Product Description

In his, highly acclaimed debut, A PALE VIEW OF HILLS, Kazuo Ishiguro tells the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. Retreating into the past, she finds herself reliving one particular hot summer in Nagasaki, when she and her friends struggled to rebuild their lives after the war. But then as she recalls her strange friendship with Sachiko - a wealthy woman reduced to vagrancy - the memories take on a disturbing cast.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43834 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Customer Reviews

Choosing to Tell
This is an amazing first novel and it is a good introduction to Ishiguro for readers who haven't read his books before. It is so delicately told from the point of view of a woman who has survived WWII. You are given only brief personal glimpses of her life, yet those glimpses spark an enormous amount of questions revealing her to be a woman of deep complexity. You would expect her to be pondering the life of her daughter Keiko, but she spends most of her time remembering the mysterious woman Sachiko who she knew briefly in Nagasaki. Over the course of reading the novel you begin to understand that this is a way for her to process her emotions over her daughter's death. Pondering the mysteries of a woman she can never understand is preferable to admitting the responsibility for her daughter's suicide. Perhaps she contributed in some way to her death? From her obsession with Sachiko and Sachiko's daughter Mariko we understand that she is possibly drawing parallels between the girls. While this mystery looms in the background you are brought deeply into her observations of Sachiko and her story of a single woman trying to survive independently. Through the entire time Ishiguro is very careful about what is and is not given away. He is a master at telling and not telling. The selection that goes into telling has an impact on the way we interpret what is told. In this way he explores human complexities that few other writers are able to dig into. Our view of Etsuko, like our view of Nagasaki, is blurred and from this not quite clear view we understand that this Japanese woman still has a lot more to tell.

Pay Attention
Having read "Never Let Me Go" and "The Remains of the Day", I was expecting a novel that left me asking questions and would make me feel a little bit empty. I was not wrong.

That is not to say that Kazuo Ishigur's novels are bad. Far from it. But if you expect to put this novel down with a neat happy ending and no questions you'll be disappointed and confused.

You really need to pay attention to the novel to understand it, there are sublte hints which at first might not make much sense, but do not dismiss them out of hand.

If you're still missing the plot there's plenty of online sources out there which will explain the plot to you in a little more detail, but don't look at these until you've finished the book.

When it all falls into place I'll guarantee you'll see why this book is actually far more intelligent than it originally seems.

Quality Creative Writing
This, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel, is similar at face value to his better known works The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go but, on closer inspection, is darker in tone and very different in its approach. The novel is the memoir of Etsuko, a woman who has left Japan for England after World War II. Without much in the way of explicitly narrated action, the reader is left to join the dots of her experiences, gaining insight into Japan's fractured post-war culture along the way. Unlike the narrators in the aforementioned later works, Etsuko does not naively misunderstand the importance of events in her life. On the contrary, she is a tortured character. She is all too aware of the scars she has been left with and is tentatively trying to explore where they came from.

Many readers accuse A Pale View of Hills of making no sense. It makes sense once you know that Ishiguro wrote it straight after taking an MA in Creative Writing. The reason the book is so beloved of English students is also its greatest weakness: read it meticulously enough and you can easily see the main ploys Ishiguro has used to toy with his readers. There's no need to read it twice.

The book follows a well-trodden "modern" path, exploring the unreliable mind of a narrator for whom past trauma leaves an imprint on every memory. Different chapters in the narrator's life are interleaved to throw recurring cultural clashes and emotional crises into sharp relief. Emotive symbolism mixes with classic horror motifs ("to keep the reader's attention," you can almost hear his lecturer saying) and result is a subtle cocktail, part disturbing enigma, part beautifully understated character study. In the end, however, you'll want to say: Very clever Kazuo. But where's the plot? Where's the substance? It was to come in later novels.