Rating: 
Summary: This is Booker shortlist ?!?! A book without logic.
Review: A ridiculous detective novel. A *well-known* detective childishly believed that after 20 years he can come back to Shanghai to save his missing parents in the specific house. After 20 years?!! And the most stromg weapon of the detective is his magnifying glass. A magnifying glass?!I *GUESS* that Ishguro wants to make the cynic and pompous and paranoid part of Chris Banks gradually known by readers. But is it so? I doubt. The personality of Banks is unnatural and contrived and without any logic. Sometimes normal, sometimes childish, a lot of time getting paranoid. Even So, I still think Ishguro's skill far from mature to fulfill it. Then, Ishguro has not enough ability to handle such a theme in such an enviroment. Set mainly before the WW2 in Shanghai, the stories indeed acrosses more than 50 years, and scenes sparsed in different places in Shanghei and England. On the whole this novel is a bad mixture of war, detective, crime, family, traitor, sex, gang, communists..., and trying to write everything results in nothing.) The whole story is never, never persuative. The writing style shattered (on purpose), and without structure. Many scenes apparently deliberatly contrived. Yes, some sections worth read, for example the childhood live. But most of this book it is a waste of time. Some scenes are quite ridiculous and make me laugh and very angry. Laugh at the author who simplified the scenes and human in Shanghei; Angry about myself why struggling to finish it. Oh, what a amazing "magnifying glass", what a welcomed Christopher Banks, how naturally the lieutnant followed him without hesitation. These plots exists only in comics. My last question, it is one of the shortlists of Booker?!
Rating:
Summary: went wacko
Review: I thought this book had promise; it reeled me in early on. BUT, although it was very well-written, it went too wacko for me. Figuring out what the author meant during some (long!) flights of fancy after a fairly straightforward beginning was too wearing. Not worth it for this reader.
Rating:
Summary: Ishiguro rests on his laurels
Review: "When We Were Orphans" has a plot like a third-rate TV mini-series, full of implausible developments, improbable coincidences and loose ends. Ishiguro seems to be trying to make some point about the nature of evil - but quite what it is just doesn't come across. Much that would help us to understand the story is simply glossed over and hence the reader is simply left with too many unanswered questions - though do we care enough about the characters to want them answered?. Christopher Banks is the kind of emotionally constipated, self-deceiving character that Ishiguro seems to specialise in. The growing relationship between himself and Sarah Hemmings simply does not convince. Having read and very much enjoyed Ishiguro's earlier novels, I am extremely disappointed with this novel.
Rating: 
Summary: a little disappointing
Review: I found this book rather disappointing. You know, you read the little synopsis on the back, think, "That sounds cool," read the little editorial blurbs, such as,". . .pushes the boundaries of the novel," or something. And I'm keeping this in mind as I'm reading. . .realizing, right, the narrator is not who he seems to be. But I was hoping there'd be more of a breakthrough or moment of realization, and there really wasn't. I got to the end and thought, all that just to find out his mom loved him all along? Geez. I wanted more detail re his career as a detective, more evidence of his skill or train of thought as a detective. I was never sure if I liked the narrator or not, he seemed pretentious and effete. . .I suppose that was intentional, but it didn't make for a very likeable guy. The best parts were his reminiscences about Akira.
Rating:
Summary: The point seems to be missed
Review: I read the 58 reviews already posted on the subject of this book with more than a little impatience. The readers' honestly expressed disappointments - the dislikable central characters, the lack of information about detectives, the lack of depth about the details of Shanghai - miss the point. The limitations are intended and deliberate. The narrator's authority is repeatedly announced as faulty by other characters; the narrator's oddness is self-described as the assumption of other people's behavior (smiles, gestures, and slang) in order to mask himself. He becomes a detective for unrealistic and naïve reasons; his work as a detective - from his "famous" successes to his wartime adventures -- are also unrealistic and naïve. Like Remains of the Day, the story is about someone who has learned manners in order to disguise an inner hollowness, and also like Remains of the Day, the narrator is someone who has learned to play a role in order to compensate for a lack of self-awareness and true identity. These emotions are genuinely felt by the writer, and described in subtle and moving ways. More, these are roles and behavior with a literary history mentioned in the text, not just the detective fiction of Conan Doyle, but also the adventure stories of Walter Scott and the coming of age novels of Charles Dickens. Throughout the book, themes and plot devices deliberately echo Dickens: the aunt from David Copperfield, the unknown benefactor from Great Expectations, the bachelor guardian and his attractive young ward from Bleak House. The book is beautifully written, carefully constructed, oddly moving, and yet does not succeed. What prevents the whole from cohering is that the specific political issues of Japanese-occupied Shanghai, the British collusion in the opium trade, and what it means to detect the truth, not to mention the art and science of detection, are more interesting to the reader than the writer's unreliable (tall)tale-telling orphan.
