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Narratives of the European BorderNowhere, in Particular: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and Central Europe

Narratives of the European Border: Nowhere, in Particular: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and... [The trajectory of Kazuo Ishiguro’s earlier work and the critical response to it accounts for the deliberateness with which his fourth novel is set nowhere — in a mysteriously unnamed and unnamable European city. After the reception of his first two ‘Japanese’ novels, Ishiguro expressed his annoyance with a certain type of misreading which took their value to be the insider’s view they gave of post-war Japanese life, as if the author were a ‘mediator to Japanese culture’.1 Ishiguro said, ‘I am not essentially concerned with a realist purpose in writing. I just invent a Japan which serves my needs’. That there was something deliberately ‘inauthentic’, in realist terms, about his recreation of Japanese life — that it was imagined rather than reported — should have been clearer from the start. In his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, the hinges of realism are unfastened in a well-known crux.2 The negotiation between realist and fabulist codes, so stark in The Unconsoled, has been a consistent preoccupation from the start of Ishiguro’s career.3] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Narratives of the European BorderNowhere, in Particular: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled and Central Europe

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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2007
ISBN
978-1-349-54129-4
Pages
156 –178
DOI
10.1057/9780230287860_7
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[The trajectory of Kazuo Ishiguro’s earlier work and the critical response to it accounts for the deliberateness with which his fourth novel is set nowhere — in a mysteriously unnamed and unnamable European city. After the reception of his first two ‘Japanese’ novels, Ishiguro expressed his annoyance with a certain type of misreading which took their value to be the insider’s view they gave of post-war Japanese life, as if the author were a ‘mediator to Japanese culture’.1 Ishiguro said, ‘I am not essentially concerned with a realist purpose in writing. I just invent a Japan which serves my needs’. That there was something deliberately ‘inauthentic’, in realist terms, about his recreation of Japanese life — that it was imagined rather than reported — should have been clearer from the start. In his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, the hinges of realism are unfastened in a well-known crux.2 The negotiation between realist and fabulist codes, so stark in The Unconsoled, has been a consistent preoccupation from the start of Ishiguro’s career.3]

Published: Mar 5, 2015

Keywords: Housing Estate; Border City; Concert Hall; Country House; Social Shape

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