All right faggots, I'm the original Ishiguroposter and I'm here to give you the lowdown on my boy

All right faggots, I'm the original Ishiguroposter and I'm here to give you the lowdown on my boy.

Definitive Ishiguro Power Ranking:

>Canonical masterpiece tier
The Unconsoled - S

>Beloved classic tier
The Remains of the Day - A+
The Buried Giant - A+

>Delightful intro tier
Cellists - A
Crooner - B

>Flawed but touching tier
Never Let Me Go - B+
>Novel experimentation tier
A Pale View of Hills - B
>Traditionally proficient tier
Artist of the Floating World - B-

>Flawed experimentation tier
When We Were Orphans - C
Nocturne - C
Come Rain or Come Shine - C-
Malvern Hills - C-

>How do I into Kazuo-kun?
I'm glad you asked!

Start with:
>The Remains of the Day
Then read:
>Never Let Me Go
If you want a foray into his early Japanese influence/reaction:
>An Artist of the Floating World

Work in the rest as you see fit, but make sure to save for last:
>The Buried Giant
>The Unconsoled

I ALWAYS KNEW MY BOY WOULD GET THE NOBEL BUT I DIDN'T THINK IT WOULD HAPPEN THIS SOON

Ask me anything about Ishiguro, I've read his entire oeuvre.

What is it about the Unconsoled that separates it from the rest and puts it in a category of its own?

I'm surprised you have his shorter fiction up there (or ranked at all, desu); did you used to have that, or is it a more recent addition?

Anyways, my alternate ranking of his novels:

1 - Remains of the Day - literally a perfect novel. This was actually the only criticism it got too (from the New Yorker) - people thought it was too perfect.

2 - An Artist of the Floating World - really good; more subtle than Remains of the Day, but tackling similar issues.

3 - The Unconsoled - Move up to the top if you're inclined. It is great, the most patrician of his works, but it can be slow-going and ponderous if you're not prepared.

4 - Never Let Me Go - It's fine. It's kind of Remains of the Day but for those with less life experience. The characters never glimpse at having agency of their own, so I found it less affecting than the previous works where they all realize that they had a choice, but gave it up.

6 (tie) - The Buried Giant - Pretty great deconstruction of fantasy novels. But the language is pedestrian and forgettable. Given that it deals with amnesia, I don't know that it could have been written better, but at the end a book about amnesia is kind of forgettable. The last few pages are pretty affecting/feels though.

6 (tie) - A Pale View of the Hills - Solid enough, but Ishiguro is still finding his footing as an author.
7 - When we were Orphans - A misfire. Even Ishiguro admits it didn't really work out the way he intended.


FWIW, his lyrics are better than Dylan's too, though his oeuvre there is obviously smaller.

I'm willing to move up Artist and move down NLMG, I made this list ages ago (you can search the archives I've been shitposting it here for a while); it's always had the shorter fiction

I think you underrated the Buried Giant. I think in the age of the literature of exhaustion and hyper technical writing, it's good to for a writer to take a step back and "prove" that he can, in fact, write a sentimental novel that rests almost entirely on his connection with human affairs and "feels." I'd consider him similar to someone like, to asspull some random examples, John Williams (Stoner) or Kent Haruf (Plainsong, Our Souls at Night), etc. etc., but of course also not limited. Had Ishiguro's entire oeuvre consisted of Never Let Me Go, The Buried Giant, and weaker imitations of the two, he would have been confined to a Booker-tier kind of author and not a Nobel laureate.

I am surprised you rank NLMG above TBG though.

It's arguably the most subtle work in an author whose oeuvre is already incredibly subtle normally and there is simply volumes to explore. The choice of thematic and subject matter (dreams and unconsciousness, combined with Ishiguro's standard motif of "memory") helps, of course. It's ripe for academic study (a sparse handful do exist, but nothing too systematic from what I can tell) which is always helpful for canonicity.

>The last few pages are pretty affecting/feels though.
I agree completely.

Not who you replied to, why is TBG separated? It is the only book of his that I've read, fyi.

