decemberthirty | Entries tagged with kazuo ishiguro

I finished Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go recently, but I can't quite figure out my feelings about it. It was a quick read (or would have been, if I hadn't gotten interrupted halfway through by Ms. E's getting burned and my suddenly having to become her nursemaid), but I kept feeling like there was some key element missing from the book yet was never able to put my finger on what. Perhaps it was just because my expectations were very high based on my love of The Remains of the Day, and there are few books indeed that can stand up to that one, but I couldn't help feeling a bit disappointed in this book.

It's funny, but many of the characteristics that made The Remains of the Day so brilliant are also present in Never Let Me Go--I can't figure out why the same things that came together so perfectly in one book would fall so flat in another. Both books are told through reminiscence, both feature pinpoint control of tone and voice, both are narrated by characters who are careful observers of other people...the list could probably go on. Perhaps the thing that Remains of the Day has that this book lacks is intensity. That's an odd thing to think because Never Let Me Go has much more drama in its plot than a butler going for a drive, but the drama didn't seem to penetrate--it's like the two books are mirror images of each other: Remains of the Day still and quiet on the surface but smoldering below, and Never Let Me Go full of much more intensity on the surface and empty underneath.

But I shouldn't just compare this book to Remains of the Day; I should think about it as its own thing. My favorite character was Tommy--I liked the teenaged Tommy so much that I was disappointed that the adult version of Tommy wasn't developed more fully. I must confess, though, that it was a little strange to read the book because the character Tommy reminded me so strongly of my cat Tommy. And not just because of their names! Like my cat, the character seems developmentally behind his peers, slow to catch on to things, easy to laugh at... The book opens with a storyline about Tommy being mildly bullied at school, and I found it very hard to read because I kept thinking that those mean children were teasing my poor helpless kitty.

Kathy, the narrator, is a strange character. There's something about her that doesn't click, something artificial about her. Several times I found myself responding to her recollections by thinking that people just don't act like that. It reminded me of a friend I had in high school who, I learned, had a very different perspective from mine. Whenever he and I would talk about something that had occurred among our group of friends, our perceptions were so far removed from each other that I would find myself wondering if we were talking about the same people and the same event. Ishiguro does acknowledge this sort of subjectivity in his narrative--Kathy is forever mentioning that one of her friends had a different interpretation of a particular instance, or that someone else remembered a story in a different way than she did--but this acknowledgment doesn't seem to amount to much.

I think the thing that disappointed me most was the ending of the book. The conclusion is a bit foregone--we know the characters can't get the thing they want--but even so it seems to happen rather abruptly, with a great deal of mystery and suspense all dispelled at a stroke. I guess in the end my problem is that I can't seem to figure out why Ishiguro wrote this particular book. The book has some science fiction-ish elements, and some coming of age elements, and a great deal of interpersonal drama elements, but all of these various elements don't seem to gel with each other, and I'm left wondering what exactly he was trying to accomplish.

Sigh. I feel like I might be being a bit too harsh here. It's an engaging enough book, and there were a few moments of nicely managed tension. I don't know. Has anyone else read this one? I would very much like to hear others' thoughts.

In totally unrelated news, I harvested my first zucchini today! And when I say first, I mean that these are the first zucchini I've grown EVER, as in my whole life. Very exciting! Now I've just got to figure out how I'm going to use them.

1. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro: Early in this book there is a passage in which a butler named Stevens, after looking out on gently rolling fields broken by hedges and dotted with sheep, muses thus:

I am quite prepared to believe that other countries can offer more obviously spectacular scenery. Indeed, I have seen in encyclopedias and the National Geographic Magazine breathtaking photographs of sights from various corners of the globe; magnificent canyons and waterfalls, raggedly beautiful mountains. It has never, of course, been my privilege to have seen such things at first hand, but I will nevertheless hazard this with some confidence: the English landscape at its finest—such as I saw it this morning—possesses a quality that the landscapes of other nations, however more superficially dramatic, inevitably fail to possess. It is, I believe a quality that will mark out the English landscape to any objective observer as the most deeply satisfying in the world, and this quality is probably best summed up by the term 'greatness'.

Although these remarks relate to rural England, they are also an apt description of the book itself. The Remains of the Day is an extremely quiet book in which almost nothing happens (the only possible plot summary is "A butler reminisces about his career while on a driving tour through the south of England.") yet it has a greatness that many flashier stories fail to attain. It's a masterpiece of nuance and impeccably controlled tone; Ishiguro's prose style is as restrained as Stevens himself. I was most impressed by the way Ishiguro conveys Stevens's emotional repression and the insularity of his existence from within the first-person perspective—definitely one of the most successful uses of first-person that I've ever read. I also appreciated the compassion with which Ishiguro treats Stevens. It would be so easy to make him a figure of fun, what with his pompous habits, his preoccupation with 'dignity', his stiffness and inability to take or make jokes, but Ishiguro never makes fun of him. It is only with the greatest gentleness that he suggests that Stevens may be wrong about dignity being the most important quality for a person to possess, that perhaps warmth and human feeling are just as important.

This is a beautiful book, the best thing I've read in months, and you should all go out and read it right now.

2. Gifts by Ursula K. LeGuin: Not a bad book, certainly, but not a great one either. A young adult novel about tribes of people who are genetically disposed to have superhuman powers, Gifts is beautifully written, as is everything by LeGuin, and her tremendous talent at building societies and detailing complex relationship structures is in evidence. Nonetheless, the story never quite comes to life. The world of the book is vivid—violent, dark, isolated, and sinister—but the characters are flat. It was a quick read and the plot was engaging enough to keep me going, but this is not the sort of book that lingers in the mind after you finish it. Disappointing, considering the way LeGuin's best YA writing does just that.

3. Strange Motion by Jonathan Franzen: Perhaps it's cheating to count this among my vacation reads, since I only read about 2/3 of it while I was away, but I think that's enough to give a preliminary review…

Like The Corrections, Strange Motion is a book that is packed with incident and with social observation. The plot contains a mysterious series of earthquakes in the suburbs of Boston, a dysfunctional family battling over a large sum of money, a love story that goes awry (and may yet right itself), and environmental wrongdoing by a major chemical company. All of these threads tie together neatly, and the story is surprisingly cohesive considering how much is stuffed into it. The prose is as quick and clever as one would expect from Franzen, although it sometimes feels a bit too self-conscious for my taste. I don't find the book to be particularly emotionally engaging thus far, but it's a fun read with a fair amount of intrigue.

4. "My Father's Suitcase" by Orhan Pamuk: I finally got around to reading Pamuk's Nobel Lecture, and I thought it was brilliant. He strikes a perfect balance between the personal and the intellectual, his tone is measured, and his language is precise. There's really nothing I can say that will be better than Pamuk's own writing, so I'll end with this quotation that would make any writer take heart:

When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man--or this woman--may use a typewriter, or profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I do. As he writes, he may drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time, he may rise from his table to look out the window at the children playing in the street, or, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or even at a black wall. He may write poems, or plays, or novels, as I do. But all these differences arise only after the crucial task is complete--after he has sat down at the table and patiently turned inward. To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.

i'm a very very complex person

i try to improve but you see how i worsen

Entries tagged with kazuo ishiguro

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Sand between the pages, or, what I read on my February vacation.

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