Review: The Buried Giant

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was a very strange book, and I have a hard time giving it a star rating. It starts with an older couple, living in England - sort of - in a fairyland time, but amongst some historical figures. There is a mysterious mist that removes people's memories, and they have only a hazy sense that they had a son, and no real memory of how or where to find him. Nevertheless they set off to his village, encountering soldiers, goats, mountains, dragons, and descendants of King Arthur's Court on their journey. The story was quaint at times, and horrifying at other times, and some reviews I read said it was not just an adult fairy tale, but a meditation on memory and loss. Sorry, I didn't get there with it - I found the book a bit of a slog and was unsurprised at some of the most important plot turns.

Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize for Literature while I was reading this, so I'm willing to bet I missed the point of this book, not that it was bad, but as a reader I can't say I enjoyed reading it.

View all my reviews