Sunday, October 29, 2017

Fuzzy Thoughts Are Happy Thoughts?


photo by Amy Brandon

Could it be our love would never have grown so strong down the years had the mist not robbed us the way it did?  Perhaps it allowed old wounds to heal. ~Axl in The Buried Giant

I keep telling myself one of these days (soon, I hope, as I am well out of girlhood), I am going to get old enough to be comfortable telling my truth with no carefully chosen language.  I am amazed at how hard it is for me to offer anything that feels like criticism without feeling guilty and second-guessing myself.  My good-girl, hush-girl, smile-girl, play-dumb-girl, Southern Baptist rearing worked a little too well.  I mean for god’s sake I had to preface this blog post with a mini-psychological analysis just to be able to say that my reaction to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant was, well…meh.  How do I dare criticize a Nobel-prize winner?

I don’t mean to say I didn’t enjoy the book, or that I believe the book has no merit.  Not at all.  I have finally, at least, starting abandoning books I do not enjoy at all.  This book I finished in a week, which is a normal time frame for me.  I read a lot of different books at once, so I don’t usually finish a book in less than a week.  Also I think people who pride themselves on  speed-reading are compensating for something.  I don’t even care what. 


I understand  the symbolic lesson of The Buried Giant, and I like it.  If individual memory is a small-time con man, collective memory is an international pyramid scheme.  And the philosophical argument to be had over what’s best:  knowing the truth always versus sometimes maybe fooling yourself or being fooled to assure your own sanity, peace of mind, ability to be happy?  I get it.  I really do.  I suspect there is no constant, dual answer to this question.  The thematic concepts in this novel are great and are well worth the time spent thinking about them.  The presentation didn’t work for me though.  The plot felt disjointed, the dialogue contrived, and the characters just felt confused.  I guess it’s hard to write characters who can’t remember their own past without having them seem addled and confused, but that construct doesn’t do a lot for character development.  Has a character developed just because that character has reclaimed its own memory?  Who are we without our memories?  Ah…but see there we get back into one of the philosophical themes.  So maybe this is a brilliant book.  Maybe I just need to be more enlightened to see it.  Maybe that will come with age.  Oh wait, I’m already old.  So maybe not.   

2 comments:

Deb Nance at Readerbuzz said...

It’s hard for me to tell the absolute truth, too. I often feel in the world of literature like the little boy who points out that the emperor has no clothes, only in my version of the story the little boy is ridiculed for his lack of sophistication.

I am getting bolder in old age.

thecuecard said...

I have heard others had trouble with The Buried Giant as well. For all the misgivings I heard about it -- I decided to pass it by when it came out -- which was hard for me because his novel Never Let Me Go pretty much blew me out of the water. It seems most of his books have to do with memory and love as well.

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