An Artist of the Floating World
In the face of the misery he saw in his homeland, the bohemian artist Masuji Ono envisioned a strong and powerful Japan of the future and put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the devastation of that...
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In the face of the misery he saw in his homeland, the bohemian artist Masuji Ono envisioned a strong and powerful Japan of the future and put his work in the service of the imperialist movement that led Japan into World War II. Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the devastation of that war, memories of his youth and of the "floating world" - the nocturnal realm of leisure, entertainment, and drink - offer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise as an artist. Drifting in disgrace in postwar Japan, indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward. "Kazuo Ishiguro is...not only a good writer but also a wonderful novelist." (New York Times Book Review)
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Format: audiobook
ISBN:
9780736647731 (0736647732)
Publish date: November 4th 1999
Publisher: Books on Tape
Edition language: English
This quiet book is supposedly about a man and his two daughters, but it is also a look at what happened and why memory is a funny thing. The book is more for what is understand. it is one of those books where the long silences actually carry the weight of the story.
Writing a review of a Kazuo Ishiguro book is like reading a Kazuo Ishiguro book: it's the same thing as the last time. What can I say different in this review? It's mostly the same: Ishiguro is a brilliant author with a gorgeous understanding of the language; he drops that displaced unreliable narra...
My completist quest regarding Kazuo Ishiguro's novels and short stories (begun long before he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature) took me back to one of his earlier works -- I only had An Artist of the Floating World and The Unconsoled to finish to have read all of his novels; and with the c...
Ishiguro’s novels are beautiful. That’s the one word the springs to mind immediately when thinking of his writing. No matter what the setting or storyline, the writing draws you completely into the world and characters; yet still retains that mystery and distance that he creates so well. An Artist...
somebody wrote, intelligently, here on GR, any given author's works will be hit and miss even for his close fans, and after five full Kazuo Ishiguro works, I find this particularly true. definite hit: Remains of the Day. definite hit: Orphans. merely competent: Never Let Me Go, Pale View of Hills. t...
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