KAZUO ISHIGURO was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and moved to Britain at the age of 5. He is the author of 6 novels: A Pale View of Hills (1982, Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize), An Artist of the Floating World (1986, Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Premio Scanno, shortlisted for the Booker Prize), The Remains of the Day (1989, winner of the Booker Prize), The Unconsoled (1995, winner of the Cheltenham Prize), When We Were Orphans (2000, shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and Never Let Me Go (2005, Corine Internationaler Buchpreis, Serono Literary Prize, Casino de Santiago European Novel Award, shortlisted for the Booker Prize). Nocturnes (2009), his connected stories collection, was awarded the Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa International Literary Prize. In 1995 Ishiguro received an OBE for Services to Literature and in 1998 the French decoration of Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
"If forced at knife-point to choose my favourite Ishiguro novel,
I'd opt for The Buried Giant. It uses the tropes of fantasy to set
up a smoke-screen which the book then, by twists and turns,
dispels. This reveal gives the book a shadow-plot, and layers of
mystery . . . An ideas-enabler, a metaphor-animator."
--David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks
"Completely astonishing. I can't think of another writer who keeps
finding such new and radically unexpected ways of exploring--and
deepening--his lifelong concerns. Which is a way of saying that I
can't think of another writer who's so unswervingly serious, as
well as impeccable, stripping away every distraction to get to the
core of things, as a Beckett might, and attaining in the end an
almost unbearable intensity of emotional directness."
--Pico Iyer, author of The Art of Stillness and The Lady and the
Monk "The Buried Giant does what important books do: It remains in
the mind long after it has been read, refusing to leave, forcing
one to turn it over and over . . . Ishiguro is not afraid to tackle
huge, personal themes, nor to use myths, history and the fantastic
as the tools to do it. The Buried Giant is an exceptional
novel."
--Neil Gaiman, The New York Times Book Review
"Ishiguro is a brilliant novelist, a born novelist. . . . Inside
his work, you feel it, that thrilling thing: a writer doing
something actually different, something actually new. . . . [The
Buried Giant] creates an entire field of unspoken meaning,
illuminating the kind of elusive truths about love, time, death and
memory that other novelists have to strain even to brush. . . .
That's the magic of true art. . . . When one day we send some
unmanned capsule into the nameless depths of space to give and
account of ourselves, it's [Ishiguro's] books I would include on
our behalf."
--Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune "Ishiguro is one of Britain's best
living novelists . . . Magnificent and heartbreaking . . . Of all
writers working in the early 21st century, he will turn out to be
the one who persisted--who went on asking questions about what
binds people to one another; who said something profound about
history, and something unsentimental about love."
--Gaby Wood, The Telegraph (London) "The weirdest, riskiest and
most ambitious thing he's published in his celebrated 33-year
career."
--Alexandra Alter, The New York Times
"Ishiguro works this fantastical material with the tools of a
master realist. . . . [He] makes us feel its sheer grotesque
monstrosity with a force and freshness that have been leached away
by legions of computer-generated orcs. . . . He keeps a straight
face, but Ishiguro has fun with the swords and sorcery: he's a
lifelong fan of samurai manga and westerns, and some of the action
has the feel of a classic showdown scored by Ennio Morricone."
--Lev Grossman, Time magazine "Ishiguro is in full genre-occupying
mode here, settling an imaginative region, capturing its tropes and
conditions, and establishing within it his own peculiar
sovereignty. . . . For all that The Buried Giant clothes itself in
the armor of chivalric romance and fantasy, it is also subtly using
these formal structures to subvert from within the kinds of
national mythologies that are so often built around them. . . .
Devastating . . . as emotionally ruinous an ending as any I've read
in a very long time, and it made me circle back to the opening
pages, to re-enter the strange mist of this sad and remarkable
book."
--Mark O'Connell, Slate "[The Buried Giant is] a profound
examination of memory and guilt, of the way we recall past trauma
en masse. It is also an extraordinarily atmospheric and
compulsively readable tale, to be devoured in a single gulp. The
Buried Giant is Game of Thrones with a conscience, The Sword in the
Stone for the age of the trauma industry, a beautiful,
heartbreaking book about the duty to remember and the urge to
forget."
--Alex Preston, The Guardian (London) "Lifetimes of myth, allegory,
and epic discoveries are contained within . . . In this as with
Ishiguro's previous fiction, the mesmerizing prose ensures that the
pages will turn swiftly. Without a doubt, Giant is Ishiguro's most
complex book thus far, managing to combine elements of Edenic epic,
Roman myth, Arthurian quest, Tolkien fantasy, philosophical
ruminations, religious dialectics, literary experimentation, and
more to create an exquisitely rendered, albeit disturbing love
story set against the unresolved threat of war--past and future
both. . . . Ishiguro's 10-year investment comes to eloquent
fruition here. The result is a provocative, multilayered
mosaic."
