I was meant to go on a long-awaited and much-anticipated trip to England this week, but volcano ashes put a stop to it. It's very unfair and I feel very hard done by - I'd been looking forward to it so much, and I hardly ever get to travel. Plus I've lost money on it, which is very upsetting.
All in a trivial, industrialised-nation way, of course. But I really am sad.
In my childhood I used to always escape into books when I was down, preferably something homely and familiar like Enid Blyton. I don't feel the same urge now (possibly because I don't think it will work). Although I wouldn't say no to a stack - a STACK - of vintage crime. Do I have any? No. And part of looking forward to my trip was thinking about the possible second-hand bookshops there, just brimming with old Cyril Hares, Patricia Wentworths, Ngaoi Marshes.
I read a Patricia Wentworth recently, a book called The Silent Pool that I bought off Tradera a while ago and saved. It was enjoyable in it's own way, but the killer turned out to be the same type of character as in another one I read, so it was predictable. It's about a rich former theatre star who thinks someone is trying to kill her, and her suspicions are confirmed when murder is done and it is obvious that the killer thought it was her. Nothing special, but grand for it's purpose.
I've also read a very disappointing Kazuo Ishiguro collection of short stories, Nocturnes. Oh why can not a favourite author remain perfect? This was dull. The meticulous, careful, detailed and simple language that works so well in Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day feels bland, trite and almost contrived. Very disappointing. There is an overall theme to the short stories, namely music, and some of the characters appear in more than one, but I don't get that carefully crafted Shortcuts effect, I just feel meh.
Oh I just feel meh in general. But at least I've done my blogging duty.
Showing posts with label Kazuo Ishiguro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kazuo Ishiguro. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Sunday, June 28, 2009
An Ishiguro sum-up
Oh noez, another author who has disappointed me. It started out so well, with me loving Never Let Me Go, and liking The Remains of the Day a lot. The next three however, failed to tickle me quite as much, and I'm going to be honest with you - no. 4, The Unconsoled, it's just never going to be read. I've reached page 54 or something like that, and the narrator seems to be caught in a reality that's a bit like a dream, with events randomly following one another, and people suddenly saying and doing odd things that nevertheless seem sensible and that you accept, and dialogue that is just making no common sense and leads nowhere. I was reminded of the really surreal stuff, like Flann O'Brien. As I've written before, this is a type of genre that I can't take. I get really annoyed. I'll just come right out and say it - I like my reading to be linear, and if not linear in time necessarily then linear in sense thank you very much. Call me unimaginative if you want, but no dwarfs in red velvet rooms for me (yes, I also get unreasonably angry if forced to watch David Lynch films). So The Unconsoled is out. It'll be there when I'm ninety if I get the urge.
Going back to the ones I have read though, I think part of the problem is that I overdosed. Ishiguro is rather formulaic. You have a narrator, and the narrator is remembering the past while going about his or her business in the present. You therefore get two narratives one might say, that merge into one as the past unfolds to explain the present. Ishiguro also has a special way of writing these memories, which is part of what makes his novels so appealing - he understands that no-one remembers an exact chain of events, or precisely what led to the memory being retold. A memory will often just be a snippet of the larger event, for some reason stuck in the brain. So the narrators will often discuss this, sort of wonder aloud what the circumstances surrounding a particular memory might have been, or even backtrack and realise that the dialogue they remember must have not been spoken like that, that they are confusing two memories. It sounds tedious, but in my opinion it works very well most of the time, because it adds to the realism. When you read five or so novels pretty much back-to-back however… Like I said, I think I overdosed. Ironically, the one I am not going to finish, The Unconsoled, does not follow this formula (some tendencies to it do exist, but by no means as strongly). And the one I thought was oddest (apart from Unconsoled), When We Were Orphans, also had less of it.
