The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Back in 2009 this was the first book I read by Ishiguro, which I followed up with Never Let Me Go later that year. At the time, I was impressed that he could tell two such different stories and yet have the sense of regret and sorrow. The same applied to his fantasy novel, The Buried Giant which I read around the time it was published. His approach remained the same regardless of the genre he was working in. More recently, I read his first two novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, both of which are excellent. Rereading this in the context of the first two, I like it even more than I did a decade ago. 

Ishiguro says he sees this as a rewrite of An Artist of the Floating World, and reading the two in quick succession really highlights the themes of coming to terms with your obsolescence as generations change and a sense of wasting one's life. More than that, both are about characters coming to terms with their own culpability in the evils of their times, Ojo for abandoning his art in favor of war propaganda and Stevens for loyally serving Lord Darlington despite the latter's nazi sympathies. I really appreciate this. Too often it's easy to point out the moral failings of others, but harder to come to terms with your own failings. I certainly have this tendency. Social media exaggerates this. I love that these books force readers to consider their own small place in the world while simultaneously not letting them off the hook for their own part in societal ills. It's subtle, but incredibly effective.

And on top of all that, it's a great unrequited love story and often very funny. Stevens' dithering about how well he is bantering had me audibly laughing in a room by myself. And, as in all the other books I've read by him, Ishiguro is masterful at having characters talk around what they mean while making it clear to the reader what is actually happening. I know that after these first three books he played around more with various genres, so I'm really looking forward to more of his work. Next up is (if I've been properly informed), his take on the crime novel, When We Were Orphans, though I will eventually read all of them.

Canon Worthy

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan

I remember liking A Visit From the Goon Squad both in terms of story and structure, but I don't remember the particulars well, but I'll be revisiting it later this year, I'm sure, after reading The Keep and Manhattan Beach, The latter two are as different from each other as from Goon Squad, and both great. I knew from a couple of online friends that this was crime adjacent, but, despite that heads up but I wasn't quite prepared for the genre shift. There are several writers I love that never do exactly the same thing twice. I'm thinking of Jeff Vandermeer and Jonathan Lethem in particular, (and Ishiguro in genre if not in mood) but I have to add Egan to that category.

This is a genre mashup of the highest order. It's a noirish gangster story. It's a life during wartime historical novel. It's almost, but not quite a romance. It's woman making her way through a male dominated world novel. It's an underwater adventure novel (briefly). And all of these are pulled off. 

The novel opens with Anna Kerrigan, then 12, visiting a gangster with her father. Her father is a go between for gangsters, politicians and union bosses. The exact nature of his involvement is initially unclear. The book jumps forward to Anna's late teens/early twenties, during WWII. Her father has disappeared years earlier. She was then working in a factory making battleship parts and longing to learn to dive. She runs into the gangster again. I won't give any other plot points, but the novel plays out perfectly. 

Overall this was a great historical novel that belongs on the same shelf at Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay, Carter Beats the Devil or Underworld. 

Highly Recommended/Canon Worthy

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

The adjective brave gets thrown around too freely in descriptions of novels, so I try not to use it. That said, Isabel Allende published The House of the Spirits less than a decade into the Pinochet regime. Considering that the final quarter or fifth of this book is a fictionalization of that regime's brutal rise to power, she clears the bravery bar by some distance. All fiction comes from a point of view, even if that point of view is neutral. Still, I don't care for work that gets too didactic, even if I agree with the bulk of the sermon. But I do love generational fantasy novels, and this fits the bill. 

The language (at least in translation) is excellent. I love that she pokes fun at Garcia Marquez and 100 Years of Solitude by pointing out (multiple times) that naming every generation of a family the same thing is needlessly confusing. I love that even though there is an evil businessman, and Esteban Trueba is truly an evil business man, that Allede doesn't A) pretend he's not evil and B) pretend he's not a person. This archetype can get tiresome but she makes him very real. I love the little details like the fact that he's a conservative ideologue who can't distinguish between the liberals, the socialists and the revolutionaries, which is incredibly true to life. And in the end, even he has to admit that military regime he helped install is a terrible thing.

And by giving three generations of women, Clara, Blanca and Alba tell the story Allende manages to show bot the brutality of the patrician class there and a sense of some of what was lost when the junta took over. But the novel is also celebratory and funny at times. This generational and fantastical approach is the main thing that keeps the ending from being didactic, but it also makes the condemnation of the Pinochet regime far more powerful giving a long context. That generational style of storytelling is powerful. 

This is, to be sure, an incredibly tough read, especially in the final act. But it is an incredible novel. I will be reading it again, I'm sure and I'll likely track down more of her work.

Canon Worthy

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

I've been on a Kazuo Ishiguro kick recently spurred by the release of his new, and very good, science fiction novel, Klara and the Sun. I recently recommended his debut novel, A Pale View of Hills, which I've only come to like more on further reflection. An Artist of The Floating World was Ishiguro's follow up to that, and it is an excellent one.

