Excelsior District Improvement Association
HELLO MEMBERS and FRIENDS OF THE EXCELSIOR BOOK CLUB
Thanks to Baruch and Michael for hosting our discussion on Moo. The book was long, with a long list of characters, and some of us struggled to get through it (and some gave up). Those of us who finished the book enjoyed it, and found it quite relevant to our current budget-cutting times. For the most part we were interested in trying other work by Jane Smiley.
The Excelsior Book Club is on vacation for the month of August.
The Excelsior Book Club will meet next on WEDNESDAY, September 8, 7:00 PM, at the home of Patty & Mike, 679 Madrid Street , (between Russia and France ). With the two-month interval, we are selecting a more challenging read: The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro (1995, 535 pages). There are several copies available at the SF Library, and it is available on Amazon for $10.85.
In The Unconsoled, Kafka’s The Castle meets Alice in Wonderland in the Twilight Zone. Ryder, a prominent concert pianist, arrives in an unidentified European city. He has been summoned to give a performance that may be the most important of his life. But the exact nature of the impending performance eludes him, since Ryder is afflicted with large gaps of memory. He seems to have visited this place before—he soon discovers that he has a wife or mistress here and a little boy who may be his son—but he cannot remember when. He has forgotten the details of the Herculean schedule that his handlers have prepared for him. And he is repeatedly startled by figures from his English past who appear surreally in the town’s winding streets, on its trams, and in the houses that Ryder visits on a geometrically increasing series of cryptic and outlandish errands. Everyone he meets seems to assume that he knows more than he knows, that he is well acquainted with the city and its obscure cultural crisis. The world he has entered is a surreal dreamscape where a door in a cafe can lead back to a hotel miles away. Ryder cannot remember what he or these people are doing here, but everyone remembers him. And everyone wants something from him. It is Ryder’s character that he can refuse none of the requests that are made of him—except, perhaps, for the ones that truly matter.
A summary of the plot of The Unconsoled gives no hint of its complexity, or of the elements that it has in common with speculative fiction, and the book defies categorization. Stripped of the fantastic elements which contribute to the book’s dreamlike narrative, The Unconsoled would be a much slimmer, much quieter novel about the significance of the artist in society. Instead Ishiguro chose to experiment with his narrative. He took the shifting realities of the world of dreams and used it to restructure his previous approach to novel writing. To do this he has borrowed some well-known elements from speculative fiction, creating in the process a challenging novel that deserves to be widely recognized as a classic of fantastic fiction.