A Pale View of Hills: Kazuo Ishiguro

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A Pale View of Hills will also leave its readers with a myriad of possibilities to consider, but only for them to discover later that, probably, much guesswork has been futile here.

The famous 'twist' towards the end is once of the most unusual and clever devices and will make you stop in your tracks and re-think the whole situation. I have read all of Kazuo Ishiguro's other novels/short stories but for some reason this, his debut, I left until last. A Pale View of Hills concerns Etsuko, a Japanese woman living in England, and the story of her past in Nagasaki. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer. Through the interactions between father and son and husband and wife, Jiro is portrayed in a poor light.Etsuko is not yet a mother but soon will be, and all indications suggest that she will be a good mother. I kept hoping it would develope into something, that I would learn more about the tragedies that befell each individual in the narrative, but I was left feeling somewhere between flat and bewildered by the end. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Anyone narrating his or her past uses a lot of confabulation, engages in make believe, but let’s say you live through having an atomic bomb dropped on you, as Etsuko has. But the fact is that even to the end of this book nothing has ever turned out well for Etsuko, and nothing probably ever will. In the destruction of Nagasaki, the westernization of Japan, has the dust risen up to make the way forward a blind man's game? This pair is comprised of an older Etsuko and Niki, a daughter Etsuko has had by a second English-born husband. I wonder if this is a metaphor for the burden of guilt she later carries about her daughter's death.

However, that’s not the only thing Etsuko’s worried about, and as the story develops, we sense that there’s something not quite right about her friend and her relationships. The story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. Speaks Japanese still with his parents, yes, but in one interview he has described his use of the language as a pidgin Japanese.

And all of a sudden you're unsure who is talking to whom, and when, and you start to realize that you have been taking what your narrator says at face value when perhaps you shouldn't have. From her window, across a stretch of wasteland, Etsuko can see, much closer to the river, an old cottage built in the traditional Japanese style. Etsuko San indeed represents a true Japanese conventional woman who is kind, considerate, helpful and duly cautious as well; so does her father-in-law, Ogata-San.

Maybe the only way we can be objective about the story of our lives is by removing parts of ourselves from it, making ourselves observers of our past, and accepting the painful and the ugly. I have Remains of the Day waiting on my shelf for me to pick up soon, but your review has me interested in A Pale View of the Hills, too! We eventually start to guess that Etsuko’s memory of the suicide of her older daughter Keiko in England is somehow linked to Etsuko’s recollections of her friendship with a strange woman Sachiko and her daughter Mariko at the time that she lived in Nagasaki. One finds it hard to believe that even bad mother Sachiko, much less Etsuko, could have been capable of such cruelty. In the story, we first meet Etsuko, a middle-aged woman from Japan who is now residing in the English countryside, while her younger daughter Niki lives in London.