"Missing Person" by Patrick Modiano

 A short novel by a French Nobel Laureate.

A list of other winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature can be found here.

A private investigator leaves work when his boss retires, to dedicate himself to tracking down his own past, which he has forgotten because of amnesia.

It's a great book for two reasons: one is the way the investigator assembles truth, the second is the way the novel explores identity.

The concept which enables the author to create a sort of Noir mystery novel. The PI follows clues to track down people who might have known him in the past, although they often say they don't recognise him, or if they do, they give ambiguous or conflicting testimonies. He uses photographs, government records and eyewitness accounts to try and piece together a coherent narrative for himself. But is he joining the jigsaw pieces together correctly? “Until now everything has seemed so chaotic, so fragmented ... Scraps, shreds have come to light as a result of my searches ... But then that is perhaps what a life amounts to ...” (Ch 40) he asks himself, and then immediately worries: “Is it really my life I'm tracking down? Or someone else's into which I have somehow infiltrated myself?” (Ch 40) That's a question that I, as reader, had been asking for some time.

When he finally begins to remember - at which point the memories arrive with startling clarity, so vivid that they might almost be illusory reconstructions, just like a fiction itself - he remembers himself trying to escape France during the Nazi occupation of World War Two.

This allows Modiano to explore the idea that one's identity depends on one's memories, and one's memories can be fuzzy, imprecise and equivocal if not downright false. He repeatedly returns to an image of evanescent vapour, from the very start to the finish:

• “I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the cafe terrace, waiting for the rain to stop.” (first lines)
• “Strange people. the kind that leave the nearest blur behind them, soon vanished. Hutte and I often used to talk about these traceless beings. They spring up out of nothing one fine day and return there, having sparkled a little. Beauty queens. Gigolos. Butterflies. Most of them, even when alive, had no more substance than steam which will never condense.” (Ch 8)
• “We were gradually becoming invisible. Even our town clothes ... melted into this fog. Who knows? Perhaps we would end up evaporating altogether. Or we would merge with the mist which covered the windows, this stubborn mist you could not wipe off.” (Ch 37)
• “A little girl is returning from the beach, at dusk, with her mother. She is crying for no reason at all, because she would have liked to continue playing. She has already turned the corner of the street, and do not our life dissolve into the evening as quickly as this grief of Childhood?” (last lines)

He counterpoints the essential indistinctness and confusion of his narrator with crystal clear descriptions of the external world, of which these are just a few examples:

• “A veranda which overlooked a pond. To the left, a small hump-back bridge, in the Chinese style, led to another bungalow, on the other side of the pond. The French windows were brilliantly lit up and I could seek couples moving behind them. They were dancing. Snatches of music reached us.” (Ch 2)
• “Everything about him was round. His face, his blue eyes and even the thin moustache, cut in an arc. His mouth too, and his plump and dimpled hands. He made me think of those balloons children hold on a string and which they sometimes release to see how high they will climb.” (Ch 7)
• “No furniture, except for an old divan, covered in worn red velvet upholstery on which we sat. He took a pipe from his pocket and lit it calmly. The stained glass windows gave the daylight that filtered through a pale blue tint.” (Ch 11)
• “We were standing before a lawn like the one I had tried to cross to reach the chateau, but here, the grass was not nearly so high. To my astonishment, the back of the chateau did not conform at all with its facade: it was built of gray stone. The roof was not the same either: on this side it was more elaborate, with cut off corners and gables, so that a house which at first sight looked like a Louis XIII chateau, from the back looked like one of those late-nineteenth-century seaside resort mansions.” (Ch 11)
• “The cigarette and pipe smoke irritated my eyes and made me cough a little. There was a smell of lard in the air.” (Ch 17)

It's a bit like the way Kafka makes us believe in his fantastical worlds by describing them in terms of everyday reality. I suspect that, without the opposition of his detailed descriptions, the ambiguities of identity would be less obvious.

A classic, worthy of a Nobel laureate.

The English title makes a lot of sense, although perhaps 'Missing Identity' might be more accurate, but is in no way a translation of the French title, Rue des Boutiques Obscures which I translate as 'The Street of Strange Shops' and which itself seems to derive from what the author describes as "my old address in Rome: Via delle Botteghe Oscure" (Ch 47)

Selected quotes:

• “He stared as though the light of a projector had been turned on his face.” (Ch 7)
• “The Eiffel Tower generally so reassuring, looked like a hulk of oxidized scrap-iron.” (Ch 7)
• “In the end, we were all ‘beach men’ and that ‘the sand’ ... ‘keeps the traces of our footsteps only a few moments’.” (Ch 8)
• “I've just returned from the Golden Tripe Competition ... I was one of the judges. We had to swallow a hundred and seventy pieces of tripe over a period of one half days” (Ch 10)

August 2026; 180 pages
First published in French as Rue des Boutiques Obscures in 1978 by Editions Gallimard
My English translation by Daniel Weissbort was first published by Jonathan Cape in 1980. I read the Penguin paperback version of this which was issued in 2019.

