Rating: 
Summary: I want more!
Review: This is the first Ishiguro I've read, and I can't wait to read the others. I picked it up by accident, and couldn't put it down till I'd finished it. Call me ignorant if you will, but I knew nothing about the author or the title and was amazed to see in the title page, after I'd finished reading, that it was published as recently as September 2000. I love reading inter-war literature; this man replicated that era of writing perfectly with his precise, vivid writing. The tale, as someone's noted before, is simple; like much of modern literature, the art lies in the telling. Where does imagination begin and reality end? Where does one time stop and another begin? The reader has to determine the answers for himself; like the best works of art, When We Were Orphans is what you make of it. There are plenty of loose ends -- who, for instance, is the mysterious Mr Grayson, and what dreadful thing that happened to Jennifer prompted her to seek refuge in the moors? There are no answers because the narrator hasn't found them himself. Yet it doesn't matter, because life doesn't provide all the answers all the time. I'd recommend this book for anyone who thinks modern English literature is all about playing with words and using 'spoken' English. This is English as it should be written, and I don't know of too many who can do it better. It's a brilliant book.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting Failure
Review: I found this novel to be an interesting failure for two reasons. First, one can't tell if it is the author or the narrator who is incompetent. Second, assuming it's the narrator, the point of his history and delusions remains obscure.
Rating: 
Summary: A good read... borders on the surreal
Review: I enjoyed reading this book. It kept my interest the entire time . At one point during the last quarter, I began to question the sanity of the main character, Christopher Banks. I had read one of the author's previous novels, The Unconsoled, which is based completely in a surreal realm... one never truly knows or understands what is going on in that story. In this novel, however, the moment I was most impressed with was during Christopher's search for his parents in a war zone. Everything seemed like a nightmare...and as I was reading I found myself feeling anxious everytime he took a wrong turn or was diverted in some way-- A dreamscape from which he finally wakes up and realizes how he has been misleading himself. This sense of the nightmarish I felt was pulled off quite well. The story ends satisfactorily and with a surprise.
Rating:
Summary: A Top Mixture
Review: When We Were Orphans is a delightful mixture of Ishiguro's early and late styles of writing. Following on from his experimental The Unconsoled, it works with elements of chance and random selection as a way of propelling the story. But it also incorporates his masterful style of writing about a character who confesses nothing but shows everything which he used in his first three novels. This mixture of style is bringing his fiction past new boundaries and while the effect feels strange you also feel that you are presented with a rich picture of a person's identity. Many people have criticized the central character of Christopher because they feel his profession isn't believable. This would be true if his profession weren't simply an artifice to his prime motive as a character. That is to rediscover his parents and homeland. The result is that you discover a solid identity can't be re-gained but is perpetually created within the movement of history. Rather than view Christopher's profession as a narrative trick, think of it as a performance of which the character is unaware.
Rating:
Summary: Confusing?
Review: Having just finished this book and having enjoyed it mostly, I would just like to comment on a very long and complicated review of this book in these pages, written on October 22, in which the erudite reviewer was under the impression that most of the action in the Far East took place in Hong Kong! What book could this reviewer have been reading? Believe me, Hong Kong never was, has been or is Shanghai!
Rating:
Summary: Give it Time
Review: Ishiguro's most recent novel is certainly not my favorite, a distinction reserved for A Pale View of Hills. However, it was a fascinatining read nonetheless. Presented in a more straightforward manner than his other stories, one could fall into the trap of reading it at face value.There's much more beneath the surface, however. From the beginning, the narrator's perceptions seem to differ from reality, starting with his belief that he fit in at school, and building to the delusion that he might find his parents, still alive in war-torn Shanghai twenty years after their abduction. It's a theme that Ishiguro has used with respect to the narrators in Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled, but here it is elevated to a new level. My biggest complaints are these: First, that the ground he treads here has been explored by him in the earlier novels, and second, that Christopher's delusions of his mission's importance seem almost too extreme to be believable. Like all of his work, it is a novel that must be savored. Take time with it, absorb it. It's worth the time.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: After reading The Remains of the Day I became a fan of Kazuo Ishiguro. After reading When We Were Orphans, however, I realized that what worked in the previous novel -- an at-arms-length narration and storyboard structure -- does not work in this book. At times I almost got the feeling that it was specifically written to be a movie, for the structure reads almost like a screenplay, yet the dialogue is so weak, a total rewrite would be required. The plot is a most interesting one, but the execution is so flawed as to make one impatient for the end; not a feeling to have when settling down with a novel, especially one so eagerly anticipated.
