According to The Writer’s Almanac, yesterday (11/8) was the birthday of Kazuo Ishiguro. I have never read any of his books, but my very dear friend and EDIWTB reader, Tuvana, has maintained for years that The Remains of the Day is the best book she’s ever read. To quote her: "His writing is measured, and perfect, and he never wastes a word."
If you’ve never read the book or seen the movie, The Remains of the Day is about "a perfect English butler who tries to give his narrow existence form and meaning through the self-effacing, almost mystical practice of his profession. In a career that spans the second World War, he is oblivious of the real life that goes on around him — oblivious, for instance, of the fact that his aristocrat employer is a Nazi sympathizer. Still, there are even larger matters at stake in this heartbreaking, pitch-perfect novel — namely, his own ability to allow some bit of life-affirming love into his tightly repressed existence." (Amazon) The Remains of the Day won the Booker Prize in 1989.
According to Salon, The Remains of the Day is a "gorgeously nuanced monologue on prewar English society. It [is] a masterpiece of tone and understatement, an heirloom novel — a living example of a literary strain that fell out of fashion a half-century ago, to be replaced by hardier, often less flavorful varieties. And more subtly, as a novel of manners by a Japanese-born writer, it [is] an exploration of those places where the Japanese and the English psyches intersect: the comforts and the tyranny of station; the refuge of historical memory vs. the reality of the encroaching present; that guarded borderland between thought and speech that the civilized soul inhabits, trapped and stultified but recused from the smaller forms of human despair."
Ishiguro also wrote When We Were Orphans, which came out in 2000. It is the story of a man living in England who returns to China to find out what caused his parents’ mysterious disappearance when he was a boy. Reviews of the book seem to concur that the book is disappointing, given the high bar set by The Remains of the Day. According to The New York Times (subscription may be required):
Though Orphans has moments of enormous power, it lacks the virtuosic control of language and tone that made Remains of the Day such a tour de force…. Indeed it remains a messy hybrid of a book that recycles Mr. Ishiguro’s favorite narrative techniques while reprising his favorite themes — most notably, his fascination with the ways in which people try to come to terms with the past, and their tendency to conflate the private and the political, the personal and the communal.
Ishiguro’s newest book is Never Let Me Go. It is about a love triangle between three students. Again from The New York Times (subscription may be required):
As in so many of Mr. Ishiguro’s novels, there is no conventional plot here. Instead, a narrator’s elliptical reminiscences provide carefully orchestrated clues that the reader must slowly piece together, like a detective, to get a picture of what really happened and why.
Never Let Me Go is marred by a slapdash, explanatory ending that recalls the stilted, tie-up-all-the loose-ends conclusion of Hitchcock’s ”Psycho.” The remainder of the book, however, is a Gothic tour de force that showcases the same gifts that made Mr. Ishiguro’s 1989 novel, The Remains of the Day, such a cogent performance.
So it seems like Ishiguro’s later works haven’t lived up to the virtuosity of Remains of the Day. I’d love to hear from any EDIWTB readers out there who have read one or more of these books — what did you think?