A review by nohoperadio
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

4.5

Having just gone on about how he has his one thing he always does, I come to his one book that’s nothing like that. Reading an Ishiguro set in a Tolkeinesque medieval Britain where dragons are real is actually less jarring than reading an Ishiguro written in the third person. But I actually really liked seeing his perennial obsessions come out so differently from usual. The fog that’s causing mass selective amnesia is a way to explore the old misremembering-as-self-definiton thing without having to be so clever about it, which is not in fact unwelcome. The ending has more genuine emotional weight than any I’ve read except the two big ones.

I wish he’d continued exploring how to do less-Ishiguro-shaped Ishiguro after this, but on the evidence of Klara and the Sun I guess that’s not the plan.