When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro - Book Discussion

This month's book is When We Were Orphans, a novel that Ishiguro himself described as "Not my best book". High praise! Let me know if you think this book deserves a critical reappraisal, or if it belongs squarely in the B-Tier of Ishiguro's bibliography.
Articles Referenced:
Dean, D, 'Ishiguro and the abandoned
child: The parody of
international crisis and
representation in When
We Were Orphans'
Ionescu, A, 'An Imagological Reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s
When We Were Orphans'
Olivier, B, 'Literature After Ranciére: Ishiguro's When We Were
Orphans and Gibson's Neuromancer'
Shang, B, 'The Maze of Shanghai Memory in Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans'
Tan, J, 'The International Settlement: The Fantasy of International
Writing in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans'
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[@samanthareed1357]

"Let's ignore the fact he's adopted an orphan ... he certainly does" 😂

[@devishreepawar6296]

I got this book and I assumed things would get intense as the story progresses, but I 'm only halfway and am really disappointed so far. Came to see if there were any good reviews/ spoilers for the book and your video summed it up pretty well for me. Thanks man!!

[@marziasadat5591]

I actually liked it and cried so much in the end when he found his mother...😔

[@shawnbreathesbooks]

Holy cow, you’ve got it going on here! Such a dynamic way of presenting . New subscriber and old BookTuber here. You’ll soon overtake me, subscriber-count-wise. Keep going and I’ll keep watching! 😀

[@eddiecational]

Thank you Shawn! I really appreciate it - absolutely no way I overtake you anytime soon but thank you for saying so :)

[@corsewonder4761]

i loved the book, thought it better than most of his other books and i'm amazed again and again by people complaining about the thin crime story. don't they get that's not the point here?

[@joeomalley2835]

Thanks for the review. I read this one awhile back and enjoyed it.

[@maciekhawryeczko2384]

Oh well, I was rather disappointed with this book. Partly my fault, as I expected a lot more of crime story tension - there’s a bit of it, but not much. It is certainly not a detective fiction but - as you suggest - a reflection on the topic of perception of self and reality. Quite frankly, I grew to like Christopher along the novel, and it was very late when I started to realise he might have trouble with accepting the reality or relating it truthfully. The whole business with magnifying glass did not catch my attention, but I became alert after the scene, where Christopher is attending a wedding reception and suddenly a groom’s brother comes to him apologising for other guests’ behaviour, namely making fun of him. I read those pages time after time and any mention of anyone laughing at Banks is nowhere to find. So I assumed he simply removed beyond his consciousness anything difficult or unfitting. He never talks about his cases, how he solved them, and in this he reminds me of Cathy H. from ‘Never Let Me Go’ - a certain shyness or inclination to remain silent about things which are indeed important; a shyness which covers some very real longings (a trait I perhaps find in myself sometimes, to a small extent). It becomes rather evident when he says that sometimes he got a feeling that he had been a disappointment to people around him. But then in the end we see Mr Banks in the reading room of a library, going over old newspaper clippings about his solved cases. Eventually he comes to terms with his self-satisfaction, and I couldn’t blame him - it makes him more honest. After watching your video I would agree that the whole Settlement is a symbol of an unreal dimension, where we enjoy staying and where we can have things the way we’d like them to be. But Settlement was impossible to maintain, and so is this dimension. And so is childhood. There were some precious moments in the book. I loved the scene when Akira cries, and Christopher is unable to say anything (the whole context of their disagreement, who’s more prone to weep, Japanese or English!); he simply provides his friend with more damp wood to tear apart. A gentle gesture, which shows something of a true friendship: one doesn’t need to know proper words to express love. All the more reason however to lament the lack of information about what happened to Akira. Certainly the Japanese soldier could not have been him: just days before that Christopher thought he saw him strutting around Shanghai in a Western suit, and suddenly he is a Japanese conscript? Would Akira build his family life in Japan? Etc. But the moment I liked the most is confrontation of Uncle Philip and Christopher Banks. Especially when Philip shouts: ‘Because I want you to know the truth! […] I meant to do good in this world’. It shook me, I must say: all the impossible situations Philip found himself in; all his desires and passions - some dark - which he is ready to acknowledge; all his zeal for the better world, destroyed by the brutal reality of this world - all of this compared to Christopher’s easy career path and well-provided life; his tendency to hide his self-admiration; his pompous reflections on the root or nature of evil… What a great scene. It really made me think, I’m still not over it. Certainly, as you say, it is a book about delusion of an ability to solve the world’s problems. It’s most manifest in this moment of the book. Thanks for this video, good job. It allowed me to see some things much clearer.

[@margute22]

my expert analysis is that i think ishiguro would enjoy PepoParty ty for listening

[@katiexyz3263]

It had the potential to be a much stronger book if the childlike regression Christopher experiences due to trauma was more starkly revealed.

[@pratyushpadhee636]

What about the ending, does christopher live happily with his mother thereafter?

[@eddiecational]

It's a good question - I think I'm in the camp of thinking that it isn't actually his mother in the care home and that this is a slight reversion to Christopher's habit of seeing his childhood in other people. Whilst she does react to 'Puffin', there's every chance that's a completely unrelated event in this woman's life. (For the record, I think Christopher knows this too - hence why he doesn't reveal himself to the staff that work at the facility!). Thanks for watching!!

[@pratyushpadhee636]

@@eddiecational that's a good interpretation. I appreciate it. Because this Novel is an engagement of narrator's fantasy mechanisms in his narrative. He is a complex character like other ishiguros narrators.i hope his relationship with sarah is so baffling