--Terry Hong, The Christian Science Monitor "Ishiguro is a master
of the uncanny. . . . Few write about the mysteries of the human
experience with such grace as Ishiguro, and his prodigious gifts
are evident throughout the novel. . . . The Buried Giant transcends
the boundaries of a conventional fantasy novel. At its core, it is
a tender story about marriage, memory and forgiveness, the tale of
an elderly couple who set off to find a half-remembered son. And
the questions that emerge in the course of their journey--as they
contend with pixies and Saxon warriors, devious boatmen and
duplicitous monks, as they begin to recall a past they might be
better off forgetting--cut to the heart of the life's mystery."
--Michael David Lukas, San Francisco Chronicle
"A spectacular, rousing departure from anything Ishiguro has ever
written, and yet a classic Ishiguro story . . . The Buried Giant
has the clear ring of legend, as graceful, original and humane as
anything Ishiguro has written. . . . All the same, I'll wager you
won't soon forget this book after turning its last pages. The
close, in particular, will haunt."
--Marie Arana, The Washington Post "Yet for all its flights of
fantasy and supernatural happenings . . . The Buried Giant is
absolutely characteristic, moving and unsettling, in the way of all
Ishiguro's fiction. . . . A novel of imaginative daring that, in
its subtleties of tone, mood and reflection, could be the work of
no other writer. . . . In the manner of Cormac McCarthy's The Road,
Ishiguro has created a fantastical alternate reality in which, in
spite of the extremity of its setting and because of its integrity
and emotional truth, you believe unhesitatingly. . . . Even after
you have finished the book, many days later, you find you can't
stop thinking about it."
--Jason Cowley, Financial Times "Mr. Ishiguro's work is never
simple. He has always been a trickster, a shape-changer,
courageously exploring the novel's form, and this new book is no
exception. His language is plain and clear. But the stories he
tells with his clean words are powerful and disturbing. . . . No
doubt this book will divide opinion powerfully: but it provokes
strong emotions--and lingers long in the mind."
--The Economist "The story sweeps us in not through the imagination
of its monsters and magic mists, but by a prose style so
distinctive that everything it touches, however airy . . . becomes
earthly, solid, with an emotional purchase usually reserved for the
'real.' . . . This is a novel that does not answer every question
it raises about war, love, memory; but it doesn't have to. It takes
us on a journey that is as deep as it is mesmerizing, ogres an'
all."
--Arifa Akbar, The Independent (London) "Hallucinatory . . . subtle
and complex . . . At the heart of The Buried Giant, luminous amid
all the dragons and warring knights, is a deeply affecting portrait
of marital love. . . . A power and a strangeness that are, in the
Shakespearean sense of the word, weird . . . For all the
deconstruction The Buried Giant performs on its manifold sources
and inspirations, the ultimate measure of Ishiguro's achievement is
that his novel is more than worthy to take its place alongside
them. The quest undertaken by Axl and Beatrice is not merely a
search for their son, but one that follows in the footsteps of Sir
Gawain, and Tennyson's King Arthur, and Frodo."
--Tom Holland, The Guardian (London) "The prose, as in many of
Ishiguro's novels, is lapidary and beguiling, suggestive of secrets
to be disclosed. . . . For Ishiguro, our poet laureate of loss, the
mercies of forgetfulness hold the greater fascination . . . The
Buried Giant is ultimately a story about long love and making terms
with oblivion. It is an eerie hybrid: a children's fable about old
age. In Ishiguro's novel, as in life, love conquers all--all, that
is, but death."
--Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic "Ishiguro is, as ever, very readable
. . . the novel is moving and strangely resonant. I suspect him of
being wise, of having a vision that subtly and politely exceeds
that of ordinary people . . . Ultimately the novel achieves a
tragic synthesis between its various parts that . . . that
reverberates powerfully in the mind."
--Theo Tait, Sunday Times (London) "What Ishiguro has delivered,
after much labour, is a beautiful fable with a hard message at its
core . . . there won't, I suspect, be a more important work of
fiction published this year than The Buried Giant. And take note,
Peter Jackson. Ishiguro's fiction makes wonderful films."
--John Sutherland, The Times (London) "Kazuo Ishiguro has written
his riskiest novel yet. . . . The Buried Giant actually feels very
modern--despite all its talk of ogres, warriors, and dragons. It
reprises the same themes Ishiguro has dealt with his entire career:
deeply flawed people grappling with dueling impulses and
loyalties--to their ideals, identities, and nations. . . . These
questions of identity and conflict lie at the heart of The Buried
Giant, and they are gripping, tangled, and well worth the attention
of so talented a novelist. . . . Lush and thrilling, rolling the
gothic, fantastical, political, and philosophical into one. In its
best moments, the fantasy elements blend with the exploration of
memory, identity, and power to significant effect. The Buried Giant
may feel very different from Ishiguro's previous works, but the
concerns that lie at its heart have preoccupied him his entire
career."
