Unsettling

On Friday, I
1) gave an introduction to department faculty and graduate students to a talk on Middlesex, which I had no business doing since, as this blog reveals, American contemporary fiction remains my undiscovered country,
2) rushed my cat to the vet for emergency bowel surgery, and
3) finished Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans.
Of these, I'd said the Ishiguro was the most unsettling. (Okay, of course that's a lie. The cat was the most unsettling, but such is my faith in and adoration for the vet school that I was/am probably less worried than I should have been.)
I gave this book to my father as a present when it first came out, based on the similarities between my dad's life and the plot synoposes I read. My father grew up in Shanghai around the time of the Chinese civil war, and left behind a close friend who he has always sought to reconnect with. When We Were Orphans is narrated by Christopher Banks, a British boy who grows up in Shanghai in the 20s and returns during the period of Japanese occupation to search for his "kidnapped" parents and his boyhood friend--a Japanese boy named Akira. My father read the book, I think, but never said anything to me about it. Later my mother told me that it "confused" him. Now I know why.
The book takes apart, slowly and with devastating effectivity, any faith in the reliability of memory or of narration. Christopher, though supposedly a renowed detective, blunders so badly and so horribly through the corrupt and brutal expatriate and Chinese communities, both as a child and as an adult, that even when the wrapping-up of the plot questions occurs, we have no way of recognizing whether or not the answers are correct. It's a meditation on the blindness of imperial Britain, surely, but also on the inability of humans in general to acknowledge painful truths. A fellow Victorianist recommended this book as one to teach in conjunction with Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, which I think I might do, but it would also pair well with James's What Maisie Knew, as a study in the devasting ignorance of childhood. Christopher, in the end, loses his parents both in reality and in memory--nothing that he has remembered about them ends up being true--and is left anchorless and alone at novel's end, in a way that is great to read about but less than wonderful to actually experience. I keep cringing now, wondering what questions and insecurities about my father's own boyhood the novel raised that made him describe it as confusing; if nothing else, let this be a warning to everyone not to give gifts of books that you yourself have not read. Especially when they concern traumatic personal histories.