So let me write about that book first. The story, as it is told in a mixture of present happenings and memories, is as follows: an English boy, growing up in Shanghai, loses both parents in what is believed to be some sort of kidnapping. First the father disappears, then after some weeks his mother. He is taken back to England to live with his aunt. We get to know him as an adult, when he is making a name for himself as a (private) detective. He becomes very well known and respected, and subsequently has the opportunity to return to Shanghai. The idea is that he will manage to crack what is behind the surging instability of the region (this is just before WW2). Okay. Problem 1: he is a detective. Now, if you change that into "vampire hunter" you get a job title that more accurately fits the tone of the novel. Something just seems off about it. I get a kind of Van Helsing (the film) meets Sherlock Holmes meets The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vibe. Problem 2: he comes to Shanghai with some sort of assumption (which seems to be shared by the majority of the English colony there) that solving the current problems will solve his parents' abduction. Not only that, he will any day now find them alive and well. To blithely assume that his parents will be found in such a state after being missing for twenty-odd years is just too queer. It makes no sense. The last chapters of the book has him leaping to conclusions in the war-ravaged sections of Shanghai, scrambling through rubble to get to a house where he believes that his parents are being held (still! after all this time!), finding a Japanese soldier whom he thinks is his childhood friend, and just generally not making much sense. I do admit that I've been racking my brains over this book for a while after finishing it, which I suppose is some credit to it. I'm leaning towards some sort of theory that the narrator never really grew up. His whole detective career is a sort of fantasy, born from his childhood games and desire to find his parents. Because the way he behaves and reasons once he is in Shanghai is just too far out to be based in reality, in my opinion. Sadly, that theory flies out the window somewhat since there's an epilogue that disproves it. Ah well.
I've also read two novels set in Japan. There is something that feels a little bit wrong about the tone of these too. I pondered for a while if I was picking up that Ishiguro, having lived in the UK since he was five, is actually writing about a society that he only knows second-best - a bit as if I were to write a book set in Ireland. This idea is supported by the fact that the same names keep popping up in both books, as though Ishiguro doesn't really know that many Japanese names (just like my hypothetical Irish novel would be populated by Dermots and Aoifes). This could of course be entirely wrong. The oddness in tone that I feel could be just a faithful rendering of the tone of a society and culture rather alien to me, the identical names could be anything - those names are very common, perhaps, or else it's a tribute to the author's family members.
I liked An Artist of the Floating World best, I think. Set in the 50s, it's about a retired artist whose work, we are led to understand, helped kindle the war-mongering in pre-war Japan. He has understood that if he does not in some way recant it will affect the well-being of his family. His younger daughter will perhaps never find a husband unless he can show that he is no longer a member of the "losing side". As he remembers we see that his praise of the traditional values that were so heavily emphasised before the war is to some extent a defensive measure, as he does not always like to be reminded of the sadder things that happened because of his political choices. There is a nice twist at the end, when his daughter comes with a different interpretation of events that make the artist less important. What she says implies that he has, to us, aggrandised his importance, perhaps so he'll have a reason to publicly repent of actions that he feels guilty about.
A Pale View of Hills was stranger. I'm still thinking about what it meant, what the underlying tension was about. Etsuko, a Japanese woman living in England, is visited by her younger half-English daughter following the suicide of her elder daughter by a previous, Japanese husband. (God that was an unwieldy sentence but I can't be bothered changing it. It's half twelve at night and I'm writing from work, after all… ) During the visit she remembers the summer in Nagasaki when she was pregnant with Keiko, and she was friends with a woman called Sachiko, who lived with her daughter Mariko in a tumbledown house near the new apartment blocks of the suburb. There is something more being said between the lines of this book, and I'm missing it. It has something to do with the mentioned fact that children were being murdered in Nagasaki that summer, and the parallell between Sachiko planning to go to America with her American lover, and Etsuko later taking her daughter Keiko to England when she herself marries a foreigner. Why are the murdered children mentioned unless I'm to suspect that I know the killer? Is it Etsuko's bullying husband? Is it Sachiko, who tries to drown the kittens? I don't get it. I must scour the internet for other thoughts. Starting with Wikipedia, maybe. Enigmatic indeed.
Despite my OD:ing, I still like Ishiguro and would recommend him. I'm going to take a break from him now though, and return to him some other time with a fresh mind.
Going back to the ones I have read though, I think part of the problem is that I overdosed. Ishiguro is rather formulaic. You have a narrator, and the narrator is remembering the past while going about his or her business in the present. You therefore get two narratives one might say, that merge into one as the past unfolds to explain the present. Ishiguro also has a special way of writing these memories, which is part of what makes his novels so appealing - he understands that no-one remembers an exact chain of events, or precisely what led to the memory being retold. A memory will often just be a snippet of the larger event, for some reason stuck in the brain. So the narrators will often discuss this, sort of wonder aloud what the circumstances surrounding a particular memory might have been, or even backtrack and realise that the dialogue they remember must have not been spoken like that, that they are confusing two memories. It sounds tedious, but in my opinion it works very well most of the time, because it adds to the realism. When you read five or so novels pretty much back-to-back however… Like I said, I think I overdosed. Ironically, the one I am not going to finish, The Unconsoled, does not follow this formula (some tendencies to it do exist, but by no means as strongly). And the one I thought was oddest (apart from Unconsoled), When We Were Orphans, also had less of it.
