“Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their
lives unfettered by such concerns. But for those like us, our fate is to face
the world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished
parents. There is nothing for it but to try and see through our missions to the
end, as best we can, for until we do so, we will be permitted no calm.”
اضافة اعلان
An eerie, oddly beautiful tale from the internationally
acclaimed author revolves around an enigmatic ordeal essentially similar to
that undergone in Ishiguro’s “
The Unconsoled” (1995).
The maze of human memory — the ways in which we accommodate
and alter it, deceive and deliver ourselves with it — is territory that Kazuo
Ishiguro has made his own. In his previous novels, he has explored this inner
world and its manifestations in the lives of his characters with rare
inventiveness and subtlety, shrewd humor, and insight. In “
When We Were Orphans,” he returns to this terrain in a brilliantly realized story.
This narrator, Christopher Banks, is a prominent English
detective whose ratiocinative skills are severely tested by mysteries lodged in
his own haunted past. Born in Shanghai, where his father was employed in the
early 1900s by a powerful global trading company, Christopher spent most of his
first decade sheltered in that otherwise turbulent city’s secure International
Settlement, only dimly aware of his mother’s outspoken criticism of the ruinous
opium trade (in which her husband’s employer was heavily invested): a
courageous stance that presumably led to the separate “disappearances” of both
Banks parents, and their son’s return to live with relatives in England.
Twenty-some years later (in 1937), the eminent detective, now the beneficiary
of a family legacy and the adoptive father of an(other) orphan, returns to
Shanghai determined to rediscover the personal history taken from him long ago.
But China is now imperiled by an increasingly violent Japanese military
presence; old acquaintances assume inexplicably “foreign” shapes; every step
taken toward recapturing his past confirms the indigenous axiom that “our
childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown.” The disturbing
climax, set in an unsettled urban hell far from the placid environs of the
International Settlement, leads to a bitterly ironic revelation of what was
sacrificed in order that Christopher Banks might live, and the chastened
realization that he is one of those (unconsoled?) “Whose fate is to face the
world as orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents.”
Elegiac, meditative, ultimately emotionally devastating, and
the purest expression yet of the author’s obsessive theme: The buried life
unearthed by its contingent interconnection with the passions, secrets, and
priorities of unignorable other lives.
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