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Bookishdish1959 t1_jd01bmg wrote

I loved When We Were Orphans. For me, it was the most Ishiguro of all the books of his I have read. It is his style, super-concentrated.

Reading it, at first I felt "this is a stupid and unbelievable mystery novel". Then the penny dropped.

Re the scene where the narrator is being driven around by the driver in the nice car, and they're trying to get close to where he believes is mother is being held: Have you ever watched two children playing, and one is real bossy and the other is rather passive? Suddenly, the passive child says "I'm not playing anymore!", and walks away. I felt this way about the driving scene and immediately felt this was just two insane people playing on the grounds of their insane asylum. Probably with a cardboard box standing in for the car.

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redditismyrockbottom t1_jd3s6ic wrote

im glad there is another When We Were Orphan fan out there. I think it really works well at showing how childlike normative western assumptions of how the world works in compared to the messiness of reality.

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