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Other novels by Modiano reviewed in this blog:

• In the Cafe of Lost Youth
• The Black Notebook

Other novels by French authors which I have reviewed in this blog may be found here.

"The Spire" by William Golding

Chosen by Anthony Burgess as one of the best 99 novels since 1939.

 A Dean in the Middle Ages is inspired by a vision to add a spire to his cathedral. Opposition includes the master builder he hires to supervise the work. Will his monomaniacal determination win the day or will his dreams come crashing down? 

The wikipedia page on this novel has a detailed account of the plot (with spoilers), the characters and the symbolism.

For me, the best thing about the book is the carefully constructed gappy stream of consciousness narration (all from Dean Jocelin's perspective) which is a masterclass in how to hook and beguile the reader into piecing together what is going on from the sometimes disjointed clues. 

The key turning points are at the one-third mark and the two-thirds mark.

Captain Ahab meets Leopold Bloom?

Selected quotes

• “The most solid thing was the light. It smashed through the rows of windows in the south aisle, so that they exploded with colour, it slanted before him from right to left in an exact formation, ... Everywhere, fine dust gave these rods and trunks of light the importance of a dimension.” (Ch 1)
• “He had a tariff of knees. He knew how they should be after this length of kneeling or that.” (Ch 1)
• “Once more, the windows were coming together. the Saint’s life still burned in them with blue and red and green; but the spark and shatter of the sun had shifted.” (Ch 1)
• “The master builder often looked at things without seeing them; and then again, he would look at a thing as if he could see nothing else.” (Ch 2)
• “When the rain drizzled, then time was a drizzle, slow and to be endured.” (Ch 3)
• “When the wind came, it ... cuffed the air this way and that.” (Ch 3)
• “A workman fell through the hole above the crossways, and left a scream scored all the way down the air which was so thick it seemed to keep the scream as something mercilessly engraved there.” (Ch 3)
• “A midday without sun and therefore blasphemously without hope.” (Ch 3)
• “Some of the gargoyles seemed diseased, as they yelled their soundless blasphemies and derisions into the wind, yet made no more noise than death in another country.” (Ch 4) “no more noise than death in another country.”: what a phrase!
• “He was helpless ... as a girl herding too many geese.” (Ch 4) A nice mediaeval simile.
• “There comes a point when a vision’s no more than a child’s playing let’s pretend.” (Ch 4)
• “The earth is a huddle of noseless men grinning upward, there are gallows everywhere, the blood of childbirth never ceases to flow, nor sweat in the furrow, the brothels are down there and drunk men lie in the gutter. There is no good thing in all this circle but the great house, the ark, the refuge, a ship to contain all these people and now fitted with a mast.” (Ch 5) Earlier in the book, the cathedral is compared to a man lying on his back which makes the spire an erect penis.
• “There's a kinship among men who have sat by a dying fire and measured the worth of their life by it.” (Ch 10)
• “Life itself is a rickety building.” (Ch 10)
• “His thoughts went trotting away like a horse unharnessed from the cart.” (Ch 11)

William Golding was a Booker prize winner (1980) and the 1983 Nobel Laureate. He wrote poetry, drama and these novels:

• Lord of the Flies (1954)
• The Inheritors (1955)
• Pincher Martin (1956)
• Free Fall (1959)
• The Spire (1964)
• The Pyramid (1967)
• Darkness Visible (1979) (which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize)
• To the Ends of the Earth (trilogy)
• Rites of Passage (1980) (Booker Prize winner)
• Close Quarters (1987)
• Fire Down Below (1989)
• The Paper Men (1984)
• The Double Tongue (posthumous publication 1995)

My copy has a delightful cover by John Piper, an artist who designed a large opus of ecclesiastical work, including stained glass windows.

August 2025; 223 pages

Published by Faber and Faber in 1964

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro

 

I read this many years ago. At the time, the revelations burst upon me one by one and, having wept near the ending, I considered this a hugely powerful piece of fiction which was nominated for the 2005 Booker Prize, and, almost alone, justifies Ishiguro's 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. A BBC poll rated it the 34th best novel of all time.

Now, re-reading it, I'm not so sure. Knowing the plot from the start, it had less power to surprise me. But what I can appreciate is his development of character. There are three main characters who grow up together in a sort of boarding-school. Kath, the narrator, is extraordinarily perceptive about the emotions and motivations of the people she observes. Tommy is a lonely little boy: he's often bullied and he has tantrums. Ruth's powerful imagination, her determination, and her sometimes bitchy behaviour make her a natural leader. Together with the other members of their peer group, they go through all the pangs of growing up, the shifts of loyalty, the squabbles and the reconciliations. 

