Word: ryders
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...Ryder, an internationally famous pianist, checks into a hotel in a European town he cannot identify. Something seems to be expected of him--the clerk at the registration desk makes several references to "Thursday night"--but Ryder doesn't know exactly what. A porter named Gustav escorts Ryder and his luggage into an elevator, tells him, "We're not going up far," then launches into a lengthy monologue about his attempts to win greater respect for the craft of portering. Since a later detail suggests that Ryder's room is on the second floor, the elevator must move with...
...porter asks Ryder the next morning to look up his daughter Sophie and his grandson Boris in the Hungarian Cafe. When Ryder does so, Sophie tells him about a house she will see tomorrow, in the hope that the three of them can settle down there together. Ryder takes this odd information calmly: "For the fact was, as we had been sitting together, Sophie's face had come to seem steadily more familiar to me, until now I thought I could even remember vaguely some earlier discussions about buying just such a house in the woods...
Somewhere around this point, the narrative rules governing The Unconsoled become ominously clear: sequential non sequiturs, ungoverned absurdity. Ishiguro has essentially re-created the world of Alice in Wonderland, but without the commonsensical presence of Alice. Ryder, unlike Lewis Carroll's feisty heroine, is totally passive, grounded only in the vagaries of each passing moment. He is guided through tall doors and short doors; he repeatedly takes, or is taken on, long car trips, only to discover that he can easily walk back to his point of origin. But he hardly ever seems surprised by or interested in the oddities...
...interruptions, can render readers peevish. Ultimately, The Unconsoled suggests a considerable talent pursuing a questionable achievement. Ishiguro has created the literary equivalent of an endless bad dream: the fright engendered by impossible expectations, the frustration of feeling powerless to deflect an apparently inevitable slide toward shame and ruin. But Ryder's ordeal seems less malevolent than capricious. He is the benumbed victim of nothing more sinister than a patchy memory and a tight schedule. Why reproduce a free-floating nightmare when the real thing lurks each night for billions of people, unbidden and free of charge...
Baum had a small speaking part in several scenes, and in one he grabs Ryder as she enters the town court-house to turn in suspected witches...