--Elaine Teng, The New Republic "Ishiguro is a deft gut-renovator
of genres, bringing fresh life and feeling to hollowed-out
conventions. . . . It's a bold departure: highly stylized,
alternately stiff and swashbuckling. But the love story at its
center shimmers with a mythic and melancholy grace."
--Boris Kachka, Vulture "A literary event . . . A story that's both
one couple's on-the-road tale, and a mystery for a great
civilization."
--NPR "Ishiguro may be a master of his craft, but, more than that,
he's a master of quiet subversion. . . . What you see is rarely, if
ever, what you get: the writer expects you to dig deeper for the
truth."
--Caroline Goldstein, Bustle "Just as in Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro
takes us into a disconcertingly different world without ever making
that world the main focus of attention . . . The Buried Giant tells
us that for nations, just as for individuals, there may be some
memories so painful and damaging that they are dangerous to face,
that some forgetfulness may be necessary . . . He has located this
novel so dreamily far away. The storytelling is formal and subtly
archaic, the dialogue elaborate and courteous, clearly paying
homage to Malory and Le Morte d'Arthur. Yet it is a far more
sophisticated narrative than it at first appears, progressively
switching its point of view away from Axl with whom we began, to
give us two 'reveries of Gawain', for example, and then, in a
sorrowful final chapter, reaching into the heart of the pair's own
story, revealing their own failings, showing us Axl and Beatrice
from the perspective of the failed boatman . . . The Buried Giant .
. . reveal itself as a work not just of great originality but
peculiar, even hypnotic, beauty: such a late, great extension to
Arthurian literature."
--David Sexton, Evening Standard "Axl and Beatrice's adventures . .
. grow in urgency yet never sacrifice the mood of quiet, elegiac
pessimism that has always characterized Mr. Ishiguro's writing--and
that makes his novels strangely both melancholic and soothing. . .
. For all its fantastical trappings, The Buried Giant is a simple
and powerful tale of love, aging and loss--no radical departure for
this splendid writer but another excellent novel all the same."
--Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal "A lyrical, allusive (and
elusive) voyage into the mists of British folklore by renowned
novelist Ishiguro. . . . The premise of a nation made up of
amnesiac people longing for meaning is beguiling . . . Ishiguro is
a master of subtlety; as with Never Let Me Go he allows a detail to
slip out here, another there, until we are finally aware of the
facts of the matter, horrible though they may be. . . . Lovely: a
fairy tale for grown-ups, both partaking in and departing from a
rich literary tradition."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "It's a sad, elegiac story . . .
A dreamy journey . . . Easy to read but difficult to forget."
--Lydia Millet, Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Ishiguro was
described as 'a master craftsman' by Margaret Atwood, and he is
every inch that throughout this book, from the self-confidence and
certainty of the slow start, through to the final, profound and
very moving, pages'.
--Emily Hourican, Irish Independent "Ishiguro's story is a
deceptively simple one, for enfolded within its elemental structure
are many profound truths, including its beautiful and memorable
portrait of a long-term marriage and its subtle commentary on the
eternity of war, all conveyed in the author's mesmerizing
prose."
--Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist "Tangled and satisfying . . .
[Ishiguro's] novels have for the last two decades frustrated
expectations, and his decision to venture into the realm of legend
this time is of a piece with the risks he's been taking all along.
. . . Ishiguro's novels dramatize quests for self-knowledge, and
though The Buried Giant . . . may be his most exotic work . . . it
may also be his most direct assault on the question."
--Christian Lorentzen, Bookforum "Part of the brilliance of this
novel is that it can be read at face value and enjoyed . . . or it
can be read deep, deeper, and deeper still, until the reader begins
scrutinizing the words not on the pages as intensely as each
description and every scrap of dialog."
--Betty Scott, Books & Whatnot "The world's greatest living
novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro, has a new book out. It is a
masterpiece."
--David Walliams "A novelist of unparalleled distinction. The style
is elegant, sparse, non-archaic and, as with Ishiguro's other
works, it accumulates as you progress, until you are mesmerised by
the agony of his characters. It is a bold, sorrowful, brilliant and
unyielding book. The journey might be imaginary, yet it is
existentially real, and that is its great beauty and strength."
--Joanna Kavenna, Prospect "A new novel from Ishiguro, his first in
10 years, is quite possibly the literary event of 2015. . . . The
Buried Giant is another thought-provoking literary
masterpiece."
--Alice O'Keeffe, The Bookseller "This book is a love story, an
adventure story, a mystery tale and an allegory. It's also an
unforgettable book about forgetting. . . . Once you have read this
book you will want to read it again."
--Erich Mayer, Publishing ArtsHub (Australia)
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