Contemporary Literary Criticism | Ishiguro, Kazuo (Vol. 110) - Charlotte Innes (review date 6 November 1995)

Charlotte Innes (review date 6 November 1995)

SOURCE: Charlotte Innes, "Dr. Faustus Faces the Music," in The Nation, Vol. 261, No. 15, November 6, 1995, pp. 546-48.

[In the following review of The Unconsoled, Innes praises Ishiguro for creating an exciting, well written, and humourous novel.]

How hard it is to be true to yourself when people expect you to be something else. Kazuo Ishiguro, the Japanese-born English writer, known to millions for the movie version of his Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day, has wrestled for his identity more than most, first as an immigrant writer struggling to throw off the noose of stereotype and now as a postmodern novelist who jolted British critical preconceptions earlier this year with his fourth novel, The Unconsoled.

A discordant, plot-entangled, sometimes farcical nightmare of a book, nearly three times longer than his earlier works, filled with literary...

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