Reviewing novels, short stories, plays and non fiction.
The Suicide of Rachel Foster, by OneOOne Games and Daedalic Entertainment, is another work of interactive fiction. It centres around a woman called Nicole. She has returned to her family’s dilapidated, abandoned hotel to discharge her parents’ estate, and becomes trapped by a snowstorm. She is contacted by Irving on an old, modified cell phone. He claims to be a FEMA agent, on the line to look out for people trapped by the ‘atypical storm’.
An Artist of the Floating World, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is a beautiful, hazy portrait of life in post war Japan. It explores generational tension, changing social mores, guilt and atonement. It is also another excellent example of the unreliable narrator, a trope of Ishiguro’s work.
Continue reading “An Artist of the Floating World, by Kazuo Ishiguru”
Ragle Gumm is an ordinary man lives with his sister’s family in a sleepy suburban 1950s town. He makes a living by winning a newspaper contest over and over again. He dallies with his neighbour and plots where the Little Green Man will be Next, but starts to realise all is not well. This is how Time out of Joint, by Philip K Dick, begins.
I just finished reading A Pale View of Hills, by Kazuo Ishiguro. As usual with his work, the book has stayed with me for over a day now. Etsuko is a Japanese woman, living in rural England in the 1970s. Her younger daughter Niki visits, and their conversation triggers a series of dreams and memories. She recalls a strange friendship she had with another woman called Sachiko in post-war Japan. Based in the still rebuilding city of Nagasaki, sweltering and devastated by the atomic bomb.
There will be spoilers in this review.
