When We Were Orphans

by Kazuo Ishiguro | Literature & Fiction | This book has not been rated.
ISBN: 057120516x Global Overview for this book
Registered by woosang of Campbelltown, New South Wales Australia on 10/9/2005
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Journal Entry 1 by woosang from Campbelltown, New South Wales Australia on Sunday, October 9, 2005
Christopher Banks, the protagonist of Kazuo Ishiguro's fifth novel, When We Were Orphans, has dedicated his life to detective work but behind his successes lies one unsolved mystery: the disappearance of his parents when he was a small boy living in the International Settlement in Shanghai. Moving between England and China in the inter-war period, the book, encompassing the turbulence and political anxieties of the time and the crumbling certainties of a Britain deeply involved in the opium trade in the East, centres on Banks's idealistic need to make sense of the world through the small victories of detection and his need to understand finally what happened to his mother and father.
This new novel, however, is the deliberate antithesis of the classic English detective story--the hermetic country-house worlds of Agatha Christie, the classic "locked room" puzzles in which order and sanity is restored at the story's end. Ishiguro mimics the functional style and clipped speech patterns of the genre, ironising its reliance on melodrama and stereotype, while developing a narrative of subtlety, great emotional depth, and political and cultural acuity: what we get is a negative image of classic detective fiction, in which the solved crimes are mentioned in passing and the real mystery is played out in the psychology of the detective himself. The act of detection, Ishiguro suggests, is one we all perform on our own past, struggling to marshal clues and evidence whilst trying to construct the story of ourselves; the one mystery Banks seems unable to solve is his own

Journal Entry 2 by woosang at Picton, New South Wales Australia on Wednesday, May 30, 2018
Clearing out the room to move house.

Journal Entry 3 by woosang at Picton Train Station in Picton, New South Wales Australia on Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Released 5 yrs ago (5/30/2018 UTC) at Picton Train Station in Picton, New South Wales Australia

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