That said, how could these be played? What would it be like to role-play one of these characters in a game? Or is this book finally not a source for role-playing?

However I can't really imagine anyone saying, "Hey! I'd like to play that character!" even if they were NPCs, which is what I think Gaiman was pointing to when he said

The excitements that the book would deliver were this a more formulaic or crowd-pleasing novel are, here, when they appear, not exciting, perhaps because they would be young people's adventures, and this is, at its heart, a book about two [old] people who are now past all adventure

What did people think of the characters? How could it make sense to play being past adventure?

1) Neil Gaiman's review in the NYT (paywalled, excertps from here: http://gypsyscholarship.blogspot.com/2015/03/neil-gaiman-on-kazuo-ishiguros-buried.html - short summary: he thought it was important and effective, didn't love it because it might be allegory);

2) Ursula K Le Guin took active offense against Ishiguro as disrespectful trespasser, and then drew back: (https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/95-are-they-going-to-say-this-is-fantasy and https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/96-addendum-to-are-they-going-to-say-this-is-fantasy); and

3) Ishiguro's response in the Grauniad (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/08/kazuo-ishiguro-rebuffs-genre-snobbery)

Reading through this stuff I started thinking about how there is an idea that people's expectations and identities deserve to be met, respected, confronted.

This applies to rpgs as well, e.g. narrative games, OSR games, crunchy games, SF vs Fantasy games, table-top vs computer RPGs, etc. And I think there might be something important here about how TTRPGs work in play - the people playing have expectations of what's allowed or not within the frame, people expect their play to be validated, and this can leaed to conflict e.g. a) Some people might want to play immersive games where their character's actions occur as described in the 1st person, other people want to simply describe what the character does in the 3rd person and let the system shape outcomes through mechanics; b) Some people want to use combat to resolve all encounter, others might want something to do something other than kill Bill.

It comes up in our discussions as well. Interested in hearing what Buried Giant provoked among the TTRPGBC, if anything. How did Buried Giant satisfy or disturb expectations? Anyone have any experiences with this in play?

The Grandson : A book?
Grandpa : That's right. When I was your age, television was called books. And this is a special book. It was the book my father used to read to me when I was sick, and I used to read it to your father. And today I'm gonna read it to you.
The Grandson : Has it got any sports in it?
Grandpa : Are you kidding? Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles...
The Grandson : Doesn't sound too bad. I'll try to stay awake.
Grandpa : Oh, well, thank you very much, very nice of you. Your vote of confidence is overwhelming.

I really enjoyed reading this. I thought it had pretty much everything for OSR: a dungeon crawl, a hex crawl, contradictory quests, battles, monsters, heroes, villains, magic, true love, ... But at the same time it isn't much like any other Arthurian or high fantasy book I've read. There were several vignettes that I thought would make good adventures, but I had a hard time imagining them turning out in play the way they turned out in the book. And the voice and tenor of the book was something something something something. Really liked it.

And it touched on themes e.g. death due to old age, grief and yearning for a past that is poorly remembered, that I have a hard time imagining working in play. I saw some similarities to the seriousness of themes in Cloud Atlas, but Mitchell's book seemed much more in genre, and so (for me) not as touching, though a couple of the stories in Cloud Atlas were amazing.

Another point where I saw similarities and differences with Cloud Atlas was the variety of narrative voices covering the same story. The unreliable narrators here though don't seem the same as unreliable narrators in other books, though I'm not sure why.

Anyway look forward to hearing what other folks thought of the book as a whole, and especially any comparisons with other books we've read, either with the club or elsewhere.

As I see it, there are three contexts for forgetting in the book:

1. The enforced forgetting of the genocide of Saxons, to ensure the peace afterwards. (Does that mean Arthur is Big Brother, Gawain is O'Brien, and Querig is MiniTru?)
2. Forgetting to cope with grief. Forgetting dead relatives to avoid reliving the pain of their loss; and the loss of memories that come with death, and the hope that the dead will remember each other in the afterlife.
3. Forgetting as forgiveness, where Axl and Beatrice forget the harms they've done to each other so they can remain in love.

What other instances of memory and forgetting are there in the book?

When is forgetting justified, or understandable, or desirable? When and what should we not forget?

I came across this article on the subject in The Conversation (a collection of accessible articles by academics): "What Ishiguro’s Buried Giant tells us about memory".

The Buried Giant begins as a couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen for years. They expect to face many hazards - some strange and other-worldly - but they cannot yet foresee how their journey will reveal to them dark and forgotten corners of their love for one another.

'A beautiful fable with a hard message at its core . . . There won't, I suspect, be a more important work of fiction published this year.' John Sutherland, The Times

'An exceptional novel . . . The Buried Giant does what important books do: it remains in the mind long after it has been read, refusing to leave.' Neil Gaiman, New York Times Book Review

'A beautiful, heartbreaking book about the duty to remember and the urge to forget.' Alex Preston, Observer