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Alan Bray
Jan 26, 20234 min read
Breakfast On The Morning Train
The Unconsoled begins with Ryder, a famous pianist, arriving in an unnamed European city to perform a concert. Through more than five...
Alan Bray
Jan 19, 20235 min read
The Unconsoled Narrator
One of the features of Ishiguro’s Unconsoled is that it makes use of two forms of narration. The story begins with close first-person...
Alan Bray
Jan 12, 20234 min read
Is Anyone Listening?
When I began this blog almost three years ago, I set out to write about particular features of stories I enjoyed, their narrational...
Alan Bray
Jan 5, 20234 min read
Crisis? What Crisis?
In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, just who are those who are unconsoled? The definition of the word “unconsoled” is a person or group...
Alan Bray
Dec 29, 20223 min read
What A Character!
My friends, what of the narrational style of The Unconsoled? After all, that’s what I typically write about. Most simply put, Unconsoled...
Alan Bray
Dec 22, 20224 min read
The Unconsoled
This week, a new story, best beloved, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1995 novel, The Unconsoled. It is, essentially, the story of a concert pianist,...
Alan Bray
Mar 17, 20224 min read
Nocturnal Progression
Last week, due to constraints of space and time, we interrupted our discussion of Cellists, the last story in Nocturnes. Let’s continue...
Alan Bray
Mar 10, 20225 min read
The Fellas In The Band Observe A Flirty Actress
In Cellists, the fifth and final story in Nocturnes, we return to the city of Venice but with new characters. The complex narrative...
Alan Bray
Mar 3, 20225 min read
You Turkey
The fourth story in Nocturnes is entitled Nocturne and is the longest of the five contained therein. Does this have meaning? I don’t...
Alan Bray
Feb 24, 20224 min read
You Talkin' To Me?
In the third story of Nocturnes, Malvern Hills, we immediately come on a first-person narrator who is never named. “I’d spent the spring...
Alan Bray
Feb 17, 20225 min read
The Band Played On
The title of the next story in Nocturnes contains another musical reference, Come Rain or Come Shine, the title of a famous American song...
Alan Bray
Feb 10, 20224 min read
Lost Illusions
Last week, we began to look at Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes, specifically the first tale, Crooner. I cut the diamond in stating that I...
Alan Bray
Feb 3, 20226 min read
Nocturnes
This week a new book, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2009 Nocturnes, originally published in Britain and then by American publisher Knopf in the same...
Alan Bray
Apr 29, 20216 min read
Time Travel
The last chapter of Remains is entitled Weymouth. It begins with Mr. Stevens sitting on a pier, or boardwalk, by the sea, waiting for the...
Alan Bray
Apr 22, 20214 min read
Mr. Stevens and St. Peter
Although Mr. Stevens spends considerable time reflecting on the past during his journey, he is at times confronted by people from the...
Alan Bray
Apr 8, 20214 min read
Road Running
What is the plot in Remains? Well, what is plot? “The main events of a play, novel, movie, or similar work, devised and presented by the...
Alan Bray
Apr 1, 20213 min read
Methods of Movement
In a 1986 Guardian interview, (pre-Remains), Ishiguro writes that he was dissatisfied with his early novels because he judged them as...
Alan Bray
Mar 25, 20214 min read
Isn’t It a Lovely Day?
Last week, I began our discussion of The Remains of the Day by saying that we’d sniffed out another unreliable narrator—Mr. Stevens, the...
Alan Bray
Mar 18, 20214 min read
The Remains of the Day
This week, a new story, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1988 The Remains of the Day. (Whiny voice: This week, a new story, Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the...