It's hugely normal and everyday and this creates huge verisimilitude so that the reader starts becoming aware of what makes these kids different at the same time as they do. Ishiguro adds the oddness in and raises the temperature in tiny increments, so that it becomes natural to talk of donations and carers, of possibles and completion and Madame's Gallery even before you really know what they mean, which is just the way a child would learn.

By the time you realise why these children will never have the opportunities taken for granted in the world at large, you are fully invested in them. You follow the roller coaster, the ups of hope and the downs of despair.

The plot is, of course, important. But it is the skill with which Ishiguro has  shown the reader the world through the eyes of Kath, so that the reader empathises and becomes one with Kath, that makes him worthy of the Nobel. He does the same thing in Klara and the Sun, a later book narrated by an android.

Towards the end there is a long intense speech which sets out the moral options and explains why the dystopian future world the Ishiguro has created is as it is.

But mostly the prose wanders back and forth as Kath narrates her story. For example: "Anyway, to get back to my point, when this sort of talk was going on, it was often Ruth who took it further than anyone." Mostly the narrative is straight-forward but every so often there are phrases like "anyway, to get back to my point ..." that ramp up the feeling that this is naturalistic dialogue. It also deflects attention away from the fact that Kath is both incredibly observant and has an extraordinary memory, repeating conversations, even from childhood, verbatim; the occasional admission that she isn't sure about something makes the reader feel that the rest must be true. This subtly used technique ramps up the verisimilitude without getting in the way of the flow of the story.

And then, again, I wept. Because, in the end, the insoluble problem faced by each of these children, is the one faced by all of us: what's the point in art or anything, or love, when in the end we will die and we will be forgotten.

Some authorities classify it as a Bildungsroman and I would concur.

This book prompted an interesting reading group discussion. Most of us, like myself, were reading the book for the second time and felt this gave us a different appreciation of it; in particular we could admire the author's artistry in the way he delicately dropped in foreshadowings. It was felt that Kath was an unreliable but not dishonest narrator: she has a very good memory for things but she often admits that her recollections do not necessarily conform to those of others. We realised that Kath's superpower (noticing and being able to understand the nuances of human behaviour) was a useful narrative device. 

One of our members suggested that the book belonged to the Gothic genre. She cited the settings: the boarding school as a sort of ruined castle set in its unkempt grounds, the removal to the Cottages (a metaphor for the barns in which farm animals are kept) which are cold and set in a barren landscape, the empty roads along which the mature and isolated Kath drives.

Perhaps Tommy, who has tantrums, is modelled after the conflicted hero of Gothic literature, the young Heathcliff. Is 'Kath' a reference to Cathy of Wuthering Heights? Is she the damsel in distress? Perhaps she is more like the heroine of Jane Eyre, who reunites with her love only after he has been crippled.

There are spoilers in the following paragraph

Or, rather than considering the Brontes, is this a version of Frankenstein? The kids are not normal human beings, looked on with dread by Madame even though she is one of their protectors and advocates; the kids are the monsters. Frankenstein, their creator, never appears, but the moral issues are very similar: even when the guardians do their best to protect to protect them, still they are human cattle exploited for the benefit of society. They leave Hailsham in the same way that Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden, to wander the earth. The difference is that the kids don't rebel against their creators (though I and all the book group were ardently wishing Kath would just run away!). The monster's angry rebuke to his creator, his God - "Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature ... Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends” - does not hold in this version of the myth. 

Selected quotes:

• "It's almost like entering a hall of mirrors. Of course, you don't exactly see yourself reflected back loads of times, but you almost think you do." (Ch 2) Nice foreshadowing
• "We certainly knew - though not in any deep sense - that we were different from our guardians, and also from the normal people outside." (Ch 6)
• "We're modelled from trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. Convicts, maybe, just so long as they aren't psychos. That's what we come from." (Ch 14)
• "She told Roy that things like pictures, poetry, all that kind of stuff, she said they revealed what you were like inside. She said they revealed your soul." (Ch 15)
• "Right from that first time, there was something in Tommy's manner that was tinged with sadness, that seemed to say: 'Yes, we're doing this now and I'm glad we're doing it now. But what a pity we left it so late'." (Ch 20)
• "However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neurone disease, heart disease." (Ch 22)
• "I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold on to each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart." (Ch 23)

Also by this author and reviewed in this blog:

