An Artist of the Floating World tells the story of Masuji Ono, an old japanese retired painter, that was once famous during the World War II. While trying to help his younger daughter to get married, he starts to remember his past, his time as an aprentice, and other passages of his professional and personal life.

The story is very light, frivolous. It doesn't inspire you to keep on reading for cover to cover, but it is so simple and the main character so captivating, that it can keep you to the end. Although the story is not quite appealing, neither it has major failures. The passages of his memories close to the end of the book come to be a little more interesting.

The main story is ordered chronologically, but the meories of the main character keep going forward and backward all the time, but the author manages to get through it without making the book too confusing. I stopped reading for a few weeks and it kind of disrupt a little bit my comprehension, cause some characters come and go with his memories, and I couldn't remeber all of them.

The annoying part of it is the way the old man's daughters treat him, but this may be a good point of the book, cause it shows how plausible it is. It feels like mr. Ono is telling his story personally.

Summarizing, this is a story about changing, about giving all you can when you believe you are right and don't deny what you have done. ( )

I have read this book four times and enjoyed it more each time. Delicate, haunting, beautifully realized. About reputation, honor and memory. The realization that one has devoted every ounce of one's talents to a cause that turns out to be wrong. ( )

"not enough art, not enough floating world. "

estaba muy interesado al principio. me gustaba el tono del narrador. un artista un poco en estado catatonico despues de un gran desastre. evasivo, con recuerdos reprimidos. como esquivando algo muy doloroso. me interesaba tambien la idea de un artista revisando lo que ha sido su vida. en algun momento por la mitad la narracion pierde interes. las revelaciones no son extraordinarias. de hecho es posible que todo haya sido mas bien su imaginacion. no hay mucha reflexion sobre arte ni mucha reflexion sobre el mundo flotante. mas bien es una meditacion sobre japon. no lo que prometia el libro.

se me ocurrio despues lo que debio haber sido obvio: es sobre la impermanencia del poder, lo fluctuante y el arte. lo malo es que eso es solo por implicacion, no es lo central en la novela.

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A gently told yet uncompromising novella, An Artist of the Floating World is the story of a Japanese artist in the years after the Second World War. Ishiguro tells a subtle tale of memory and legacy, of coming to terms with one's own mistakes and the world one has created for others. His narrator is as vague and unreliable as Stevens is in the later Remains of the Day, but here that narrative style didn't quite hit the political and societal notes with the same sharpness it would in the later novel. Overall, an interesting character study, and if you like Ishiguro's other novels, you will no doubt enjoy this one, too. ( )

This is a rich study of an artist. As with other Ishiguro novels, the narrator is unreliable. The action here is in trying to figure out what the narrator believes, instead of what he merely states that he believes, and so how far he is lying to us and himself in the presentation of his thoughts.

This was enjoyable for me because even though the artist--a Japanese painter who served as a propagandist for World War II--technically claims that what he did was morally wrong, you feel that he cannot quite accept that. He is a stubborn, proud man. Though the end during which the narrator reflects tranquilly on the path his life has taken, like Mr. Stevens at the end of Remains of the Day, but here the ending is sinister.

Without fully owning up to what he did, and the consequences of what he did, as well as being cast off by a progressing society that would rather pretend those years didn't exist, his summing up and self-satisfaction represents an revocation of responsibility. It is an revocation of responsibility, demanded by the rhythms of life, that allows for the sins of the past to be conveniently forgotten.