Thank God someone actually read him. Gonna steal all of your opinions and pretend they're my own.

>I made this list ages ago (you can search the archives I've been shitposting it here for a while)
I know, I remember the list - I just guess the short pieces never really registered in my mind though.

I suppose thinking more on it, I would move Buried Giant above NLMG. NLMG kind of left me cold - it was alright, but like I said, it was somewhat like reading a Greek tragedy, where every action taken by our protagonists was entirely prescripted, and they never really even question that it any serious way.

After those top three (RotD, AotFW, Unconsoled), the next three are all pretty close to me. WWwO is definitely his weakest though.

For us the Japanese, Pale view of hills was really shocking. It's a dreamy reminiscence of fake Nagasaki just after the war.

Yes, his relationship to Japanese literature and history is fascinating. It's important to read his interviews where he explained why he had to move away from Japanese settings because people kept assuming he was a Japaneses author writing Japanese historical fiction/post-war coming to terms literature, whereas instead he just wanted to explore how individuals/collectives/societies engage with memory and the past, which is partly why he moved to heavily into "genre" fiction in NLMG, and later in TBG.

I agree with WWwO as the flop of his full length novels.

What do you mean "separated"?

Unconsoled is m. night shyamalan tier tho

>Work in the rest as you see fit, but make sure to save for last:
>The Buried Giant
>The Unconsoled

Thanks for reminding me of your list btw, I've seen you before (probably in the last Buried Giant thread I made.)

>masterpiece tier
Artist of the Floating World
The Remains of the Day

>decent tier
A Pale View of Hills

I'm not sure about The Unconsoled yet. Only 100 pages in, but it's rather weird and I'm not sure 500 pages is the right size for his kind of stories.

The remains of the day is so good. An almost impeccable novel. Funny and sad at once. The party scene is a parody of the last supper. There s even a washing the feet event.

What does "S" mean?

Above A.

S is a rank above A. From fighting games, I think.

The eternal anglo strikes again!

The Unconsoled is way different from the rest of his work.
Have you even read it?

Ive only read Nocturnes, and it was awful. I would like to try him again.

Read Remains of the Day.

Superlative

>I am vayway honorued to bwing home the gweat nobel pwize to my pwoud countwy.

I can't wait til korea reduces that cucks homeland to a pile of glowing ashes.

Ishiguro’s novels range from the polished and conventional to the sprawling and incoherent, so if you’re new to his work, trying to get a handle on which book does which can be overwhelming. If you’d like to dip into his oeuvre and aren’t sure where to start, this guide is for you.

>Beginner level
We’ll begin with Never Let Me Go — unless you are a science fiction purist, in which case the clone story will only annoy you and you are to head directly to Remains of the Day.
Ishiguro has described Never Let Me Go as his most uplifting novel, because it is the only one to feature a wholly sympathetic cast: Kathy H., our narrator, is a thoroughly likable, thoroughly sensible, thoroughly ordinary young girl, which makes what happens to her all the more upsetting. It’s a good place to get your bearings with Ishiguro and figure out how he sees the world.
A word of caution: Do not read Never Let Me Go in public if you do not like to cry in public. “Oh,” you might think, “I’ll be that cool person on the train with my book cover tilted just so, so everyone can see I’m reading a Nobel Prize winner —” No. You will not be the smart person reading an acclaimed work of literature that shows the world you are serious and intelligent; you will be that weirdo sitting on the train sobbing over a book. And then when you remember that Ishiguro calls Never Let Me Go his most uplifting work, you’ll be that weirdo hysterically laugh-crying over a book.
From there, move along to Remains of the Day, the second of the two most famous Ishiguros: If you hit just those two, you will still be fully qualified to discuss his works at a cocktail party. Remains of the Day is a little colder than Never Let Me Go, and the main character — an English butler in a manor house around World War II — is much more warped by the world in which he lives than sweet Kathy H. was. This is Ishiguro delving into monstrosities hidden beneath a stiff British upper lip, and while Remains of the Day may or may not make you cry, it will certainly make you shiver.