• Klara and the Sun: Klara is an android and this is her interior monologue as she tries to make sense of the human world.
• The Buried Giant: Ishiguro's version of fantasy? An old man and his wife leave their mediaeval village to embark upon a quest.
• When We Were Orphans: Celebrated private detective, Christopher Banks, returns to Shanghai to solve the mystery of the disappearance of his parents.
• The Unconsoled: a Kafkaesque masterpiece

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Last Gift" by Abdulrazak Gurnah

An elegiac portrait of a foundation-less family written by the 2021 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

The book opens with Abbas having some sort of seizure and being cared for by his wife, Maryam. As his illness progresses we learn about his early life growing up in Africa and how he comes to be living in Norwich; we learn of Maryam's life, born a foundling, and we also find out about the lives of their now-geown-up children Hanna and Jamal. And we start to discover answers to the two great mysteries: why Abbas left Africa and why Maryam fled from her Vijay and Ferooz.

The book is written in the third-person, head-hopping between the PoV of the four members of the family. There are times when it seems to meander, with long paragraphs, but this is life in all its messiness, not neatly tied up like a novel, and its purpose is to make you understand this family.

But it is structured. The big revelation from Abbas comes almost exactly at the half-way mark.

Selected quotes:

• "The longer he lived, the nearer his childhood drew to him, and it seemed less and less like a distant fantasy of someone else's life." (C 1)
• "That was the thing about growing old together, you shuffled and made space and learned to be comfortable with each other, if you were lucky." (C 1)
• "Is this what parents do, she wondered, study their children as they turn into men and women they learn to grow cautious of?" (C 1)
• "Ba's silences were sometimes dark and his solitariness has a feeling of menace, as if he had gone somewhere where it would not be pleasant to meet him." (C 1)
• "Allah karim, he said is any of their neighbours asked to borrow money for some emergency. God is generous. Ask him for a loan, not me." (C 1)
• "Perhaps it was like that for many people, ducking and weaving through life, wincing as glancing blows landed now and then and putting up a ragged rearguard against a strengthening adversary." (C 1)
• "How their teachers loved that deep submissive silence. But they could not make that silence endure. They could not quite keep the children in check. Something always happened, some small insurrection, irrepressible laughter, an undaunted boy whose cheek could not be suppressed." (C 1)
• "For millions of people, moving is a moment of ruin and failure, a defeat that is no longer avoidable, a desperate flight, going from bad to worse, from home to homelessness, from citizen to refugee, from living a tolerable or even contented life to vile horror." (C 2)
• "Perhaps that was what happened to everyone, and they all learned to swallow what hurt they felt as their children tired of them." (C 2)
• "The paintwork was peeling and its beams and bannisters leaned slightly from age and fatigue. Its dereliction was malign, watchful, accusing." (C 2)
• "There was a library, with hundreds of books he could take home to read if he wished. It was like all his schooling until then had taken place in a small room, a small empty shut-away room. Then someone had opened the door and he found out that the room was a tiny cell in a huge building." (C 2)
• "She thought that in times of trouble Beverley would be a denouncer." (C 3)
• "Who did it belong to, the flat cap? To the working man or to the landed gentry? He had seen pictures of it on both their heads." (C 3)
• "There were people who just knew how to do that, just take what they wanted, or at least take what they could." (C 4)
• "I am still here, like a tiresome guest in my own life." (C 5)
• "Madness is a cataclysm, an act of nature whose meaning is explicable only to itself, because it serves neither human nor divine purpose." (C 5)

A very readable book with moments of wisdom as Gurnah reflects on rootlessness and family life in beautiful and elegant prose.

December 2021; 279 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Books by Nobel Laureates reviewed in this blog:

Abdulrazak Gumah (2021)

The Last Gift
Gravel Heart 
Afterlives

Kazuo Ishiguro (2017)

Klara and the Sun

The Buried Giant

When We Were Orphans

Patrick Modiano (2014)

In the Cafe of Lost Youth

The Black Notebook

Alice Munro (2013)

The View from Castle Rock

Herta Muller (2009)

The Passport

Doris Lessing (2007)

The Golden Notebook

The Fifth Child

Ben, in the World

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1992)

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Saul Bellow (1976)

The Victim

Heinrich Boll (1972)

The Train was on Time

Samuel Beckett (1969)

The Expelled; The Calmative;, The End & First Love

Waiting for Godot

John Steinbeck (1962)

Of Mice and Men

Cannery Row

Albert Camus (1957)

The Plague

The Outsider

The Myth of Sisyphus

The Fall

William Faulkner (1949)

Sanctuary

As I Lay Dying

Andre Gide (1947)

The Immoralist

Strait is the Gate

The Vatican Cellars

Hermann Hesse (1946)

Steppenwolf

Demian

Thomas Mann (1929)

Death in Venice

"Afterlives" by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Afterlives (published 2020) is the latest novel by Abdulrazak Gurnah who on 7th October 2021 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Zanzibar, in Tanzania, Gurnah has lived most of his life in Canterbury, Kent, England. I moved away from Canterbury the day before Gurnah won his Novel Prize! And I never met him. 

