The Buried Giant had been lying on my TBR for more than a year, and Ishiguro winning the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature prompted me to pick it up from the pile. The Swedish Academy issued a very short press release on October 5th, saying no more than Kazuo Ishigoru to be an author “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”.
There are two important elements in that statement, the personal and the political, and I’ll get back to them in a moment. First, some basics on the book, and a rumination on intertextuality. Continue reading