Read this a very long time ago and can't really remember the story. I do remember that I enjoyed reading it though.......maybe I'll read it again.

Thanx Barefootmum, i'll get arouind to this in the next few weeks I hope. Will review when read :)

(23/10) Finished. Review to follow...

As with the last time I read one of his (The Remains of the Day), I was left thinking, ‘What is the point of Ishiguro’s books!’ Yes there is a message here about personal responsibility & collective guilt, but it’s all very laboured. The style is similar; the slow unpicking of the past through the stilted ramblings and events in an older man’s life. In this case, Masuji Ono, a 60-something(?) moderately famous artist in post-WW11 Japan, trying to reconcile his part in the cultural & political revolution leading to Japanese aggression and expansionism. Ono was part of a bohemian art movement which aimed to capture the ‘night-time world of pleasure, entertainment and drink’ – the Floating World of the title. But, he turns his back on this world in favour of a more political stance, looking at the realism of poverty in Japanese cities and the perceived corruption of the population at the hands of the greedy businessmen & politicians. He looks to a stronger patriotic Japan under the Emperor’s patriarchal rule. In later life, as he tries to marry off his younger daughter, some of the ripples from the past come through and make him think again; he does openly acknowledge mistakes and errors of judgement that he made, but doesn’t atone fully by ‘falling on his sword’.

Reserved for mini-bookray:

Angi612UK
Wormyone (will release)

RELEASE NOTES:

On its way to Angi to enjoy and pass on :)

Thank you Tony. I'm looking forward to this.I read Remains of the Day and listened to it on Book at Bedtime! I think the narrator gave it a bit more meaning for me. So I'm really looking forward to this book. I've heard so much about it.

I found this book disappointing. It was quite a hard read; I understood what Ishiguro was saying, but I found the prose quite stilted in places. I felt sorry for the way life had treated Masuji and wanted things to go his way for once. I felt he was a very lonely man.

Thank you BookGroupMan. It's now on its way to Wormyone.

Arrived safely and crossed off my wish list. Thank you for sending it Angi612UK and for the ray BookGroupMan.

I found this very readable and enjoyable. I notice that Ishiguro wrote it before The Remains of the Day and I think this could be seen as a precursor to that Booker Prize winning novel. They are similar in that they are both written in the first person with the key elements emerging between the lines, rather than explicitly. In both novels, the narrator has a deluded perspective on the past (specifically the period of the second world war) and the reader is cleverly guided to gain a different view from the one the narrator holds himself and expounds.

I particularly liked the way the narrator’s grandchild, an appallingly spoilt and badly-behaved eight-year-old boy, is used both to highlight the narrator’s foolish behaviour and to mirror his views. The narrator often appears to be describing (and criticising) someone else when he is really describing himself. I also liked the fact that an additional question as to the veracity of the narrator’s viewpoint is added at the end.

I have found some of Ishiguro’s novels hard-going and dry but this, while dealing with serious subject matter, manages to be light and entertaining (as well as fairly short).

RELEASE NOTES:

On the seats nearest the ticket barriers on the concourse at about 17:30.

I just picked up this book in Brighton Train station, Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, United Kingdom. Am very much looking forward to reading it. Review to follow...