It took me a while to get into this book. It is written in a conventional third person past tense with an omniscient narrator and the narrative distance varies from extreme overview shot (there are individual paragraphs which detail years of warfare, as if they are the establishing shot in a film, taken from a long way off) to in head thoughts (for Hamza and Afiya, at least) but it never gets close enough to the thoughts of the characters to be stream of consciousness so the overall effect is a little bit stand-offish. This is particularly the case in the first few chapters and the last chapter which deal mostly with peripheral characters; the core narrative of the love story between Hamza and Afiya is restricted to the centre of the book. There were parts which read like a narrative history. This distant narration reminded me of other African writers such as Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart, Arrow of God, and No Longer at Ease). 

I think this was why I took a while to enjoy the book; once it arrived at a more conventionally 'western-novel-style' narrative I began to enjoy exploring the character of Hamza and, through him, began to appreciate the complexities of the other characters, Khalifa in particular who is a great grumpy old man with a heart of gold and his shrewish wife Bi Asha. 

In some ways, Afterlives resembled a memoir more than a novel. What, in conventional novel terms, is one to make of the demonic possession of Ilyas, unless it is to provide a motivation for his researches in the final chapter, or to suggest that native African explanations of 'voices in the head' have as much validity as Western-style psychology? 

It was a coincidence that I had read An Ice Cream War by William Boyd less than a month before this book: both of these novels deal with the fighting between the Germans and the British in East Africa during World War One although their perspectives (Afterlives purely African; Ice Cream purely British) are diametrically opposite. 

Another brilliant book about the African experience in the First World War (though this time in the trenches of the Western Front) is At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop.

Selected quotes:

• "‘No, you’re adding too much salt,’ Hamza said in exaggerated disbelief." (C 5)
• "European volunteers who thought killing was an adventure and were happy to be at the service of the great machinery of conquest and empire." (C 5)
• "In his exhaustion he sometimes reached a stage when he was unafraid, without bravado, without posturing, detached from the moment and open to whatever might happen to him." (C 5)
• "The Oberleutnant was furious and the other Germans joined him in his rage at the indiscipline of the carriers, as if they really believed that the ragged troop they beat and despised and overworked owed them loyalty." (C 7)
• "The morning was warming up but not yet hot and the crowds were still good-natured in their jostling and shoving. Carts barged their way through pedestrians, their drivers calling out in warning, bicycle bells tinkled and cyclists snaked a passage through the press of bodies. Two elderly matrons shuffled on unconcernedly and the crowd parted around them as if they were rocks in the middle of a stream." (C 8)
• "The worst mistakes he made in his earlier life in this town had been the result of his fear of humiliation." (C 9)
• "These thoughts filled him with sorrow, which he thought was the inescapable fate of man." (C 9)
• "Their disagreements sometimes ended in an exchange of tiny imperceptible smiles as if they had seen through each other’s performances." (C 9)
• "He puts great faith in the truth, though that sounds more pompous than I meant it to. Perhaps it would be better to say he has faith in frankness, openness, something like that, without noise or show" (C 10)
• "Poor Ilyas, his life was attended with difficulties yet he lived under a kind of illusion that nothing bad could ever happen to him on this earth. The reality was that he was always on the point of stumbling." (C 11)
• "Good fortune is never permanent. You cannot always be sure how long the good moments will last or when they will come again. Life is full of regrets, and you have to recognise the good moments." (C 12)
• "She talked almost constantly while she was with Bi Asha, even ventriloquising some replies to the questions she addressed to her." (C 13)
• "So what we can know for sure, Ilyas told his parents, is that someone loved Uncle Ilyas enough to follow him to certain death in a concentration camp in order to keep him company." (C 15; last lines)

Other books about war reviewed in this blog are here.

October 2021

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Klara and the Sun" by Kazuo Ishiguro

My wife's favourite book, shortlisted for the 2022 fiction of the year prize in the British Book Awards and longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize.

The narrator, Klara, is a robot, designed to have empathy so that she can be an Artificial Friend to a child. The narration is straightforward and matter of fact, enabling Ishiguro to emulate Kafka (as he also seems to in his novel The Unconsoled), who told the strangest tales as if they were everyday occurences. 

