The Buried Giant

I was wondering what I'd get when I noticed what appeared to be fantasy from [a:Kazuo Ishiguro 4280 Kazuo Ishiguro https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1424906625p2/4280.jpg] on the library shelf. [b:The Buried Giant 22522805 The Buried Giant Kazuo Ishiguro https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1451444392s/22522805.jpg 41115424] proves to be remarkably Kazuo. In this fictional Albion with ongoing Anglo-Saxon conflict, he threads an underlying question of what it means to be British, that to me feels like the kind of interrogation you can only really have when you grow up a non-native Brit. It's startling, at least to me, to see the landscapes of England shifted to fantasy and yet described so accurately (or what I imagine to be accurately). He gets the spirit of the place.Setting aside, the novel is an odd, timeskipping piece. We're kept in the dark about most of the plot, since the characters don't really know what's going on half the time anyway. It's interesting to meet characters who don't remember their own lives, but I wouldn't say the experience is particularly fun. The jumps in perspective and time, even mid paragraph, are disorienting. Again, that's sort of the point, I suppose, but it's not easy to read. Ishiguro gets an amazing sense of tone and atmosphere here; it's certainly “literary” or at least feels that way. Yet impressive prose doesn't make it entirely enjoyable, so come into this with appropriate expectations...