The Buried Giant

King Death of the Scurvy Rats reviewed The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

Slow to start, but a book that has a lot to say

5 stars

I came to this after reading some of Ishiguro's other books. Klara and the Sun was my first, and coming to this one I was more attentive to Ishiguro's styles and techniques, and to how the story was developing

I found it slow to start, but began to thoroughly enjoy the characters and their diverse styles. If you find it quite dry to start with then persevere, a lot of themes come in quite late in the book, and around the middle of the book the worldbuilding becomes suddenly very vibrant. I loved this in the context of Arthurian legend and the literary/mythological tradition surrounding it

Dion H reviewed The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

Interesting ideas but meandering execution

3 stars

The ending picks up and makes some interesting points but it's a fairly long-winded road to get there. The general theme around memory and forgetting is definitely the best aspect of the book, and it makes me wish that more time had been spent developing all of the other elements to make it a rich, well-rounded read. The characters were all quite bland. I don't feel like I ended up emotionally invested in any of them, and I think a lot of that was due to the dialogue. All of the characters spoke in the exact same way, and it was a bizarrely formal/polite/detached style that made them feel inhuman. The main couple talked a lot about how much they loved each other, but it didn't really come across in the rest of the writing. At first I thought maybe this was part of the magic of the mist, clouding …

The ending picks up and makes some interesting points but it's a fairly long-winded road to get there. The general theme around memory and forgetting is definitely the best aspect of the book, and it makes me wish that more time had been spent developing all of the other elements to make it a rich, well-rounded read. The characters were all quite bland. I don't feel like I ended up emotionally invested in any of them, and I think a lot of that was due to the dialogue. All of the characters spoke in the exact same way, and it was a bizarrely formal/polite/detached style that made them feel inhuman. The main couple talked a lot about how much they loved each other, but it didn't really come across in the rest of the writing. At first I thought maybe this was part of the magic of the mist, clouding their mind and taking away their personality and emotion but it never changes so I guess not. By the end, the world was a bit more filled out but for a lot of the time it was as bland as the people.

I think this could have been a really fantastic short story but, as it is, it's a mostly tedious meander for the first 2/3rds that delivers a good ending. I'm just not sure the ending is good enough to justify the investment.