So let me write about that book first. The story, as it is told in a mixture of present happenings and memories, is as follows: an English boy, growing up in Shanghai, loses both parents in what is believed to be some sort of kidnapping. First the father disappears, then after some weeks his mother. He is taken back to England to live with his aunt. We get to know him as an adult, when he is making a name for himself as a (private) detective. He becomes very well known and respected, and subsequently has the opportunity to return to Shanghai. The idea is that he will manage to crack what is behind the surging instability of the region (this is just before WW2). Okay. Problem 1: he is a detective. Now, if you change that into "vampire hunter" you get a job title that more accurately fits the tone of the novel. Something just seems off about it. I get a kind of Van Helsing (the film) meets Sherlock Holmes meets The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vibe. Problem 2: he comes to Shanghai with some sort of assumption (which seems to be shared by the majority of the English colony there) that solving the current problems will solve his parents' abduction. Not only that, he will any day now find them alive and well. To blithely assume that his parents will be found in such a state after being missing for twenty-odd years is just too queer. It makes no sense. The last chapters of the book has him leaping to conclusions in the war-ravaged sections of Shanghai, scrambling through rubble to get to a house where he believes that his parents are being held (still! after all this time!), finding a Japanese soldier whom he thinks is his childhood friend, and just generally not making much sense. I do admit that I've been racking my brains over this book for a while after finishing it, which I suppose is some credit to it. I'm leaning towards some sort of theory that the narrator never really grew up. His whole detective career is a sort of fantasy, born from his childhood games and desire to find his parents. Because the way he behaves and reasons once he is in Shanghai is just too far out to be based in reality, in my opinion. Sadly, that theory flies out the window somewhat since there's an epilogue that disproves it. Ah well.
I've also read two novels set in Japan. There is something that feels a little bit wrong about the tone of these too. I pondered for a while if I was picking up that Ishiguro, having lived in the UK since he was five, is actually writing about a society that he only knows second-best - a bit as if I were to write a book set in Ireland. This idea is supported by the fact that the same names keep popping up in both books, as though Ishiguro doesn't really know that many Japanese names (just like my hypothetical Irish novel would be populated by Dermots and Aoifes). This could of course be entirely wrong. The oddness in tone that I feel could be just a faithful rendering of the tone of a society and culture rather alien to me, the identical names could be anything - those names are very common, perhaps, or else it's a tribute to the author's family members.
I liked An Artist of the Floating World best, I think. Set in the 50s, it's about a retired artist whose work, we are led to understand, helped kindle the war-mongering in pre-war Japan. He has understood that if he does not in some way recant it will affect the well-being of his family. His younger daughter will perhaps never find a husband unless he can show that he is no longer a member of the "losing side". As he remembers we see that his praise of the traditional values that were so heavily emphasised before the war is to some extent a defensive measure, as he does not always like to be reminded of the sadder things that happened because of his political choices. There is a nice twist at the end, when his daughter comes with a different interpretation of events that make the artist less important. What she says implies that he has, to us, aggrandised his importance, perhaps so he'll have a reason to publicly repent of actions that he feels guilty about.
A Pale View of Hills was stranger. I'm still thinking about what it meant, what the underlying tension was about. Etsuko, a Japanese woman living in England, is visited by her younger half-English daughter following the suicide of her elder daughter by a previous, Japanese husband. (God that was an unwieldy sentence but I can't be bothered changing it. It's half twelve at night and I'm writing from work, after all… ) During the visit she remembers the summer in Nagasaki when she was pregnant with Keiko, and she was friends with a woman called Sachiko, who lived with her daughter Mariko in a tumbledown house near the new apartment blocks of the suburb. There is something more being said between the lines of this book, and I'm missing it. It has something to do with the mentioned fact that children were being murdered in Nagasaki that summer, and the parallell between Sachiko planning to go to America with her American lover, and Etsuko later taking her daughter Keiko to England when she herself marries a foreigner. Why are the murdered children mentioned unless I'm to suspect that I know the killer? Is it Etsuko's bullying husband? Is it Sachiko, who tries to drown the kittens? I don't get it. I must scour the internet for other thoughts. Starting with Wikipedia, maybe. Enigmatic indeed.
Despite my OD:ing, I still like Ishiguro and would recommend him. I'm going to take a break from him now though, and return to him some other time with a fresh mind.
