Reviews and Comments

This book is not a love story but a character study. It's a meditation on professional dignity, and what happens when you sacrifice everything - every opportunity, every chance for connection, for human emotion - on the altar of that dignity. It's a book about misleading yourself. It's a book about giving in to sunk costs.

The last few pages are what made this story work for me. Because Stevens is a sympathetic, if deeply frustrating, narrator. I was rooting for him to have some kind of growth, to leave him ready to grasp the remains of the day. And it seemed like Ishiguro was leading him there, showing him reconsidering the value of bantering (and thus, human connection). But the very last thing Stevens thinks is how this will make him a better butler. Because in the end, he is too scared to be anything but what he has always been.

Superbly done by Ishiguro.

The Unraveling is set in the far future, in a world that's meant to be very different from our own. There is accordingly a ton of worldbuilding in this novel, ranging from the familiar to the wildly experimental. I won't spend much time on the familiar stuff - the hyper-networked reputation systems, computers in your head you can talk to, a small shadowy group that controls a massive society, etc. They're fine, but they're not what makes this book special.

There are two elements of the worldbuilding that really stand out. First, Rosenbaum has invented two entirely new genders, and a novel set of gender and family politics which much of the world, and the book, is based around. Second, in this far future society, people can inhabit multiple bodies at once. Combined, these elements make for a disorienting read. I found it fairly easy to follow along with the pronouns (xe/xir & ze/zir) used for the new genders, but following three bodies at once was much, much harder to get used to. The triple-narration confused more than it enlightened. Perhaps this was intentional - it certainly felt alien! - but it came at the price of taking me out of the story.

This book reminds me quite a bit of Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, both in its ambition and in the way that its narrative choices can alienate the reader. If you like rich world-building and explorations of gender, give this a shot.