About this title: In Kazuo Ishiguro's fifth novel, Christopher Banks is an English boy growing up in Shanghai. His parents disappear and are eventually presumed dead, and Christopher is raised in England by an aunt. As an adult, he becomes a prominent detective who returns to Shanghai to try to find out what happened to his family. The fateful year of his return is ...
read more
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Date Published: 2001
ISBN-13:9780571205165ISBN:057120516X
Description: Good. *** Expect to see light wear and some spine creasing *** Dispatched in padded packaging. ** UK SELLER-Get it in days not weeks ** read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Date Published: 2001
ISBN-13:9780571205165ISBN:057120516X
Description: Good. GOOD OVERALL CONDITION-TRUSTED DEVON (UK) BASED SELLER-IN STOCK-SENT WITHIN 1 WORKING DAY-AVAILABLE BY EMAIL FOR QUERIES-NO QUIBBLE REFUND IF NOT COMPLETELY SATISFIED- read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Date Published: 2001
ISBN-13:9780571205165ISBN:057120516X
Description: Good. PAPERBACK BOOK-GOOD OVERALL CONDITION-TRUSTED DEVON (UK) BASED SELLER-IN STOCK-SENT WITHIN 1 WORKING DAY-AVAILABLE BY EMAIL FOR QUERIES-NO QUIBBLE REFUND IF NOT COMPLETELY SATISFIED- read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Date Published: 2001
ISBN-13:9780571205165ISBN:057120516X
Description: Good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Date Published: 2000
ISBN-13:9780571204403ISBN:0571204406
Description: Good. This book is in GOOD overall condition. It shows signs of having been read and has general light wear to the cover, spine and pages. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Date Published: 2001
ISBN-13:9780571205165ISBN:057120516X
Description: Good. This book is in GOOD overall condition. It shows signs of having been read and has general light wear to the cover, spine and pages. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Date Published: 2000
ISBN-13:9780571205622ISBN:0571205623
Description: Good. This book is in GOOD overall condition. It shows signs of having been read and has general light wear to the cover, spine and pages. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Date Published: 2001
ISBN-13:9780571205165ISBN:057120516X
Description: Good. This book is in GOOD overall condition. It shows signs of having been read and has general light wear to the cover, spine and pages. read more
Description: Good. Ships from the UK. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Your purchase also supports literacy charities. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Date Published: 2001
ISBN-13:9780571205165ISBN:057120516X
Description: Very Good. * BOOKS DISPATCHED WITHIN 24 HOURS * SATISFACTION GUARANTEED * ALL QUESTIONS ANSWERED PROMPTLY * SHIPPED FROM UK * USA DELIVERY IN 3-5 DAYS * SHIPPED FROM UK: USA & EUROPE SPECIALISTS DELIVERY IN 3-5 DAYS. read more
"I'm trying to be tough on my rating. I just finished reading this but it was really a matter of disappointment to me. Actually, after reading "the Remains of the Day" my expectations from Kazuo Ishiguro had been intensified. I expected much and got less. It's like he's written this one with this intention that one day somebody would write a script of it for a Hollywood movie, which generally speaking is not very satisfactory. Basically I am not very much into books that are very adventurous and so many things happen in them. They sound a bit too insane to me. This one is definitely one of them. Things happen one after the other without any special reason. You can just put them away and what will be left is still a complete story. So many people get lost and then found out of blue, exactly on the path the first person is taking. The narration pattern gets boring when in almost the first half of the book you just read a memory of the narrator which points to something for which to be explained you should read another memory which in turn is very evolved with some others. The second half is so stretched that drives you crazy with all the nothing that happens in it. And at the end, in one or two very dense chapters you are flooded with information about peoples destinies and that would be all. I don't regret reading it; actually I don't regret reading any book. (Except the damned "Demian" of course.) But if you want my word, you won't miss a thing if you exclode this one from your "to be read" list."
"This story of a deluded and emotionally-stunted individual in search of his lost parents and his vanished childhood left me frustrated and disappointed. Ishiguro is an amazing writer but in this work his talent lets him down. He has the rare ability of capturing an entire character through the narrative voice he creates for him. His writing is always to clear and evocative. He displays this talent again in this book, but it is not enough to save it. As the book begins, we meet Christopher Banks growing up in the International Settlement in Shanghai with a father working for a British company and a mother passionately opposed to the opium trade. I should note here that Ishiguro's depiction of pre-war Shanghai I found not particularly evocative as compared say to J.G. Ballard's "Empire of the Sun." Christopher makes friends with a young Japanese boy his own age, Akira. (WARNING, SPOILER AHEAD). Later, at the denoument of the book, they meet again in a scene that is particularly unsatisfying. I'm not sure if Akira was supposed to be a symbolic character. if so, I was unable to grasp his symbolic significance and as a flesh-and-blood character he falls short. Christopher's father disappears and is suspected to have been kidnapped. A little later, his mother also vanishes. Christopher, then about 10, is shipped to boarding school in England.
