2014 read #52: An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro.

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
206 pages
Published 1986
Read June 11
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

I'm fascinated by how Ishiguro's characteristic style -- narration written as if drawn from unreliable memories, full of asides and interjections like "Now, he may not have used those exact words" and "Perhaps I am confusing it with another conversation we had" -- can perform so adeptly for radically different characters. The soft, naive, yet perceptive narrator of Never Let Me Go could hardly be further removed from the quietly arrogant, nostalgic old artist of Floating World, yet the prose itself hardly seems to vary between the two books, separated as they are by almost twenty years of Ishiguro's career. The biggest advance in Ishiguro's craft seems to be structural. Never Let Me Go was constructed with aching delicacy, wavering just above the surface of horror and tragedy. Floating World is similarly airy, letting its emotional beats pass unsounded beneath Ono's rambling recollections, but the symmetry of the narrative is just a tiny bit too blunt, I thought. Which is not to say I didn't find it clever, just that the narrative structure here is just that tiny bit less assured than in Never Let Me Go.