Ishiguro's mastery of subtlety is well on display here. Again there is an unreliable narrator. Again the characters are often talking around what they mean in heartbreaking ways. The narrator, Masuji Ono, is an an old artist in post-WWII Japan. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that he is reckoning with his actions during the war, specifically his move from a place among bohemian artists to essentially pumping out war propaganda. I have read books that talk about regret and reckoning with one's own complicity in the crimes of the times, and I have read books in which characters are reckoning with their lack of impact, but I have rarely read books that sit in the paradox of both at the same time. It's a powerful tension.

As in Pale View of Hills, the war looms in the background of the book. Like the previous novel, there are themes of authenticity and wondering about how to continue living that are not far off from the Existentialists. With the war came American influence, both in the dropping of the bomb and in the subsequent western influence on Japan. In both of Ishiguro's first two novels, the struggle between those American influences and Japanese culture, and the changing mores of the younger generation drive a lot of character motivation. 

Another meditative, masterful novel. I expect I'll eventually read all of Ishiguro's books. Next up is a reread of The Remains of the Day for the first time in around a decade. Ishiguro saw that novel, one of his most famous, as a rewrite of this one in a British context. I look forward to returning to it with that in mind.

Highly recommended (though with reflection and a reread it could go up to Canon Worthy)

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

The interview Ishiguro did for this book with Neil Gaiman pushed me to read more of his work. Last week I read (and loved) A Pale View of Hills, his debut novel. After further reflection and listening to a couple episodes of The Gene Wolfe Literary Podcast where they discuss it, I like it even more than I did at first. This one, Ishiguro's latest, will take a similar amount of time to fully process, but I do have initial thoughts.

It is a near future science fiction novel narrated by an AF or Artificial Friend, the Klara of the title. I love the science fictional tool of a narrator whose vocabulary/experience is limited and so descriptions of mundane things become otherworldly. Gene Wolfe is masterful at this, as is Ishiguro here. These AFs are essentially AIs embedded in robot dolls that are able to move and provide a level of companionship for children as they grow. Klara has feelings and is quite perceptive. The first chapter takes place in her store, but eventually she is purchased by a family for a girl named Josie, who is quite ill. I don't want to get into the plot mechanics too much so as to avoid spoilers, so I won't summarize further.

As with A Pale View of Hills, so much of this novel's meaning lies in the subtext. The limited vocabulary of the protagonist makes for a different type of unreliable narrator. Honestly, I'm going to need a reread to fully understand her visual perception as described. But as the novel progresses a world is revealed in which CRISPR-like gene manipulation has created a separate class of people who have genetic advantages. Between the advances in AI and the "Lifted" people, two new prejudices have been folded into an already existing xenophobia. There are hints that one character has joined an alt-right enclave that is as opposed to non-white people coming into their space as they are about the genetic and AI advances. It's very subtle, though. 

The main narrative is, unsurprisingly for Ishiguro, one of deep grief. The mother's grief over her daughter who has died, and around the illness of her remaining daughter. And Klara herself, AI, though she is, reveals this elliptically. One of the most haunting aspects of the book is the solar powered Klara's invention of a sun centered religion of sorts. Her prayers to the Sun on behalf of Josie are heartbreaking. Most AI narratives are asking questions about what makes us human, but Ishiguro's use of religion as a marker is brilliant. As is planned obsolescence as a stand in for death.

After hearing him discuss this novel with Gaiman, I got the sense that I might be diving in and reading all his books. Reading this and Pale View of the Hills only confirmed it. I'm reading An Artist of the Floating World, his second novel, now. More to come, I'm sure.

Highly Recommended

Wild Seed by Octavia Butler (2021 Reread)

Not much to add this time through (2021 annual reread), except that, even though I'm an easy cry, this is an incredibly moving book. Like I said two years ago; beautiful and brutal.

2020 update- Wild Seed is one of my annual rereads and when I first thought of building this blog around my personal canon, this was one of the books automatically in. I’ve lightly edited and pasted my 2019 review below. It sums up a lot of my feelings about the book well.

I do want to add that on this reread I really wrestled with the power dynamic between Doro and Ayanwu. Theirs is on the most defining level a master slave relationship. It is troubling, then, when Butler gets as close to a “happy ending” as that dynamic, and the dystopia that is the endpoint of events set in motion in the book, can possibly allow. Over and over in her books, Butler is incredibly insightful into the psychology of slavery, of being on the powerless end of the relationship. This is true of all her books, but it is hard to see the ending as anything other than a defeat. It is no less powerful a book for that.

As I said last year, I cannot recommend this highly enough.

Annual Reread  2020 1/8

Rereads, Library Books, Etc 2020 3/35

My 2019 Review Lightly Edited:

I’ll start by saying Wild Seed is one of my favorite books; I reread it once a year. It’s the first Butler book I read, and it is not a bad place to start. Certainly if I thought I could only convince someone to read one Butler book, it would be this one.