>Intermediate level
The next step in your Ishiguro education is When We Were Orphans. Ishiguro fans sometimes talk about this one as his hidden gem, the dark horse favorite for his best novel. Its form is more deconstructed than either Never Let Me Go or Remains of the Day: It begins as a detective novel, evolves into a family story, and then gestures at turning into a war story without ever quite doing so; you can feel the narrative becoming less coherent as you slowly lose confidence in the narrator’s ability to understand the world. It’s unsettling and sad to read, with all sorts of dark undercurrents.
Next up is Ishiguro’s most recent novel, 2015’s The Buried Giant. This one led to a public spat with Ursula Le Guin, in which Ishiguro fretted that readers might not understand that he was writing a literary novel with fantasy tropes and Le Guin accused him of condescending to those tropes without fully understanding them.
Ishiguro is certainly using his fantasy ideas in a heavily allegorical mode: The Buried Giant is a melancholy story built around the idea of a medieval English legend, with a dragon and a curse, and even readers who love it will tell you straightforwardly that it is a cold and misanthropic book that sees the worst in human nature. Ishiguro’s other books tend to be about fallible human beings who are warped by the world in which they live but are still worthy of empathy and love, but The Buried Giant is about how human beings warp the world themselves.

>Advanced
Depending on whom you ask, Ishiguro’s sprawling 1995 novel The Unconsoled — with its elliptical dream logic and refusal to even appear to cohere into a recognizable narrative structure — is either a masterpiece or an incomprehensible wreck. I myself am perfectly willing to believe it a masterpiece if Anita Brookner says it is, but I also have never managed to get past page 275 of 535. You may attempt it with my blessing.

Stop posting that shitty Vox article already. It ignores half of his works, and it spouts nonsensical trash about the rest of them.

bump for the best ishiguro thread up at the moment

Expirmental Anglo factory runaway wins Nobel tbqh

Never Let Me Go oughtn't be that high, it's a C at best. It's extremely derivative, and doesn't really have any of the literary flourishes that might justify the fact that it's a crude rehash of a sci-fi caper that's been retold hundreds of times.

save it for /pol/ pal. And say what you like politically, the Japanese have contributed massively to world literature. My boy Dazai Osamu, Tsushima Yuko, Miyazawa Kenji, Sakaguchi Ango, Kawabata, Tanizaki, hell even Natsume Soseki is a legit heavy hitter. Then theres meme writers like Murakami and Banana who still get love around the world (although those two might serve as an argument in favor of your position). That's not even mentioning the mangas and animes that are the reason this site even exists.

In any case Ishiguro is as British as high tea and crumpets, he's more British than the British.

all I'm saying is we should have finished the job after Nagasaki, they spent 70 years drawing children cartoons of schoolgirls fucking crustaceans and mollusks and selling panties in vending machines. now korea is doing what we no longer have the balls to do

...

This is nuts, and I'm kind of ashamed to admit it

>decide to go out and grab a book for the first time in months
>hit up thrift store
>first book i see: Remains of the Day
>the title has a certain intrigue to it and i sort of recognize the author's name
>pop open my phone to check who he is
>Ishiguro
>Booker prize winner
>Rave reviews on everything he's written, probably top 3 if best not in Britain still active
>sold
>next DAY
>he wins nobel prize

God damn the hype is real now. What am I in for?

a sad and touching tale of self deception, regret, and human suffering

It's a Japanese grade thing. Can be thought of as "A+" (in particular, an A+ in a system that rarely gives A+'s and usually just gives A's or worse) or "good enough to be in a rank of its own, above all others."

Thanks, finally a useful thread. I'm going to start with RotD.

...

> In any case Ishiguro is as British as high tea and crumpets, he's more British than the British
Obviously not.

OP: Thanks to this thread, and your recommended reading order, I bought, read, and thoroughly enjoyed The Remains Of The Day. I felt things through the SSRI haze, and for that you have my gratitude.

stay comfy friend