As he recounts his schooldays, we become aware that Christopher is an unreliable narrator. He obviously thinks he fits in as a perfect little Englishman. We become aware that he obviously stands out. When people slight him, he's oblivious or pretends to be oblivious. Christopher grows up to become a "detective" in the Sherlock Holmes mode and imagines himself a fighter in the frontline against evil. His chosen profession, invoked in a deliberately old-fashioned and unrealistic manner (he seems to spend his time on his stomach peering through a magnifying glass) is evidently an attempt to compensate for the unsolved mystery of his parents' disappearance. Christopher also meets Sarah Hemmings, a fellow-orphan and similarly unmoored character. The two seem attracted to one another but also both too emotionally stunted to connect. Sarah's role in the story is strange. She doesn't seem to fit in, except as an example of Christopher's inability to find a proper place in the world. Finally, Christopher travels back to Shanghai to solve the mystery of his parents' disappearance. The city of engulfed in fighting as the Japanese threaten to take over. Christopher seems to believe that his success in clearing up his own mystery would be a decisive blow against "evil" that could somehow stave off the coming World War. In this part of the book, the plot becomes entirely unmoored from reality. I am an admirer of this author but I felt reading this book that he was trying too hard to duplicate his previous success. As a protagonist, Christopher is all too similar to Stevens from "The Remains of the Day." But this book lacks the emotional resonance of the earlier effort, which looks back ruefully on a life, a way of life and an entire empire. Ishiguro cannot keep returning to this well. He needs to find a new wellspring of inspiration. "When We Were Orphans" shows too clearly that the old well has run dry."
"Another highly unusual narrative taking place before the break out of WWII in China as the Nanking area invaded by the Japanese. Christopher is a detective whose parents were kidnapped in China when he was a child. He returns as an adult to solve their abduction, and the answer is most unexpected. Ishiguro is known for giving just enough information to intrigue, but never really answers all the questions."
"Many reviews here have commented on Ishiguro's unreliable narrators (let's let that classification stand, whether or not it is entirely valid or really applies to all of his work), as if this aspect of his fiction is so obvious, or that it has been so exhaustively mined, that there is little to nothing left to say about such a narrative strategy.
Christopher Banks, When We Were Orphans' narrator, is certainly unreliable, yes. But our relationship to him as an unreliable narrator is a strange one, an inverted one. I think that it's fairly clear to the reader early on that Banks's memories and perceptions do not align with those of the people with whom he surrounds himself and/or encounters. His school chums and his one-time guardian recount for him their memories of his child self as a lonely, melancholy boy, which contravene his insistent accounting of himself as a sociable, friendly, put-on-a-brave-face type of lad. His insistence, which seems to verge on a quiet, private hysteria, his disproportionate insult, and the confluence of multiple others' POV point us to the fact that the schism between how he sees himself and how the world sees/saw him is not just a matter of opinion. The novel shows us, time and again, that Christopher is unwilling, unable, to reconcile not only his memory but his ongoing lived experience (see the scene at the wedding where he is apparently subjugated to teasing and humiliation, but insists that said teasers are his friends, etc., and note that we never get to see the actual scene) to the lived experience and memory of others. (We also never get to see him work, to uncover anything, to solve anything.)
Here's where I'm sort of getting to my (excruciatingly long-winded) point...
When We Were Orphans tells us, its readers, that it is a mystery novel. The book offers us one story, the disappearance of Christopher's parents, claiming that this story is its central mystery and suggesting, by form and structure, that this will be the riddle we puzzle out as we read, alongside Christopher. Thus, we enter into a sort of contract with the book in which we agree to be careful, astute readers, who by dint of our diligence and hard work will be treated to the satisfaction of resolution.
All along, however, there is a secondary mystery that is actually the primary mystery, and that mystery is twofold: one, when will Christopher realize how deeply, irreparably damaged his perception of the world is, and two, WE THINK when we will learn the truth that his distorted vision has necessarily been hiding from us, despite our best efforts to see through it? Usually, in a novel that relies on an unreliable narrator (ignore the inherent contradiction), part of the reader's pleasure is untangling the skeins of the narrator's logic in order to arrive at some approximation of truth.
But Orphans rejects that second possibility completely. (I am in no way suggesting that this novel's project is one of relativism, in which we're meant to see that there is no objective truth, or if there is, we cannot access it.) All along the mystery/mysteries is/are just a diversion, a smokescreen, a trick (that I admire deeply and totally respect) that leads us in a circle back to what we see, finally, is an absent center. There is no mystery in the book. The truth isn't the point. There is only the fact of Christopher's mutilating orphaning, his abandonment. His grievous misapprehension of his parents' abduction/leave-taking, the emotional/psychological violence of it,and his child's need to make sense and order of the insensible strand him in mental time; he is marooned in a make-believe world in which detectives are great heroes and even celebrities, a la Sherlock Holmes--a world that history tells us did not exist as such, especially in twentieth century Britain.
When Sarah offers Christopher the chance to reject his false understanding of the world, to "see clearly," and to reject a vision of himself (one that is manufactured by an innocent egotism/narcissism that has sustained him all along) in which he is the savior not only of his parents, but also of an entire city and perhaps nation, he is, finally, unable to do so. To give that up would be to negate himself, to reject his very identity. He would be twice-orphaned.
There's a lot going on here vis a vis the orphaning, of course--colonialism and imperialism, the patronizing"helping" of the east by the west, sexual politics and power, issues of class, et al. But as I read I felt more compelled by what's "missing" in this novel than what's there.
I'll confess to being somewhat befuddled by and disappointed in the final revelation concerning Christopher's mother, and unsure about the necessity of Jennifer. My only thought about Jennifer's utility (and despite its coldness, that word seems apt) is that perhaps she's meant to enact the cycle of violence that "orphaning" perpetuates... she is orphaned twice over, and the novel's end suggests how devastating this has been for her.
When I finished the book I found myself returning to its title, over and then over again. First person narratives usually require, despite old Bobby D.'s admonition, a looking back. They are necessarily retrospective. My mind lingers on the titular "When." Despite how sad the book is, despite its ambiguous ending, the title left me feeling hopeful for Christopher in that it seems to suggest that the time of his orphaning, of Jennifer's, and even of Sarah's (sigh), is past, is gone and that, no longer orphans, having chosen to look forward, to abandon their isolation and to rely on each other, on other people they might, oh they just might... be happy."
We guarantee every item's condition, as described on Alibris. If you are not satisfied that an item is as described, return your purchase for a refund.
rating
