A Pale View of Hills
Kazuo Ishiguro, 1982
183 pages
Read in 2025.02
check synopsis and details on amazon.com
🔽 Intro and review summary 🔽
✔ Memories of the post war chaos of Nagasaki
✔ Struggles of mothers and unreliable nostalgia
✔ Mother daughter relationship
★★★★★ Ishiguro's stories always have some subtle sarcasm and slight malice of seemingly "normal" kind people. Here you get some madness. It's quiet but it squeezes out our bad intentions we'd like to hide.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
His debut novel. Actually they just released a Japanese film based on this book as I write this post.
As always his books are both so Japanese and so English at the same time and there is nobody else in the world who can write with this mixed sentiment.
His stories are always slightly twisted with a hint of evil of ordinary people.
Here there's a small madness of Sachiko and her daughter always hanging in the air, while everyone else is perfectly polite, but all slightly selfish. Brilliant, I mean that's how we all are, aren't we.
The struggle of loss and the post war, past and present. Women with regrets. Women trying to close their past, Etsuko trying to come to terms with her past.
True, like Etsuko the narrator says, memories are not reliable. Her memories are vague, for her sanity, to comfort herself. And what is wrong with that, she hurt herself enough, she struggled enough.
A book by Ishiguro, always a pleasure to read. They are quiet, but they squeeze out who we are deeply inside.
🔽 Where to buy / Summary and info 🔽
●●● Amazon.com (US) ●●●
A Pale View of Hills Paperback
Amazon.co.uk (UK)
A Pale View of Hills: Kazuo Ishiguro Paperback
Amazon.it (Italy)
Pale View of Hills Paperback - English
Un pallido orizzonte di colline Paperback
赤パンの本棚 akapan's bookshelf 