an artist of the floating world book review

has been replaced by a Western-style business district, where young businessmen wheel and deal, with their eyes to a new horizon, and with no thoughts about the old man sitting on a park bench and watching them with pride and affection. As it is, a husband-hunting daughter and a job-hunting onetime protégé now view him as a liability.' Once again, the Briefly Noted review picked up on Ishiguro's adept play with the themes of age and memory:īy the end, in 1950, the city's 'floating world'. The New Yorker' s Briefly Noted review called it 'a fine, strong novel.The plot's subtle pattern is the attentive reader's ample reward.' The reviewer remarked upon Ishiguro's skill in showing, through thoughts and dreams, how his protagonist was shaped by her experiences as a girl after the bombing of Nagasaki: 'This web of memories features the child's nightmarish visions, which now haunt Etsuko.'įour years later, Ishiguro returned with ' An Artist of the Floating World,' which is set in an unnamed Japanese city in the years directly following the Second World War and which is narrated by an elderly artist stranded by the nationalist propaganda work that 'might have made him a national hero if the Second World War had gone differently. ' A Pale View of Hills,' published in 1982, is about a middle-aged Japanese woman named Etsuko who, living in England, finds her life disrupted when one of her daughters commits suicide. Here is a brief guide to those novels, and a look back at what the magazine's critics had to say about their author. Over the past twenty years, as he has developed a reputation as one of Britain's most ambitious and sophisticated writers, each of his five novels has been reviewed in The New Yorker.

It is Ishiguro's first piece for The New Yorker, but he is not new to the magazine's pages. 'A Village After Dark,' a short story by Kazuo Ishiguro, appears in this week's magazine and here online (see Fiction).

An artist of the floating world book review