Volume 47, Number 15 · October 5, 2000
Foreign Affair
By Pico Iyer
When We Were Orphans
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Knopf, 336 pp., $25.00
There is a moment, early on in Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel, When We Were Orphans, that cuts to the heart of everything that's odd—to use a favorite Ishiguro word—about his not-quite-English fiction. His fussy, agonizingly self-conscious narrator, Christopher Banks, never quite sure of his place in the world around him, steps out of a London restaurant to pursue a woman to whom he's strongly (if passively) attracted. When he catches up with her on the street, she starts to reminisce about the careless bus rides she took as a girl with her mother, now dead, and asks Banks if he rides the buses too.
Review, 3144 words
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