Not only is Ishiguro emulating Kafka, by using a non-human narrator he can adopt a 'Man from Mars' approach, observing human social interactions. For example:

• "She ... held Josie in an embrace that seemed to go on and on, until the Mother was obliged to introduce a rocking motion to disguise how long it was lasting." (Part Two, p 92)
• "I saw more insects hovering before me in the air, nervously exchanging positions, but unwilling to abandon their friendly clusters." (Part Three, p 156 - 157)

At the same time, by endowing Klara with a (perfectly subservient) personality, he is exploring the ethical relationships between humans and such created artefacts. For example, in the first part, when Klara is in the Store waiting to be purchased, there are notes not only of an orphanage, whose inmates hope for adoption, but also a pet shop and a slave market. 

Klara is solar powered, so she has a key relationship with the Sun, a relationship which begins in the first paragraph. She superstitiously conceives of the Sun as a divine being, able to grant the gift of life, to whom she can address prayers. Ishiguro seems to be saying that a quasi-conscious robot would have a spiritual side to it. This aspect of the book reminded me of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and Ishiguro's The Buried Giant. 

Ishiguro's Klara perceives the world through pattern recognition software, which seems to resolve the world into a cubist painting, all disconnected shapes which sometimes fuse into a more rounded portrait than a conventional perception. At times of stress, or when the nscene is changing rapidly or the lighting is poor, her visual field seems to become divided into boxes, some of which contain the same image but with subtle variations, suggesting either that the image has changed with time or that there are layers of meaning. For example:

• "The sky from the bedroom rear window was ... capable of surprising variations. Sometimes it was the color of the lemons in the fruit bowl, then could turn to the gray of the slate chopping-boards. When Josie wasn't well, it could turn the color of her vomit or her pale feces, or even develop streaks of blood. Sometimes the sky would become divided into a series of squares, each one a different shade of purple to its neighbor." (Part Two, p 52) 
• “Josie was near the middle of the room talking with three guest girls. Their heads were almost touching, and because of how they were standing, the upper parts of their faces, including all their eyes, had been placed in a box on the higher tier, while all their mouths and chins had been squeezed into a lower box. The majority of the children were on their feet, some moving between boxes. Over at the rear wall, three boys were seated on the modular sofa, and even though they were sitting apart, their heads had been placed together inside a single box, while the outstretched legs of the boy nearest the window extended not only across the neighboring box, but right into the one beyond. There was an unpleasant tint on the three boxes containing the boys on the sofa - a sickly yellow - and anxiety passed through my mind.” (Part Two; p 70)
• “Soon the scenes were changing so rapidly around me I had difficulty ordering them. At one stage a box became filled with the other cars, while the box immediately beside it filled with segments of road and surrounding field. I did my best to preserve the smooth line of the road as it moved from one box into the next, but with the view constantly changing, I decided this wasn't possible, and allowed the road to break and start afresh each time it crossed a border.” (Part Two; p 97)
• “The mother leaned closer over the table top and her eyes narrowed till her face filled eight boxes, leaving only the peripheral boxes for the waterfall, and for a moment it felt to me her expression varied between one box and the next. In one, for, her eyes were laughing cruelly, but in the next they were filled with sadness.” (Part Two; p 104)
• “We drove past a large creature with numerous limbs and eyes, then even as I watched, a crack appeared down its center. As it divided itself, I realized it had been, all along, two separate people - a runner and a dog walk woman - moving in opposite directions who for an instant happened to be passing one another.” (Part Four; p 217)
• “The figures became more simplified, as if constructed out of cones and cylinders made from smooth card. Their clothes, for instance, were devoid of the usual creases and folds, and even their faces under the streetlight appeared to be created by cleverly placing flat surfaces into complex arrangements to create a sense of contouring.” (Part Four; p 235)

This technique lends the narrative verisimilitude and enables Ishiguro to create strikingly original descriptions and also maintain that robotic matter-of-fact voice that makes the futuristic and other-worldly aspects of the narrative more credible.

The way that Ishiguro drips clues into the story, so that the reader has to piece together what is happening, is fantastic. (He does much the same in Never Let Me Go). For example, we learn quite quickly that Rick has not been 'lifted' but it is only much later in the book that we understand what this means. The significance of an incident in the first part of the book only becomes clear much later.

Selected quotes:

• "My cello-playing, even at its glorious best, sounded like Dracula's grandmother." (Part Two, p51)
• “The grass was tall in all three fields, and when the wind blew, it would move as if invisible passers-by were hurrying through it.” (Part Two; p 52)
• "What was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom." (Part Three, p 113)
• "It became normal for me to remain during Rick's visits, even though he sometimes looked towards me with go-away eyes" (Part Three, p 117)
• "Not only was her voice loud, it was as if it had been folded over onto itself, so that two versions of her voice were being sounded together, pitched fractionally apart." (Part Three, p 179)
• "Mr Capaldi believed that there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn't be continued. He told the Mother he'd searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn't inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her." (Part Six, p 306)

A beautifully written book by a master. Shortlisted for the 2021 Waterstones Book of the Year

I am a little bemused by the use of American spellings. My copy of the book was published in London, UK in 2021. 

