
I don't understand the hype around Remains. I read it recently, I enjoyed it very much, but I don't see anything more than a decent story about a master-servant relationship in the British tradition. In interviews, Ishiguro says "we r all butlers." Is that it? How on earth is that Nobel Prize worthy?

[Anonymous No.18145897]

Anyone here read his newest yet? I thought it was alright but there were definitely some YA-esque parts I wasn't so fond of. I guess if I didn't like that, I wouldn't like >>18144878 either?

[Anonymous No.18145898]

i recently reread remains of the day and it's great, but i don't think it's better than never let me go, or more subtle or anything. it's actually all pretty blunt, it's very obvious with the whole stevens is lying to himself, look how proud he is about how he handled that situation when we understand how damaged he is and how he's putting some snooty dude's minor foot ailment over his father's death etc. which isn't to say that it's not wonderful because it is.

but i think that never let me go is even better and more subtle and well done in the way it handles the ideas of wasted lives, self-deceiving romanticising of the past, duty vs self fulfillment etc. to me it's a refinement of the thing, not a kids version of it. i think people here (and nowhere else that i've seen) just write it off and like the old butler one more because the old butler one is about an old butler and never let me go is about teenagers

[Anonymous No.18145956]

>>18145838
it's less explicitly about master-servant relationship and more about how much stevens is willing to put himself through for the sake of his ideals. he sacrifices being with his father, denying history, and denying his own emotions to abide by his own image of "dignity." it's a deeply emotional story

[Anonymous No.18145991]

>>18145897
I read it and thought it was wonderful, and also something of a departure in that it was basically a very straight-forward story. No self-deception and no big mystery, just a family and a robot helper and the AI robot's thoughts. Just people learning how to be decent to other people. Also it was the first time that Ishiguro tackled religion, and I was a bit surprised (and chuffed) at how he did so and the impact it had on the events of the story.

The prose is straightforward and somewhat banal, but that's also what you get with Ishiguro's narrators.

[Anonymous No.18146000]

>>18145897
i liked it but thought it was a bit of a mess. lots of very nice ideas and evocative scenes. i especially liked the way she saw in boxes and the bit where she went to the barn to meet the sun

[Anonymous No.18146040]

>>18145838
Recent trends in the Nobel are in favor of dudes who came at the same theme from multiple angles across their career - Modiano, Handke, Munro espeically. I think they like Ishiguro because you can see him doing repression and regret from different positions. I also reckon in Remains and Artist, and to an extent Never Let Me Go there's this question of the moral value of loyalty and self-denial when it turns out that e.g. your master has decided that this Hitler guy maybe isn't so crazy after all. That seems to me a fundamental social question - can you really be a good servant to a bad master?

[Anonymous No.18146174]

>>18146040
I think my personal problem is the way he uses WW2 and Hitler as the ultimate moral test. In the liberal post-war worldview, Hitler and Nazism was the worst thing that ever happened, and no sane human could ever have possibly thought that he was a good man, but we know that in reality, it simply wasn't like that. I find Nazism as poor of an ideology as a find the liberal world we live in now, for various reasons. Lord Darlington is still a good master, aside from one somewhat short-sighted incident with the two Jewish girls, which he quickly regrets. In any case, he's a fine master to the protagonist.

Personally, the book would have had infinitely more impact if Darlington had committed some kind of objectively repulsive moral misdeed, and THEN Stevens had attempted to remain loyal. I've actually worked in household service before, and I place a massive amount of importance on loyalty. I think Stevens was correct to remain as he did, at least in the political sense. (His father and Miss Kenting are different matters). If the master of the house I was working for had some unorthodox political opinions, even extreme ones, I wouldn't care.

[Anonymous No.18146246]

>>18146174
>the book would have had infinitely more impact if Darlington had committed some kind of objectively repulsive moral misdeed, and THEN Stevens had attempted to remain loyal.
Darlington did this several times - the ones that immediately jump to mind is him ordering Stevens to fire the jewish maid, and the time when he and his group brought Stevens in just to poke at his ignorance and inability to answer political questions.

