The Buried Giant received generally positive reviews.[7] In The Guardian, British author and journalist Alex Preston wrote:[8]
Focusing on one single reading of its story of mists and monsters, swords and sorcery, reduces it to mere parable; it is much more than that. It is a profound examination of memory and guilt, of the way we recall past trauma en masse. It is also an extraordinarily atmospheric and compulsively readable tale, to be devoured in a single gulp. The Buried Giant is Game of Thrones with a conscience, The Sword in the Stone for the age of the trauma industry, a beautiful, heartbreaking book about the duty to remember and the urge to forget.
Not all critics praised the novel, however.[9] James Wood in The New Yorker criticized the work, saying that "Ishiguro is always breaking his own rules, and fudging limited but conveniently lucid recollections."[10]
Ursula K. Le Guin criticized the novel for its treatment of the fantasy genre. She wrote:[11]
I respect what I think he was trying to do, but for me it didn't work. It couldn't work. No writer can successfully use the 'surface elements' of a literary genre — far less its profound capacities — for a serious purpose, while despising it to the point of fearing identification with it. I found reading the book painful. It was like watching a man falling from a high wire while he shouts to the audience, "Are they going to say I'm a tight-rope walker?"
Ishiguro responded to Le Guin's comments, saying: "Le Guin's entitled to like my book or not like my book, but as far as I am concerned, she's got the wrong person. I am on the side of the pixies and the dragons."[12] Le Guin in turn responded, writing, in part: "I am delighted to let Mr Ishiguro make his own case, and to say I am sorry for anything that was hurtful in my evidently over-hasty response to his question 'Will they think this is fantasy?'"[13]