Rating: 
Summary: A Master Storyteller!
Review: It is 1915, Shanghai. A ten-year-old English boy living in the international city, has his life shattered by the sudden disappearance and supposed murder of his parents. He is whisked off to England, attends a boys school and builds a successful life as a celebrated detective. He returns to Shanghai in 1937 to solve his parents' murder, but as the Chinese and Japanese are fighting each other, the reader learns that Christopher's life is a sham and all is not as it appears. So we are suddenly confronted with an unreliable narrator. What does the reader do? Kazuo Ishiguro is never content with surface events or just writing a clever mystery. It doesn't really matter that the plot is not entirely believable. There is a master storyteller at work here, grappling with larger ideas. I will not give away the story, but I guarantee that reading it is a treat. You will not be able to put it down.
Rating: 
Summary: A Roadmap Through Time
Review: I was greatly surprised by the number of reviews of people expecting this to be a full blown detective story. I found,after reading only a few pages, this was not to be the case. Christopher,I believe, is a child grown into manhood who has found a way to delude himself from his obvious childhood trauma. This done by becoming in his eyes a meticulous observer of the obvious which of course in his case is not so. He is, in a great number of incidents, quite naive but appealing. I,also found the story to have a somewhat unreal quality. However, this did not diminish my interest. Reading this book was like taking a very quiet stroll through an immense garden, stopping every so often to admire what lay before me. I appreciated the use of the English language which like Christopher was precise and very correct. For those of you that have not read this book, please give it a try. It is not a book that will blow you away with its magnificence, but should leave you saying, as if you had just finished a fine dinner, 'Yes, that was a good read'.
Rating:
Summary: A master of understatement
Review: Although not the masterpiece "Remains of the Day" was, I found this a fascinating study of a man who slowly sinks into delusion--almost without the reader realizing it. The main character's detachment from himself is quite startling. The morning after he agrees to go away with a married woman who has fascinated him for some time, he describes himself as "rather excited". Or did the conversation with her really take place as he describes it to us? One is never quite sure. And what was REALLY going on at that wedding he attends? His search for his parents in the war zone is a dream--a nightmare--a harrowing description of what war means to a people whose slum is the battleground, being fought over block by block. My book club had mixed reviews for this one--the detachment of the main character from his own reality also distances the reader. But give it a try--you won't be neutral about this one.
Rating:
Summary: When we preferred opacity to clarity
Review: Simply put, a brilliant book. Most novels (rightly so) are like rivers--you jump on and ride the waves, coast through the shallows. WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS is like a still pond. You take your boat out in the middle and (to borrow Thoreau's metaphor) plumb the bottom with a measuring stick--to see if it's solid, to see how far down it goes. In the end, the plot's a simple thing: lost-and-found parents, as it were. But the emotional consequences? The ways the narrator prefers blindness, or a kind of myopic sight, to clarity? Devastating. Beautiful. Words escape me, as his parents do him. I found my time with the narrator to be like my time with any good friend--I never know the whole story, only pieces, more and more as time goes on. I put them together, decide which memories are red herrings, which events are important--all the while listening for the whole that escapes me. Ishiguro's talent reminds me of Jane Austen's: precise, beautiful, small (this is not the right word--not small-minded or country-headed, but rather compact, exacting. The Mona Lisa, not the Sistine Chapel). This novel's rather like a beautiful miniature he's building up, one stroke at a time.
Rating:
Summary: Elegantly written, but the author held back too much.
Review: This book was very well written, and I felt sorry for the narrator for his inability to express himself or connect with others. The detective format was compelling at first, but Ishiguro gave out so few clues that it became frustrating to try to put the puzzle together.
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