Honestly I don't think Ishiguro really even needs Darlington to be sympathetic towards Nazis for the book to work; Stevens' life was a wasted life because ultimately he didn't live for himself, and his life would have been just as wasted if he had spent his time in service to someone with the 'right' politics. Darlington being a Nazi sympathizer adds some color, and gives Stevens the opportunity to talk about how he hadn't even made his own mistakes, only Darlington's (and therefore lacking any real dignity of his own), but everything about Stevens' sacrifices (his relationship with his father, his relationship with Ms Kenton) works just as well regardless of who he's working for.

The real gut-punch of the book comes just after Stevens realizes that he wasted his life, when he immediately goes back to trying to figure out how to better please his new American employer ('I know, I'll get good at bantering!') instead of figuring out what he should do *for himself* with his remaining days. It's an epiphany that is wasted on Stevens because of the force of habit he's so thoroughly ingrained into himself.

[Anonymous No.18146269]

>>18146174
Mmm, but I think the way he writes about Nazi-ism as a moral test is really in line with what you say - it's clear that Darlington is benevolent and doing his best - which is more sympathy for the Chamberlain position than you would get from a lot of other writers. Accordingly, showing loyalty to a good man feels right, but all the butler's done is spoil his own life for the sake of what's at best a dead end.

The scenario you describe is what I think of as the de Maupassant approach to morality in fiction. Ishiguro's game is more about dissatisfying compromise than life-shattering irony, which obviously prevents catharsis-type effects on the reader, but I'd argue is a more accurate reflection of life.

(On a sideline, in the book before the Japanese war record is the moral test, and he came back to that later, so it's not all Hitler-mining. As for WW2 as recurrent dramatic centrepoint, I just reckon that's how large scale war plays out in any society's art.)

[Anonymous No.18146291]

>>18145991
Am I the only one who thought the ending was sad? I won't openly discuss it to avoid spoilers but it just feels unfair. I suppose it depends on if you feel that an AFs consciousness is equal to ours. If you feel they're just a tool then it wouldn't be sad. To make conscious beings and discard them like a phone when a new one is released seems extremely grim to me.

[Anonymous No.18146296]

>>18146246
I'm tempted to wonder whether Stevens' life would have been any better if he had "lived for himself" though. I truly believe that many people are happier in a fixed hierarchy, where a purpose and the positive impact one has is eminently visible. Stevens would seem to be one such of these people.
You might be right, perhaps he did indeed waste his life (I don't argue that he should have definitely lived more for himself, the levels he takes it to are absurd) but I feel more sympathetic to the hierarchy of loyalty and service than I think Ishiguro would want me to be.

[Anonymous No.18146454]

>>18146291
I definitely found it sad, especially considering the reason why Klara was bought in the first place.

[Anonymous No.18146478]

>>18146291
For me, the point of the book was that the best thing we can do is to be kind to one another, and to help one another, whether we're AIs or human. I think Klara was content with that. Certainly you could read some additional meaning into the ending about how we treat so many things as disposable, but I think that Klara ultimately felt that she had fulfilled her life's work, and that seems like a decent place to be.


>>18146296
Oh, you may well be right that a life in a fixed position of some hierarchy may be preferable to one that isn't, but like the other anon said the focus (at least for me) seemed to be more on the sacrifices that Stevens made in pursuit of his definition of dignity than it was about loyalty or a life in service being desirable or not.

[Anonymous No.18146484]

>>18144878
I was really unimpressed by the Remains of day so im not even gonna bother. Very uninteresting writer.

[Anonymous No.18147757]

>>18146454
That was my feeling as well. But as >>18146478 said she did fulfil her purpose. I suppose I'm ambivalent. While the AFs had emotional intelligence to an extent I'm not sure she could objectively reflect on her existence. It's all coloured by the programming that makes her think almost like a child. Honestly though I was really impressed by the book. Particularly what seemed to me as paradoxical in the existence of a religious robot.

