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An Artist of the Floating World

As heard on BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime

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An Artist of the Floating World

By: Kazuo Ishiguro
Narrated by: David Case
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About this listen

1948. Japan is rebuilding her cities after the calamity of WWII, her people putting defeat behind them and looking to the future.

The celebrated painter Masuji Ono fills his days attending to his garden, his house repairs, his two grown daughters and his grandson; his evenings drinking with old associates in quiet lantern-lit bars. His should be a tranquil retirement. But as his memories continually return to the past - to a life and a career deeply touched by the rise of Japanese militarism - a dark shadow begins to grow over his serenity.

©2014 Kazuo Ishiguro (P)2014 Faber & Faber Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction War & Military
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I read this some years ago and didn't take to it. I think it was the first Ishiguro book I read, and I didn't appreciate the subtlety in the language. I think I found it quite boring. Returning, I realise I was wrong, Ishiguro has a way of drawing out thought on his subject and not telling you what to think / feel about even the most emotive subjects.

For people new to this. Notice that he never uses description about emotion.

The narration is utterly terrible. A nasal robotic voice that has difficulty with pronunciation and keeps putting emphasis in sentences in entirely the wrong place, which is really confusing.

Great story. Awful performance.

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This is a poetic book. It vibrates with meaning, but like the protagonist Ono, we’re not entirely sure of what that meaning is.

The floating world as described is the late night haze when you slip the shackles of the day but also turn to face the new morning. A liminal space. This whole book inhabits that space.

Like much of Ishiguro’s work the story is told from the perspective of a narrator that you are not entirely confident of. Was it a memory? A metaphor? A misunderstanding?

Much happens and nothing happens, life from the perspective of the old, of the end.

A great book.

Sublime

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Ishiguro does it again... might be my second favourite of his. The flow of the inner monologue was great.

A surprising delight

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The story is absorbing and thought-provoking; it's typical Ishiguro. However, the narrator inflects at random points and it sounds like he's asking a question at the end of most declarative sentences and it's really beginning to grate.

Let down by narrator

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The narrator (or the sound editing) leaves random pauses and question marks hanging mid sentence making the entire passage of text feel disjointed.

Drawling and Dry

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