12 Novels #1: The Buried Giant
Feb. 6th, 2025 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grayestofghostsFirst book of 2025 read! My challenge for this year is 12 novels in 2025, and I’m making progress on that, so at least one good thing happening. I started this book late last year as one of my writing buddies suggested it to me as a possible “comp” for a book I needed comparisons for and it really, I think, is a good comparison, in many ways, except I find Ishiguro to be pretty humorless in this book and my novel is… not like that. However, keeping this in mind, my reading of this book was probably poisoned in that I was looking at it for a certain purpose so that purpose was always in the back of my head and I may not have such a good idea of it on its own. It’s not a book that I would have picked up on its own.
The Buried Giant is a book about an elderly couple traveling in post-Arthurian England to meet their son, who lives in another village, while the country is shrouded with a mysterious mist that causes people to forget things. It might be a small thing and more indicative of what I read but I appreciated the main characters being elderly. This may be less true of literary fiction but… there aren’t terribly many elderly protagonists out there, at least in comparison to more youthful ones. I think in general most writers tend to write ages they’ve already experienced. The friend who recommended it to me also talked about how they hated the way Ishiguro writes dialogue and honestly I did not notice it. Or, well, it’s less that I did not notice it, but noticed that it did not seem bad read out loud by the narrator, in the same way Shakespeare is better read out loud by someone who actually knows what they’re doing rather than awkwardly stumbled over by a first-time reader. Not that I think Ishiguro is that brilliant, but there’s something to his dialogue that probably would not come through in the strictly written text, or the reader David Horovitch is very talented. But considering The Buried Giant is a novel, this would probably be considered a flaw.
The Buried Giant is a book about an elderly couple traveling in post-Arthurian England to meet their son, who lives in another village, while the country is shrouded with a mysterious mist that causes people to forget things. It might be a small thing and more indicative of what I read but I appreciated the main characters being elderly. This may be less true of literary fiction but… there aren’t terribly many elderly protagonists out there, at least in comparison to more youthful ones. I think in general most writers tend to write ages they’ve already experienced. The friend who recommended it to me also talked about how they hated the way Ishiguro writes dialogue and honestly I did not notice it. Or, well, it’s less that I did not notice it, but noticed that it did not seem bad read out loud by the narrator, in the same way Shakespeare is better read out loud by someone who actually knows what they’re doing rather than awkwardly stumbled over by a first-time reader. Not that I think Ishiguro is that brilliant, but there’s something to his dialogue that probably would not come through in the strictly written text, or the reader David Horovitch is very talented. But considering The Buried Giant is a novel, this would probably be considered a flaw.
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Date: 2025-03-18 02:04 am (UTC)I really loved The Buried Giant. I thought it handled the general forgetting well, and agree that the age of the protagonists really added to the impact.
I do not remember issues with the dialogue, although it might be that I was making allowance for it being in translation, as I find the dialogue in a lot of Japanese works to not flow naturally in translation, which I attribute to complexities of keeping the spirit and the flow with the very different word order rules.
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Date: 2025-03-18 02:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-03-18 06:28 am (UTC)Fair. But it is also the case that my first exposure to Japanese novels in translation were Haruki Murakami, whose writing I find kind of surreal and floaty, and whose dialogue I find angular and off-putting. So my reference point isn't necessarily very reliable!
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Date: 2025-05-07 02:50 pm (UTC)