[Anonymous No.18148546]

bump

[Anonymous No.18148616]

>>18144878
Remains of the Day is the only book I’ve read by Ishiguro and it was well worth it. It wasn’t YA at all and very melancholic with a good message

[Anonymous No.18148637]

>>18144878
I read one page out of one of his books and it was full of commonplace expressions. Not a single striking sentence, metaphor or instance of word music.
Canned literature. Mass product for lazy readers who read for the plot.

[Anonymous No.18148733]

>>18147757
That's true. I certainly find it a happier ending to have her where she is, content that she fulfilled her mission, rather than following her initial intended path, though I know she would have done her duty to the best of her ability in that, too.

Still, it does hurt a bit to know that she was important enough for her family to go so far conceptually with plans for her, but in the end she became in effect another piece of outdated technology to them. The book was uneven at times but the parts that focused on Klara's perspective, especially her praying to the sun in McBain's barn, were genuinely beautiful.

[Anonymous No.18148934]

>>18148733
I agree with most of your points but I didn't find it uneven as a book. I think as you can see throughout this thread, in no way accusing you of this, people seem to think writing has to be overly descriptive to be worthwhile in literary terms. Klara for me was like a late stage Delillo book, you get out of the book as much as you read into it thematically. Those reading for prose and plot will come away with hardly anything but if you think of what this book is pointing towards you'll have discussions like you or I.

Personally I'm a more pessimistic person so that final bit of Klara left in that park or whatever it was, it was awful. To create this pure mind and relegate it to consciousness but leave it trapped seems wrong to me. I'm not a luddite, I think this kind of technology is fairly inevitable but I wonder if the people developing that tech should stop and ask if they should rather than could. It's not clear cut and I honestly prefer when a novel ends that way. Her reverence of the sun and her plan is still fascinating to me. I honestly don't know what to think of it. Beautiful but sad as he really communicates the ignorance needed for such a belief. She doesn't know what the horizon is. She's such a sophisticated piece of technology but genuinely think the sun leaves every day. It's so odd.

[Anonymous No.18149015]

>>18148637
You're missing the forest for the trees, anon. A sentence or page of Ishiguro is unlikely to be memorable (James Woods is right when he talks about the punishing blandness of Ishiguro's prose); but put into the context of a whole work it often ends up being necessary and sometimes revelatory.

[Anonymous No.18149360]

>>18148934
>Her reverence of the sun and her plan is still fascinating to me. I honestly don't know what to think of it. Beautiful but sad as he really communicates the ignorance needed for such a belief
What do you make of Josie's recovery after the sun broke through the storm and shone on her? The old saying goes that you can't argue with results. Obviously that's pretty on-the-nose, but for all of Klara's ignorance I don't think we can definitively say that her theology/theodicy is wrong.

[Anonymous No.18149878]

>>18145897
If he (as has been said) merely writes the same novel over and over, then this is the best version so far.

[Anonymous No.18150045]

>>18148637
>I read one page out of one of his books

> product for lazy readers

[Anonymous No.18151129]

>>18149360
Personally from what they said of lifted kids they either make it through that rough patch or die. While I appreciated what Klara did, I think Josie pulled through of her own accord. Still regardless of whether or not Klara changed the outcome the fact she cared at all is more important to me. Did Klara even choose to love her or is that all programming? Do we choose to love or is that biological programming? The more I think it over I'm just left with more questions.

[Anonymous No.18152751]

>>18146174
>If the master of the house I was working for had some unorthodox political opinions, even extreme ones, I wouldn't care.
Then you are of weak moral constitution.

[Anonymous No.18152798]

>>18144878
Remains of the day is his better work.

[Anonymous No.18153120]

>>18152751
No they would want to keep their job retard. You'd do the same when you're not posturing on the internet.

[Anonymous No.18154429]

>>18144878
>it reads like a YA novel
It literally is a ya novel