Book 2 of 2023 - The Buried Giant (2015)

The Buried Giant 

Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Genre: Fantasy/Historical Fiction

Pages: 317

Date Started: March 5th, 2023
Date Ended: March 22nd, 2023

Finished: Yes
Final Rating: 9/10

The Buried Giant is Japanese-British (and Nobel Prize winning) author Kazuo Ishiguro's seventh novel. Ishiguro's most famous work is probably the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day, which was adapted into a film in 1993. The Buried Giant follows Axl and Beatrice, and old Briton couple, as they undertake a journey to reunite with their son in a post-Arthurian Britain plagued with a strange mist that causes selective memory loss.

The Britain Axl and Beatrice call home is a fantasy realm, in which King Arthur and his knights were very real, and ogres, pixies, and dragons lurk in dark places ready to carry off the unwary. Journeying beyond your village is a perilous task indeed, and doubly so for an elderly couple. Kazuo's prose has an almost misty, dreamlike quality to match the setting, with characters quarreling in one moment and forgetting what they were even mad about in the next. 

Along the way, we meet Saxon warrior Wistan and his young protégé Edwin and an elderly Sir Gawain, still carrying out his mission to the long dead King Arthur. As the companions spend more time together, memories come to light and they begin to realize there are segments of their past that are intertwined and rather unpleasant.

The Buried Giant is an incredibly moving story with a haymaker of an ending. Ishiguro does such a remarkable job of bringing to life a murky, treacherous Britain, complete with engaging characters, monsters, and its fair share of creepy bogs, fens, copses, and mountains. It explores a life where we're free to forget our traumas, and suggests that maybe we have a duty to ourselves to remember no matter how difficult it might be. Also the consequences of war crimes, can't forget the war crimes.

tl;dr: book good check it out