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When We Were Orphans Paperback - 2001
by Kazuo Ishiguro
During the Sino-Japanese War, a young man returns to Shanghai to solve the mystery of his parents' disappearance some 20 years earlier. From the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of "The Remains of the Day" comes this work of soaring imagination, a "New York Times" Notable Book.
Summary
British writer Kazuo Ishiguro won the 1989 Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day, which sold over a million copies in English alone and was the basis of a film starring Anthony Hopkins. Now When We Were Orphans, his extraordinary fifth novel, has been called "his fullest achievement yet" (The New York Times Book Review) and placed him again on the Booker shortlist. A complex, intelligent, subtle and restrained psychological novel built along the lines of a detective story, it confirms Ishiguro as one of the most important writers in English today. London's Sunday Times said: "You seldom read a novel that so convinces you it is extending the possibilities of fiction."The novel takes us to Shanghai in the late 1930s, with English detective Christopher Banks bent on solving the mystery that has plagued him all his life: the disappearance of his parents when he was eight. By his own account, he is now a celebrated gentleman sleuth, the toast of London society. But as we learn, he is also a solitary figure, his career built on an obsession. Believing his parents may still be held captive, he longs to put right as an adult what he was powerless to change as a child, when he played at being Sherlock Holmes -- before both his parents vanished and he was sent to England to be raised by an aunt. Banks' father was involved in the importation of opium, and solving the mystery means finding that his boyhood was not the innocent, enchanted world he has cherished in memory. The Shanghai he revisits is in the throes of the Sino--Japanese war, an apocalyptic nightmare; he sees the horror of the slums surrounding the international community in "a dreamscape worthy of Borges" (The Independent). "We think that if we can only put something right that went a bit awry, then our lives would be healed and the world would be healed," says Ishiguro of the illusion under which his hero suffers. It becomes increasingly clear that Banks is not to be trusted as a narrator. The stiff, elegant voice grows more hysterical, his vision more feverish, as he comes closer to the truth. Like Ryder of The Unconsoled, Ishiguro's previous novel, Banks is trapped in his boyhood fantasy, and he follows his obsession at the cost of personal happiness. Other characters appear as projections of his fears and desires. All Ishiguro's novels concern themselves with the past, the consequences of denying it and the unreliability of memory.It is from Ishiguro's own family history that the novel takes its setting. Though his family is Japanese, Ishiguro's father was born in Shanghai's international community in 1920; his grandfather was sent there to set up a Chinese branch of Toyota, then a textile company. "My father has old pictures of the first Mr. Toyota driving his Rolls-Royce down the Bund." When the Japanese invaded in 1937, the fighting left the international commune a ghetto, and his family moved back to Nagasaki.When We Were Orphans raises the bar for the literary mystery. Though more complex than much of Ishiguro's earlier work, which has led to mixed reactions, it was published internationally (his work has been published in 28 languages) and was a New York Times bestseller.From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the publisher
First line
IT WAS THE SUMMER of 1923, the summer I came down from Cambridge, when despite my aunt's wishes that I return to Shropshire, I decided my future lay in the capital and took up a small flat at Number 14b Bedford Gardens in Kensington.
From the jacket flap
From the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of Remains of the Day" comes this stunning work of soaring imagination.
Born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, Banks was orphaned at the age of nine after the separate disappearances of his parents. Now, more than twenty years later, he is a celebrated figure in London society; yet the investigative expertise that has garnered him fame has done little to illuminate the circumstances of his parents' alleged kidnappings. Banks travels to the seething, labyrinthine city of his memory in hopes of solving the mystery of his own, painful past, only to find that war is ravaging Shanghai beyond recognition-and that his own recollections are proving as difficult to trust as the people around him.
Masterful, suspenseful and psychologically acute, When We Were Orphans" offers a profound meditation on the shifting quality of memory, and the possibility of avenging one's past.
Born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, Banks was orphaned at the age of nine after the separate disappearances of his parents. Now, more than twenty years later, he is a celebrated figure in London society; yet the investigative expertise that has garnered him fame has done little to illuminate the circumstances of his parents' alleged kidnappings. Banks travels to the seething, labyrinthine city of his memory in hopes of solving the mystery of his own, painful past, only to find that war is ravaging Shanghai beyond recognition-and that his own recollections are proving as difficult to trust as the people around him.
Masterful, suspenseful and psychologically acute, When We Were Orphans" offers a profound meditation on the shifting quality of memory, and the possibility of avenging one's past.
Details
- Title When We Were Orphans
- Author Kazuo Ishiguro
- Binding Paperback
- Edition First Thus
- Pages 352
- Volumes 1
- Language ENG
- Publisher Vintage, New York
- Date 2001-10-30
- ISBN 9780375724404 / 0375724400
- Weight 0.62 lbs (0.28 kg)
- Dimensions 8.02 x 5.24 x 0.82 in (20.37 x 13.31 x 2.08 cm)
- Reading level 1030
-
Themes
- Cultural Region: Asian - General
- Cultural Region: British
- Cultural Region: Asian - Chinese
- Cultural Region: Southeast Asian
- Ethnic Orientation: Asian - General
- Library of Congress subjects Mystery fiction, Psychological fiction
- Dewey Decimal Code FIC
Excerpt
Media reviews
Citations
- BookPage, 11/01/2001, Page 43
- New York Times, 11/04/2001, Page 36
About the author
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