Beyond the Book: “The Buried Giant” by Kazuo Ishiguro
It’s been about half a year since I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s book “The Buried Giant”, but I feel the story still lingers within me. It leaves me unsettled with the haunting question: Is it better to remember the horrors and risk causing more tragedies, or to let those terrible memories sink into the abyss of forgetfulness?
This dilemma becomes even more challenging when we have no influence over how an entire nation reacts, and especially when we cannot stop a tragedy once it starts. Is forgetting truly the better choice? But if we forget everything and only have a surface-level peace, are we truly alive? Do we have the right to our memories, even if it could unleash collective hell?
I still haven’t found an answer that I am wholly at peace with. “The Buried Giant” is a splendid literary experience, one I’d recommend to anyone who enjoys immersing themselves in a book and doesn’t mind the often slower pace of Japanese writers compared to their Western counterparts.
From this point on, there are spoilers in the review. If you don’t want to know certain parts of the story in advance, stop reading and just read the book! :)