It is the first book of Butler's Patternmaster series chronologically. It was written after the later books in the series, though. It could be read as a standalone. But the brilliance of what she pulled off here can only be fully grasped in the context of the later books. Her first published novel, Patternmaster, was a far future dystopia in which three groups of people existed: a web (pattern) of connected psychics controlled by the strongest of those (the Patternmaster), mutes (regular humans with no psychic ability), and Clayarks (centaurish bearers of a disease that will turn mutes or psychics into Clayarks). It is easily the weakest of the series. That’s not to say it’s not good. It is. In the prequels, though, she reverse engineered what it would have taken to get to that dystopia and those books are ingenious. Each is a different subgenre. Mind of My Mind establishes the origin of the pattern in 1980’s California. It’s a near future scifi with some elements of a mainstream approach to character. It’s very good. Clay’s Ark, which talks about how the Clayark virus hit earth combines pandemic disease from outer space thriller and home invasion horror against a sort of Mad Max background. It’s great. She always plays fair and doesn’t change anything implied by Patternmaster. Each book ends with a bittersweet bleak ending. But the knowledge of what they are setting up gives them a harder edge than they would have in isolation.

Then came Wild Seed, the best of the series. It reads like a literary fantasy novel beginning in Africa and travelling to antebellum slave-holding America. It feels like folklore, like myth with elements of superhero comics and slave narratives. By this point Butler’s prose was flawless. She was really in control of her themes of slavery, gender and the power dynamics that come from those. But she is never didactic here (the main flaw of her more famous Parable of the Sower, in my mind). These themes all emerge from the story. That story pits two long lived people against each other in a variety of capacities. The dominant one is master/slave. The backdrop of that power struggle is pure scifi; a centuries long genetics experiment.

Anyanwu is 300 years old at the beginning of the story. She’s a shapechanger and can heal herself. She presents as an old woman to reduce the scrutiny and fear of her people, who revere her as a healer and fear her as a witch. Doro is unbelievably ancient. When he dies he jumps to the nearest body and lives through them. Over the centuries, he has cultivated people who have abilities trying to create a species of psychics; he has bred them like cattle, and unsurprisingly is drawn into the slave trade. He is originally from Africa, but is making America the center of his efforts. He manages to coerce Anyanwu into his fold; she is the only person he’s discovered over the years who has the potential to be as long-lived as he. He threatens, cajoles, seduces. He sees people as valuable seed, values them for their potential to forward his genetic goals and kills them when they rebel or go crazy. She sees them as people, values them as family and attempts to heal them. She is “wild seed.” Her genetic mutations happened outside of his control.

Their long struggle forms the narrative of the novel, and it is a great one. I’ve only got a couple more Butler novels before I’ve read them all. She is among my favorite writers, and to my mind, this is her greatest book. Beautiful and brutal. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Canon.

The Keep by Jennifer Egan

I read Egan’s Pulitzer Prize winning A Visit From the Goon Squad back in 2011. I don’t remember it well, though I intend to revisit it soon. I love books that are oddly structured or that consist of stories that can stand on their own but when put together add up to more. I usually think of such story suites as a science fiction trope, but given books like Winesburg Ohio, Dubliners or Nazi Literature in the Americas (or on a larger scale 2666) there’s a lot of precedent for it in mainstream fiction as well. What I do remember about Goon Squad was that it worked wonderfully as a connected sequence. That metafictional impulse is on display in The Keep as well, and I’m glad that I’ve finally returned to Egan’s work.

The story begins as a pastiche of a gothic family melodrama/horror story. And it works incredibly well as that. For a while there were tics about the narrative voice that bugged me, but eventually I realized what was happening and came to love it. The gothic tale is being written by a prisoner, named Ray, who is in a prison writing group. If this were set in an MFA workshop, I think I would have rolled my eyes at that point, but the fact that the narrator is in a group of people at least one of whom is a legitimate threat to his safety adds stakes that make that part of the story compelling. The final section is narrated by the woman who is leading the workshop in the prison. 

Gene Wolfe once said something to the effect that the narrative voice should match that of the story, and Egan did that masterfully here. You believe that Ray wrote both the gothic novel and the prison one. There was a bit in there about hatred of adverbs that brought Elmore Leonard to mind, though the writing style isn’t as pared down as his. I read in a review (maybe on themillions.com?) that one reviewer appreciated the way Egan was able to bring an emotional weight to metafiction that is often lost in the ironic distance a writer risks in the use of such techniques. I couldn’t agree more (though I think more writers than just Egan and Vollmann can pull this off, though they certainly do. I suspect the reviewer hadn’t read genre masters like Jeff Vandermeer or Caitlin Kiernan etc who accomplish that feat regularly). This was metafiction as compelling page turner with emotional weight. For all the textual tricks it never disappears into too-clever-by-half navel gazing. It’s also smart/prescient (set in a time of blackberries, not smartphones and radar dishes not 5G networks) about how people get addicted to their constant connection with an illusory digital world. The importance of silence, imagination and how the latter is hard to foster without the other is a major theme. 

This is an excellent book and I look forward to reading more by her and to that revisit of Goon Squad.

Highly Recommended (though a reread could bump it up to Canon Worthy)