SOURCE: Roz Kaveney, "Tossed and Turned," in New Statesman and Society, Vol. 8, No. 352, May 12, 1995, p. 39.

In the following negative review, Kaveney calls The Unconsoled a "talented mess of a novel."

Dreams are the most personal of universal experiences. Writers who deal in them may get credit for what is recognised or for what forces its way into the shared grammar of dreaming, but will be told there is no art in telling what everyone knows. They will be blamed for anything that seems too personal or feels like mere invention. Ishiguro's tortuous tale of missed appointments suffers, and occasionally succeeds, under all these rubrics.

Freud claimed all dreams for literary criticism, to be decoded as a poem full of hermetic symbolism. Jung added historicist New Criticism: your dreams are not your own, but merely inheritors of rules. They imposed a loss of innocence on the telling of dreams...