Also by Ishiguro and reviewed on this blog:

• When We Were Orphans
• The Remains of the Day

Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in 2017. Other Nobel Laureates reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was originally written in July 2021 and updated in May 2026; 307 pages
First published by Faber and Faber in 2021

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Spoiler alert: a summary of the plot

Klara is remarkable in her powers of observation. While at the store she notices, outside, Beggar Man and his Dog. They spend a whole day so immobile that she thinks they are dead but the next day they have revived. She attributes this apparent resurrection to the healing powers of the Sun. One day, her view of the sun is marred by a road-mending machine with Cootings written on its side which belches smoke into the air. After some time, Klara is sold to Josie and her mum, after she has demonstrated to the Mother that she imitate Josie's idiosyncratic walk successfully.

At Josie's house, Klara learns how to be a successful AF. She also discovers that Josie is ill. She enjoys looking out across the fields at the evening sun which seems to set into Mr McBain's barn. Klara meets Rick, Josie's friend, who lives with his mum in a neighbouring property. He has designed some drones. There is a dreadful teenage party in which other friends of Josie come to socialise: they are all 'lifted' except for Rick. Josie becomes too ill to go on a promised trip to a nearby waterfall, so the Mother takes Karla instead.

There was another daughter, Clara, who died. The implication is that both Clara and Josie were lifted, an operation on their genetic makeup that has risks; that this is what killed Clara and this is why Josie is ill. Rick's mother decided not to risk it for him and therefore doomed him to dead end jobs and a second-class status.

Josie becomes even more ill and Rick starts to come round regularly and they play a game where she draws a picture with empty bubbles and he fills in the words. Rick's mother wants him to try for a college which still accepts non-lifted kids. Josie and Rick argue. Klara decides to go to the barn to ask the Sun to give his special healing rays to Josie but it's a long way and she has to be piggy-backed by Rick. There, she promises the Sun that in return for his help, she will destroy the polluting Cootings machine.

A trip to town. Josie and the Mother are going to see Mr Capaldi, who is making a 'portrait' of Josie. At his studio, Klara discovers that the portrait is a sculpture, a doll, and the plan is that Klara will learn to imitate Josie exactly and then inhabit the doll, so that if and when Josie dies the Mother will have another 'Josie'. The meet the Father, who is a talented engineer who has been supplanted by robots and now lives in a commune which is seeking to defend itself. The Father takes Klara to find the Cootings machine and helps Klara immobilise it, but it needs a significant amount of fluid from Klara's 'brain' which Klara sacrifices. Rick's mother takes him to see her ex-lover Mr Vance, a tutor at the college, hoping Rick will gain some favouritism, but the meeting ends disastrously as Mr Vance recalls all his resentment against Rick's mother from when their relationship broke down.

Josie gets worse and becomes very ill, dangerously close to death.. Klara has discovered that there are more than one Cootings machines. She goes to the barn and apologises to the Sun. On this occasion, she seems to have hallucinations, mingling what she observes with memories of the Mother's house and the Store. 

Josie recovers.

Josie goes to college; Rick meets up with friends in town, accepting his reduced possibilities. Klara, no longer wanted, retreats to a store cupboard.

Our last glimpse of Klara is in a scrap yard.

"In the Cafe of Lost Youth" by Patrick Modiano

 Reading this hard on the heels of Modiano's The Black Notebook was a disconcerting experience. Both books revolve around old people remembering when they were young. Both books focus on a young woman who has a number of aliases, about whom there is some mystery. Both books feature a detective, both have an author who narrates some if not all of the book. Both involve an iconic Parisian cafe, and students, and walking the Parisan streets and taking the metro. It is as if Modiano has reworked the material.

Especially since both books include the line: "We live at the mercy of certain silences." 

Whilst The Black Notebook was contextualised by revolutionary politics, this is contextualised by an interest in magic and the occult. It seems that Louki's favourite book is Lost Horizon, which is a potboiler that may or may not reference the earthly paradise known as Shambhala, or to modern ears Shangri La.

The title is a line taken from ‘In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni’ [We Wander in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire], a 1978  film by Guy Debord, the revolutionary and Situationist.

