An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It ends with such a subtle well-balanced ambiguity that I was left just about as uncertain about where the main character stands as he is. I won’t spoil it by saying what’s uncertain or how; maybe I’ll mention that if I had read this as a teenager I wouldn’t even have known there was anything to be uncertain about. There are degrees of subtlety upon subtlety.
And yet, not as subtle as some of his other books. There are ways that you can see that this is an earlier work, where the bones and girders are a little more visible. It was good for me to see, as a writer, because I think it gives an idea of what’s going on under the surface in the more mature novels. Like, if you imagine that, draft by draft, he removes elements that are too obvious, smoothing things out over time, something like Never Let Me Go might be a 10th draft and An Artist of the Floating World might be a 7th. Something like that.
Kazuo Ishiguro is, as always, excellent. The grandson is adorable. The scenes of postwar Japanese life are by turns charming and sad. A very good book.
View all my reviews