5/30/2023 0 Comments The buried giant kazuoSome of the oddness comes from the medieval terrain: This is a novel about an elderly couple going from one village to the next, set in a semi-historical England of the sixth or perhaps seventh century, in which the Britons and the Saxons have been at bloody war. In “The Buried Giant,” his seventh and latest, he begins with clear, unhurried, unfussy language to describe the England of some 1,500 years ago, in a novel as well crafted as it is odd. Kazuo Ishiguro is a remarkable novelist, both for the quality of his work - because his novels share a careful, precise approach to language and to character - and because he does not ever write the same novel, or even the same type of novel, twice. This has left me a little shy of talking about allegory, and very shy of ever mentioning “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Once, many years ago, a French translator decided that my novel “Stardust” was an allegory, based on and around John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress” (it wasn’t), and somewhat loosely translated the book with footnotes to that effect. It is a way of making our metaphors concrete, and it shades into myth in one direction, allegory in another. It is a way of talking about things that are not, and cannot be, literally true.
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