Selected quotes:

• "If everything was down in black and white, it meant that it was over, just like tombstones that have names and dates carved on them." (p 73)
• "Intermediary zones existed in Paris, no-man's-lands where you were on the fringes of everything, in transit, or even suspended. You enjoyed a degree of immunity there." (p 112)

September 2020; 153 pages

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog can be found here

Other books by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner

 Addie Bundren has asked to be buried not near her home but over in Jefferson; this necessitates the family making an epic journey with the coffined corpse. The journey takes far longer than it should have done, because the river has flooded and the bridges cannot be crossed, and because of the attitude of Addie's husband Anse, who repeatedly refuses help because he will not be beholden to anyone. "It's like a man who has let everything slide all his life to get set on something that will make the most trouble for everybody he knows." (p 78)

The story is told in a multiple perspective stream of consciousness, a bit like Ulysses by James Joyce, except that Faulkner uses fifteen narrators while Joyce used only three and, importantly, because Faulkner's characters sometimes know things they cannot know, transcending time and place, including the by-then-dead Addie, who has a chapter reflecting upon her life.

Once again, the fifty per cent rule works: Darl articulates secrets about both Jewel and Dewey Dell exactly half way through the book.

Characters

I was immensely confused about who was who after the first thirty pages. Each chapter is headed with the name of the character who is narrating. To be helpful, here are the main characters.

• Addie Bundren, the dying woman, later a corpse.
• Anse Bundren, her husband. He repeatedly describes himself as a 'luckless' man but it is his dogmatism, his delaying and refusal to seek help that causes many of the problems the other characters face.
• Addie and Anse have five children:
• Cash the eldest boy, a skilled carpenter, methodical and careful, and incredibly stoical.
• Darl the second eldest, the main narrator, a character who is much more fluent and articulate than any of the others, so much so that he transcends the limitations of his education.
• Jewel, the third eldest, who loves horses; it turns out that he is not Anse's son but, apart from Addie and his biological father, and perhaps Darl, and maybe Jewel himself, no one else seems to know.
• Dewey Dell, the girl, who has got herself pregnant and is secretly seeking an abortion.
• Vardaman, the littlest boy, whose stream of consciousness displays his immaturity.
• Other characters include Vernon Tull, the neighbouring farmer, and his hyper religious wife Cora (Vernon's relationship with Cora is summarised when he muses on how God could leave the Universe to Core: “I reckon if there's ere a man or woman anywhere that He could turn it all over to and go away with His mind at rest, it would be Cora. And I reckon she would make a few changes, no matter how He was running it. And I reckon they would be for man's good. Leastways, we would have to like them. Leastways, we might as well go on and make like we did.”; p 65); Peabody the doctor; and Reverend Whitfield the local pastor.

There are stupendous descriptions:

• “Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks.” (p 5)
• “It would be black, the shelf black, the still surface of the water a round orifice in nothingness.” (p 7)
• “The horse snorts, then Jewel sees him, glinting for a gaudy instant among the blue shadows.” (p 8)
• “He flows upward in a stooping swirl like the lash of a whip, his body in mid-air shaped to the horse.” (p 9)
• “The sun, an hour above the horizon, is poised like a bloody egg upon a crest of thunderheads.” (p 34)
• “She looks at us. Only her eyes seem to move. It's like they touch us, not with sight or sense, but like the stream from a hose touches you, the stream at the instant of impact as dissociated from the nozzle as though it had never been there.” (p 37 - 38)
  
• “He looks like right after the maul hits the steer and it Ed no longer alive and don't yet know that it is dead.” (p 54)
• "Motionless, the tall buzzards hang in soaring circles, the clouds giving them an illusion of retrograde." (p 82)

There are thought-provoking observations:

• “When I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind - and that of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.” (p 37)
• “Now and then a fellow gets to thinking about it. Not often, though. Which is a good thing. For the Lord aimed for him to do and not to spend too much time thinking, because his brain it's like a piece of machinery: it won't stand a whole lot of racking. It's best when it all runs along the same, doing the day's work and not no one part used no more than needful.” (p 63)
• "I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn of He don't take some curious ways to show it, seems like." (p 95)
• "You can't tell about them. Just about when you decide they mean one thing, I be durn if you not only haven't got to change your mind, like as not you got to take a raw-hiding for thinking they meant it." (p 102)
• "A fellow can see every now and then that children have more sense than him, But he don't like to admit it to them until they have beards." (p 123)
• "My father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time." (p 153)
• "How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-strings: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls." (p 188)
• "I ain't sho who's got ere a right to say when a man is crazy and when he ain't." (p 214)
• "Some folks have the smooth, pretty boards to build a court-house with and others don't have no more than rough lumber fitten to build a chicken coop. But it's better to build atight chicken coop than a shoddy court-house." (p 215)

This was one of the novels Faulkner had written before being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is a read which challenges the reader to work out who is who and what their back stories are, and I'm not sure after a single read-through that I haven't missed some of the subtleties, but the inevitability of tragedy builds up and builds up until you can hardly bear to find out what must happen next.

One of those books I need to think about and re-visit.

September 2020; 240 pages

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God