Crisis of Crises: Re-imagining Central Europe in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled

Abstract

ABSTRACT While the 1990s disintegration of the Eastern Bloc drew attention to the countries and peoples of Central Europe, various British authors explored the region’s exotic postsocialist otherness. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (1995) fits this tendency, not only because the setting echoes the Kafkaesque tradition, with the unnamed eerie town somewhere in Central Europe and its unconsoled inhabitants, but also due to the local crisis there, itself a product of various international crises. Milan Kundera famously argued that Central Europe was not a region, but a mindset, shaped by the region’s shared history. In this essay I will argue that by depicting an unnamed Central European town and its crisis, Ishiguro recreated a milieu characterised by its relationships to the past, the urban landscape and the politics of arts and culture. Following an overview of the conceptual development “Central Europe”, I explore the ambiguous relationship with the past in The Unconsoled, utilising postcolonial theory in the postsocialist environment, based on Madina Tlostaova’s approach. The past is physically present in the urban space, which functions as a metaphor for the city’s community, with its uncertain identity and continuous crisis. Finally, arts and culture form vital political elements in the fabric of novel.