The Buried Giant - Ida's BookWyrm

English language

Published April 16, 2015

ISBN:: 978-0-307-27103-7

(1 review)

The Buried Giant is a fantasy novel by the Nobel Prize-winning British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, published in March 2015.The novel follows an elderly Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, living in a fictional post-Arthurian England in which no-one is able to retain long-term memories. After dimly recalling that they might years earlier have had a son, the couple decide to travel to a neighbouring village to seek him out. The book was nominated for the 2016 World Fantasy Award for best novel, and the 2016 Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature. It was also placed sixth in the 2016 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.

5 editions

Dion H reviewed The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

Interesting ideas but meandering execution

3 stars

The ending picks up and makes some interesting points but it's a fairly long-winded road to get there. The general theme around memory and forgetting is definitely the best aspect of the book, and it makes me wish that more time had been spent developing all of the other elements to make it a rich, well-rounded read. The characters were all quite bland. I don't feel like I ended up emotionally invested in any of them, and I think a lot of that was due to the dialogue. All of the characters spoke in the exact same way, and it was a bizarrely formal/polite/detached style that made them feel inhuman. The main couple talked a lot about how much they loved each other, but it didn't really come across in the rest of the writing. At first I thought maybe this was part of the magic of the mist, clouding …

The ending picks up and makes some interesting points but it's a fairly long-winded road to get there. The general theme around memory and forgetting is definitely the best aspect of the book, and it makes me wish that more time had been spent developing all of the other elements to make it a rich, well-rounded read. The characters were all quite bland. I don't feel like I ended up emotionally invested in any of them, and I think a lot of that was due to the dialogue. All of the characters spoke in the exact same way, and it was a bizarrely formal/polite/detached style that made them feel inhuman. The main couple talked a lot about how much they loved each other, but it didn't really come across in the rest of the writing. At first I thought maybe this was part of the magic of the mist, clouding their mind and taking away their personality and emotion but it never changes so I guess not. By the end, the world was a bit more filled out but for a lot of the time it was as bland as the people.

I think this could have been a really fantastic short story but, as it is, it's a mostly tedious meander for the first 2/3rds that delivers a good ending. I'm just not sure the ending is good enough to justify the investment.