A Novelist for All Times
The announcement of this year’s Nobel prize in Literature had some surprises — both for bookies and the awardee himself. Kazuo Ishiguro, 62, whose name struggled to get into bookies’ lists has won the award. Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki in Japan but moved to the UK when he was five, said he was “tremendously proud” to receive the award and emphasised how much he hoped it would be a force for good at a time of global instability.
His most famous works include ‘Pale View of Hills’ (1982), ‘An Artist of the Floating World’ (1986), ‘The Remains of the Day’ (1989), ‘ Never Let Me Go’ (2005) and ‘The Buried Giant’ (2015). ‘The Remains of the Day’, his most famous work won the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 1989. A film adaptation of the novel, made in 1993 and starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, was nominated for eight Academy Awards. In this book, the narrator, Stevens, a butler, recalls his life in the form of a diary while the action progresses through to the present. Much of the novel is concerned with Stevens’ professional and, above all, personal relationship with a former colleague, the housekeeper Miss Kenton.
Taking a look at his style of writing, we see that most of his novels are narrated in first person. They typically start with a flashback and move forward to the present. Also, Ishiguro’s novels step aside from contemporary mores and pressing social issues. Audaciously, sometimes bewilderingly, they abstract us from our times. One of his famous books, ‘Never Let Me Go’ opens with a page that says only “England, late 1990s”. Narrated by a young woman who is a clone, created, like her fellow clones, to provide organs for those requiring transplant surgery, it takes place in a version of Britain both cosily provincial and utterly strange. The countryside, the liberal boarding school, the English seaside town have never made for such a disturbing backdrop. .
Like any other achiever, Ishiguro also has an interesting story about his life with which I will wind up the article. Ishiguro’s second book, had brought with it it’s first flurry of public success and a lot of distractions. Potentially career-enhancing proposals, dinner and party invitations, alluring foreign trips and mountains of mail had all but put an end to his “proper” work. He had written an opening chapter to a new novel the previous summer, but almost a year later, he was no further forward. So, he and his wife Lorna, came up with a plan. He would, for a four-week period, ruthlessly clear his diary and go on what was somewhat mysteriously called a ‘Crash’. During the ‘Crash’, he would do nothing but write from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday through Saturday. He would get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. He would not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone. No one would come to the house. In this way, so they hoped, he would not only complete more work quantitively, but reach a mental state in which his fictional world was more real to him than the actual one.
But then, there was a problem. By the third day, Lorna observed during his evening break that he was behaving oddly. So, she asked if he wanted to continue the ‘Crash’. But Ishiguro insisted that everything was fine and just after three weeks, the first draft of the novel was complete. This was how, fundamentally, his most famous book, which won the Man Booker Prize, ‘The Remains of the Day’ was written. This does tell us the hardwork put in by a great achiever and the risk he took, to do what he loved. Hopefully, each one us will learn something from this story.
-Darshan V
(Inputs from Guardian)