Rating:
Summary: To build a good world
Review: Ishiguro, as someone with intimate knowledge of English culture, while being in some ways outside of it, writes of an old world that has crumbled away and a new uncertain one that is slowly forming. He examines with great insight the trauma this has meant for those who belonged by class or by servitude to the elite of the old world. The Remains of the Day and his most recent book are a metaphor for what happens to such people when "the day is nearly over", or when they "become orphans". These books are also scathing denunciations of how the old world of power and privilege created a class of irresponsible and greedy people who were at the same time self-complacent, uninformed and blind to the reality outside of their privileged cocoon. When We Were Orphans is by far Ishiguro's most stinging condemnation of such an elite when it constitutes an empire that uses its power simply for self-aggrandizement, conniving hypocritically with despised "inferiors", in total disregard of the misery it has created or is an accomplice to. He uses the "surreal" mode to chronicle the horror that is the fate of the poor and the terrible cruelty that war brings to their lives, while the contiguous "international settlement" parties and drinks and gossips about internal love affairs, standing idly by while the world hurtles towards a catastrophe. Even the most decent of this elite, like the protagonist, are essentially stunted, incapable of growing or of expressing their feelings and ultimately of taking responsibility for themselves and others. Christopher has chosen his life's work in accordance with his goal of "defeating evil", but in the end he has little to show for his life except "old newspaper clippings" that speak of insignificant, long-past cases he solved as a "detective". In fact, the events of his life force him to acknowledge that he has not only failed to "defeat evil", but has actually been dependent on it for the modicum of comfortable living he has enjoyed. No wonder that a number of American readers are puzzled or annoyed with this book. The hands of the clock of their empire are still some way off from "the remains of the day". Nevertheless, it is a book whose sensitivity, subtlety and imagination gives us all a chance to look in the mirror before it is too late, to discover in time that we do not need after all to be orphans of some make-believe nursery world of luxury, but could develop into human beings who are capable of expressing feelings and perceiving the feelings of others, and taking responsibility for each other as members of a human family. The world need not hurtle to catastrophe while we watch. Ishiguro's real message is that of the doomed Japanese soldier who at last understands and begs Christopher to tell his son "to build a good world".
Rating:
Summary: perplexing
Review: I try not to be swayed by pre-pub blurbs nor even reviews, but the raves for this book drew me to it, only to be disappointed. It has the oddest combination of sweeping and miniscule pallette. On the one hand, Christopher's inner life is stuffy and confined, almost a cliche of the male English spinister, his passions so tightly cloaked as to be painful, yet the action-sweeping across continents-encompasses war, the machinations of the opium trade, and an excrutiatingly drawn out campaign to solve childhood mysteries. The subplot of Mr. Banks' adoption of Jennifer, while affecting in itself, seems contrived to give resonance to the orphan theme. In the end, I couldn't reconcile the small inner world of this strangely withheld man with his adventures in a the world beyond himself, a world filled with almost numbing action and intrigue.
Rating: 
Summary: The Unconsoled - part two - maybe
Review: What if you lived a life of a lie? Getting into Kazuo Ishiguro's mind is difficult, but he must have read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Like Pip, young Christopher was supported as a gentlemen by an endowment that was not quite what he thought. What happens when your life is no longer what you think? The life of Sarah Hemings is not what he thought either. Like in "The Unconsoled", Christopher enters into a lost world of rear entries, mysterious passages, unfamilier, and disappearing landmarks. People appear and disappear in a nightmarish experience while he is trying to reach his goal. Beyond the maze lies the truth -the unobtainable truth. Or is the truth is far from previous belief? When our truths become unsubstantiated what do we do? What do we do when our core beliefs about ourselves are proven unless. What Christopher does is... But that is the story. You will think for this book for a while. Writers - this book is a good example of the use of movement through time - compressed time and expanded time.
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