The Unconsoled

by Kazuo Ishiguro

This is the third and so far the most difficult novel of Ishiguro I read. It took me about six weeks to finish it.

If comic episodes and repetitive dialogues of A Pale View of Hills are charming, here they take most of the space — and become tiresome. Was it really necessary to include everything the most mediocre characters say? Ishiguro himself provides great examples of how to deal with that: “For a while he went on uttering such empty phrases” or “continued in this vein for a while longer, but I had stopped listening”. The book ended just as I started to enjoy it. Bother.

The Unconsoled was published 30 years ago and, according to Wikipedia, was not received very well at the time. Now it is considered to be a masterpiece. I hope to re-read it a few years from now, perhaps even at a slower pace.

As I started to read the book during the Women’s Euro 2025, which I followed closely, the story of Number Nine — a favourite toy football player of Boris, the protagonist’s stepson — resonated with me.

‘Number Nine’ belonged to Boris’s very favourite team, and was by far the most gifted of the players. However, for all his immense skill, Number Nine was a highly moody personality. His position in the team was somewhere in midfield, but often, for long stretches of a match, he would sulk in some obscure part of the pitch, apparently oblivious of the fact that his team was losing badly. Sometimes, Number Nine would continue in this lethargic manner for over an hour, so that his team would go four, five, six goals down, and the commentator — for indeed there was a commentator — would say in a mystified voice: ‘Number Nine so far just hasn’t found his form. I don’t quite know what’s wrong.’ Then, perhaps with twenty minutes remaining, Number Nine would finally give a glimpse of his true ability, pulling back a goal for his side with some fine piece of skill. ‘That’s more like it!’ the commentator would exclaim. ‘At last, Number Nine shows what he can do!’ From that moment on, Number Nine’s form would grow steadily stronger, until before long he would be scoring one goal after another, and the opposing team would be concentrating entirely on preventing at virtually any cost Number Nine receiving the ball. But sooner or later he would, and then, no matter how many opponents stood between him and the goalmouth, he would manage to find a way through to score. Soon the inevitability of the outcome once he had received the ball was such that the commentator would say: ‘It’s a goal,’ in tones of resigned admiration, not when the ball actually went into the net, but at the moment Number Nine first gained possession — even if this occurred deep within his own half.

Incidentally, Spain’s own Number Nine, Esther González, with four goals, won the Top Scorer award of the tournament.

Aitana & Ozogoche

Both documentaries were screened last Thursday in Casa de Colón.

Aitana (2023)

a film by Marina Alberti

Marina Alberti’s directorial debut is a letter of love to her mother, Aitana Alberti León, and grandmother, María Teresa León. Now Aitana starts to show symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, which also affected María Teresa.

Now this was not in the film: according to Spanish Wikipedia, María Teresa León spent her last years of life in a sanatorium in Majadahonda, near Madrid. Her loving husband, Rafael Alberti, never accepted María Teresa’s illness and... escaped to Rome. What a gentlemen! She died alone and forgotten.

Ozogoche (2023)

a film by Joe Houlberg Silva

In a recent interview, the director Joe Houlberg says that it took six years to film Ozogoche. In the beginning it was supposed to be a documentary about strange behaviour of migratory birds, upland sandpipers (Bartramia longicauda), known in Ecuador as cuvivíes. There is no shortage of hypotheses why some of these birds travel some 10,000 kilometers from North America to Ozogoche lagoons only to plummet into the icy waters and die. What happened though, after these years of living with local community, the film creators realised that poor cuvivíes became, in words of Houlberg, “just an allegory of the true story <...>, the story of an indigenous family in the Ecuadorian páramo who are waiting for their relatives, waiting for something to change”. If you liked the magical realism of El Eco, you’ll fall in love with Ozogoche.

As Neves

a film by Sonia Méndez

Kids nowadays.

No, not really. They ain’t any different from us when we were their age. And from our parents, etc. You’ve got your whole life in front of you, and you’re dead bored. Epecially when you are growing up in a rural village in the middle of nowhere, no matter how beautiful. As Neves, for example. So, alcohol, drugs, and sex, if you’re lucky.

Not that the events of this film would be much different if the protagonists were adults. As if grown-ups don’t consume magic mushrooms or engage in revenge porn.

Still, I think that Sonia Méndez was right to shoot a teen drama. The young non-professional actors are utterly convincing and As Neves is worth watching for them alone.

Still Alice

a film by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland

This powerful and touching drama was shown in Filmoteca de Cantabria Mario Camus as a part of III Jornada de Cine y Enfermedad Avanzada organised by the Hospital Santa Clotilde. I loved most of it, bar the predictably embarrassing finale of Chekhov’s Three Sisters (really, why?!). Starring Julianne Moore in her Oscar-winning role, Alec Baldwin and Kristen Stewart.

Arrugas

by Paco Roca

Wrinkles? I don’t mind wrinkles (Arrugas, Rides etc.), in all this ageing business it’s memory loss that scares me the most. It’s not a laughing matter and definitely not a comic material.

Or so you’d think until you read this comic book. You won’t laugh out loud, but it’ll make you smile more often than you’d expect. Just try to get quickly past the first few pages which I found rather depressing.

A few days ago, a friend told me about the Valencian collective Les Veus de la Memòria, the first and only choir of Alzheimer’s patients in Spain. As I was watching the trailer of the documentary, I couldn’t help thinking who of its protagonists could be Emilio and who Miguel.

The Housekeeper and the Professor

by Yōko Ogawa
translated by Stephen Snyder

Imagine the Professor, a retired mathematician suffering anterograde amnesia; and the Housekeeper, a young single mum with a ten-year-old son, whose job is to look after the Professor. He does not remember her from one day to the next. In fact, his memory lasts exactly eighty minutes.

This is a story of a wonderful friendship between the three, brought together by the paradox of memory, Euler’s formula and baseball.

A word of warning: in contrast to the math, the baseball terminology in this book is left largely unexplained.

Another word of warning: you may well want to cry in the end.

“I’m going to call you Root,” he said. “The square root sign is a generous symbol, it gives shelter to all the numbers.” And he quickly took off the note on his sleeve, and made the addition: “The new housekeeper... and her son, ten years old, √. ” At first I made us name tags, thinking that if the Professor weren’t the only one with notes clipped to him he might feel less anxious. I told my son to change his school name tag for one I made that read “√”. The experiment proved less successful than I’d hoped. No matter how much time passed, I was always the young woman who made painfully slow progress with numbers, and my son would be the boy who simply appeared, and was embraced.

P.S. The Housekeeper and the Professor is the first book of Yōko Ogawa I’ve ever read. I just learned that L’annulaire (The Ring Finger), the French movie that I saw couple of years ago, is based on her novel of the same name.