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day
I saw the film of course - I've probably seen it a few times actually. Based on the film I was expecting something a little more passionate and tense, but my impression of the novel is softer, more humorous, although obviously melancholic. There are parallells to Never Let Me Go; as in that book we find out gradually, as our narrator in analytical detail remembers the past, that there was a dark shade to it, something that wasn't as safe and reassuring as you might think. Here the German sympathies of Lord Darlington provide the unpleasant backdrop, as he, easily led, becomes more or less a Nazi puppet while his butler shakes off any personal responsability, certain that Lord Darlington knows what is best and that serving such a great man is a reward in itself.
You read almost the entire book without fully realising why Miss Kenton, the housekeeper, reacts so passionately towards some of the things Mr Stevens does, why she takes things so personally. After all you're reading Stevens point of view, his reminiscing and justification over and of the past. Then at the very very end, there is the bit where Miss Kenton, who is now Mrs Benn, says to Stevens that the reason for her feeling unhappy at times is because she can't help thinking about what a life she might have led.
"And you get to thinking about a different life, a better life you might have had. For instance, I get to thinking about a life I might have had with you, Mr Stevens. And I suppose that's when I get angry over some trivial little thing and leave."
And Stevens admits to himself and us that at that moment, his heart breaks. But he rallies and hides it, and says his cordial goodbyes. This is beautiful. It's wrenching in its simplicity and in its understated emotionality. The great thing about Ishiguro's novels is how you don't understand everything that's been going on until the end, and that unmasking of what it seems is quite important.
It's quite as lovely as Never Let Me Go. Now I wish I had another Ishiguro to read. I feel this wish to stay in that mood or spell that Ishiguro's writing conjures up. Unfortunately I didn't make it upstairs to the English section when I was at the library last, because I brought Minimus and the pram, so I settled for the paperback swivel shelf (with selected novels) they have at the foot of the stairs. I picked up quite a few books then, and the other one in my bag is a Zoë Heller, Notes on a Scandal. It's probably going to be good too, but it's a whole different mood. Hm.
Incidentally, flipping through the last pages of The Remains of the Day I was reading the blurbs about the other books that Faber & Faber Ltd have to offer - I was thinking about how those days must surely be over now, when people read a paperback and proceeded to order another one based on these summaries and reviews, using the order form on the very last page, and I wonder if anybody ever did that at all? Surely people have always gone to book shops? Maybe this was a service used by lonely readers on isolated islands or something? and I noticed how this book was printed in 1999 and the order page has an e-mail address and a web URL for reference, so this must be the dying gasp of an old paperback tradition - anyway, I was reading the suggestions and got quite interested in a much-endorsed novel by Peter Carey called Oscar and Lucinda, "also a major film starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett", and I was a bit amused by the fact that Cate Blanchett's face adorns Notes on a Scandal, since she was in that film too. Such little coincidences form the fabric of life, eh?
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go
How can I not have read this author before? I'm partly ashamed, partly happy that I have a number of probably most likely wonderful new reading experiences ahead of me. Never Let Me Go will always hold a special place in my heart I predict, because this my friends is science fiction at its best. The Wikipedia entry doesn't call it science fiction, but I've seen some other sites that recognize it as such. Like all good sci-fi it's not about the technology, it's about what it does to us.
The novel is set in a different Britain, in which sterile clones are grown from childhood to adulthood only to become "donors", to have their organs harvested. The story is told by Kathy, in her 30s, who is on her way to settling down to becoming a donor and subsequently "completing". She tells the story of how she grew up in a boarding school for clones, how she and her friends gradually learnt what they were, and she tells about her relationships with the people she loved best. It's very very good. It's slightly marred towards the end, when Kathy and her lover Tommy confront a former teacher from the school, and she "explains all". It feels a bit too summarizing and lecturing, but it's okay.
Recommended heartily. I'm off to borrow all his other works.
The novel is set in a different Britain, in which sterile clones are grown from childhood to adulthood only to become "donors", to have their organs harvested. The story is told by Kathy, in her 30s, who is on her way to settling down to becoming a donor and subsequently "completing". She tells the story of how she grew up in a boarding school for clones, how she and her friends gradually learnt what they were, and she tells about her relationships with the people she loved best. It's very very good. It's slightly marred towards the end, when Kathy and her lover Tommy confront a former teacher from the school, and she "explains all". It feels a bit too summarizing and lecturing, but it's okay.
Recommended heartily. I'm off to borrow all his other works.
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