When We Were Orphans
'You seldom read a novel that so convinces you it is extending the possibilities of fiction.' Sunday TimesEngland, 1930s. Christopher Banks has become the country's most celebrated detective, his cases the talk of London society. Yet one unsolved crime has always haunted him: the mysterious disappearance of his parents, in old Shanghai, when he was a small boy. Moving between London and Shanghai of the inter-war years, When We Were Orphans is a remarkable story of memory, intrigue and the need to return.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2017–2020years
67% recommend33% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Good question. On this recommendation, I immediately went to Audible, but they apparently don't have the '99 books-on-tape version.
I can say that I've "read" more Ishiguro through audiobooks than paper, and that they've all been excellent. Rosalyn Landor's Never Let Me Go was particularly moving.
The first-person perspective used by Ishiguro in several of his novels lends itself very well to the format. When We Were Orphans isn't typically considered one of his stronger works, but as a "told tale" I found it fascinating.
- Great! Not that the Nobel prize means anything to me, but I simply love Kazuo Ishiguro. His surreal novels are always moving to me. I absolutely love how he plays with unreliable narrators, like in "The Remains of the Day", "A Pale View of Hills" and "When We Were Orphans". He shows how they are flawed, sometimes self-sabotaging, but we (or rather, I) still empathize with them.
The ending of "The Remains of the Day" always moves me, almost to tears. How the butler, having realized he threw his life away for people who were not worth it, is at it again, repeating the same mistakes and having learned (almost) nothing. And still, I root for him.
- The Remains of the Day isn't just my favorite book from Ishiguro. It is my favorite book, period.
It is a book about many things, but one of the main themes is regret. As a younger person, I thought I would end up following the trajectory of Stevens. The narrative matched mine so much that I thought it was a description of an inexorable path in life that someone like me was bound to follow. As I got older, I realized the opposite: that Stevens was an anti-hero, that I did NOT have to follow the his trajectory, and that I had the agency to make different choices in life. In that way, the book's anti-message guides me today.
p.s. with regards to Ishiguro, despite liking RotD, I didn't care for any of his other works. I didn't like Never Let me Go (which was highly acclaimed), nor the Buried Giant, nor When we were Orphans. Admittedly I have not read "An Artist of the Floating World".
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