Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant has drawn me back to the time of King Arthur, where Axel and Beatrice, an elderly couple, are making a journey to their son's village, where they are "eagerly awaited" - at least that's what they say, but in fact their son hasn't heard from them and doesn't expect them. They meet knights, warriors, monks, kings' emissaries, children destined for greatness, and dragons on the way.
What strikes me most as a reader is the level of chivalry practiced among folks in the story. Their manner of conversing is so fairytale-like. "Come, friends! Let's proceed with courage!" and the like. I find myself quite seduced by this romanticized portrayal of our medieval ancestors. I'm very happy to think of people in the dark ages being so courteous to one another, and holding up such a high level of honor.
However, now that I think about it, the courtesy makes the story feel very brittle, as if the least bit of conflict will rock the boat intolerably. Indeed, when the characters allow even the slightest edge into their voices (or when the narrator implies it - I'm listening to an audiobook) I feel upset, and want things to return to a dull, polite equilibrium.
There is so much about this world which remains in shadows, which I suppose fits the time setting, since the people who lived then didn't know much about their own world. One mystery which has been threaded through the story is what Axel and Beatrice refer to as the "mist" which seems to have clouded people's memories. Even the events of a few days ago are foggy, if not entirely forgotten. Axel and Beatrice find they cannot remember their son at all, and this concerns them. They also cannot remember a woman who visited the village a few weeks ago and cause quite a commotion.
The knight they meet says that the she-dragon in the land is the source of this forgetfulness, but I think it's something else. One woman Beatrice asked about it said that God had begun to forget humans, so humans could hardly be expected to remember anything themselves. I must say I'm more intrigued with that explanation than with the dragon.
The other book is The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan, which has drawn me into the extended social circle of the members of the Club, mothers and daughters, who tell their tales. It's remarkable how much easier it is to read the tales of the 20-something and 30-something daughters who have grown up in America, than of their 50- and 60-something mothers who speak of their lives growing up in China. Not only are the tales of China full of hardship and infuriating oppression of women, they are told in terms of names, places, traditions, suspicions, foods, and names that are foreign to me. This must be somewhat how people feel who are introduced to the Western Canon without any grounding in the Western cultural tradition. So much harder to stick with, and make sense of.
I have to remember that when I teach George Orwell next semester. My students come at this text from so many points. In some ways we have both the Chinese-American daughters and the Chinese mothers in the class - students who have adopted American culture because they have either tried to, or they have been here long enough to do so naturally, and students who still manifest their home cultures, again either by choice or because they arrived in the US recently.
Here is a passage which included an unusual (for the narrator) moment of anthropological meditation on the differences between East and West: (Start with the mother saying "It's my fault...")
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