Literature Nobel goes to Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.  He is best known (among us older folks) for his novel Remains of the Day, which won the Man Booker Prize and was later made into an Oscar nominated film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.   The Hopkins character is an aging butler who remininisces about his life of service and his suppression of any emotional and romantic life of his own.

It is so quintessentially British that it seemed remarkable that a Japanese man could have so perfectly captured the life of an English butler;  but, in fact, Ishiguro has lived in England since he was eight, when his family moved there.   He was educated in English schools, and he thinks of himself as British, although he also has Japanese sensibilities, having been raised by Japanese parents and having spoken Japanese in their home.  Perhaps that mixture of English and Japanese life experience is what gives him such a range of emotional resonance.

Ishiguro's novelistic range is shown in the contrast -- of time, place, and almost everything else -- with his later dystopian novel Never Let Me Go.   As it begins, you think you're listening in on conversation of a group of teenagers in an ordinary English boarding school.    As the novel moves along, you begin to realize that this is far in the future and that these teens are actually clones to real people out there in the world, created for the specific purpose of supplying "spare parts," as needed, for their "originals."

The permanent secretary of the Swedish Committee that gave the award said:   "[Ishigura] is an exquisite novelist.   I would say if you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka you get Ishiguro in a nutshell."   And she added, "a touch of Proust as well" because of his focus on memory.

The formal statement from the academy hailed Ishiguro's ability to reveal "the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world . . . in novels of great emotional force" that touch on memory, time and self delusion."

I agree, although I found it very discomforting to read Never Let Me Go -- and couldn't bring myself to see the film;  but that's my own personal aversion to dystopian fiction -- and it's only this one of his work on this theme.

I prefer the real world as I know it.   There's plenty of room for human depth, conflict, love, and achievement within that, for me.   Even so, I greatly admire Ishiguro's writing, and I'm glad that his quality of writing has been recognized with the Nobel.

This will not be a controversial choice, as was last year's pick of Bob Dylan for the Literature Prize.   Some people thought it was great, others a bit odd for a singer to be chosen on the basis of song lyrics alone.

Ralph