November 5, 2009
The five stories of "Music and Nightfall" contained in Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro display Ishiguro's virtuosity in creating fiction that is both illuminating and pleasurable. Reading his works is always an experience of multiple satisfactions -- characters, landscape, plot -- and the themes he explores are consistently brought to a new place of examination and understanding. My favorite story in the collection was "Crooner", with its narrator both innocent and wise, its underlying themes of regret and passage, and its conclusion that music (and the comfort that it gives, no matter what its motivation or how unintentionally given) is on the highest plane of human endeavor. Writing -- when it is as good as these stories are -- is also on that plane, and Ishiguro gives great comfort, pleasure, and insight with these stories.
Ishiguro never takes the easy way out in his fiction; he doesn't write stories with a clear demarcation of right and wrong, light and dark, and yet he does insist on a line of human decency. His characters yearn for what is best not only for themselves but also as a reaching outward for someone or something else. Even when they fail, miserably or, as demonstrated to great affect in two of the stories, humorously, they are trying to do the right thing; Ishiguro's characters want to be the right person for the job, to answer the needs of the people (acquaintances, wives, agents, friends, memory of a mother) making demands all around them, and to bring some gratification, some pleasure, somewhere. Rarely do they please themselves, but that is life, both in Ishiguro's stories and in the real world. Learning to live with dreams that have not quite come true, with loves that do not answer all needs, with the injustice of how life's rewards and punishments are meted out, is learning to live, period. And in Ishiguro's stories, the lesson is learned through moments of pain, of grace, and of laugh-out-loud chaos.
Per FTC rules, the book I reviewed here was a review copy provided by the publisher.
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May 13, 2009
I was very moved by Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, moved by thinking and by feeling. As in his other books, like The Remains of the Day and A Pale View of Hills, Ishiguro is the master of the slow but entrancing build, the teaser of facts mixed in with luscious background to draw us in and hold us as we squirm for more. We push eagerly through his lovely books for the full story, for the true story that lurks -- in this book, oh so creepily -- in the shadows. And always, at the end of his books the fullness is revealed and in that fullness we find an awful yet undeniable truth.
I will not give away the story of Never Let Me Go but I can tell you it has to do with the concept of the soul. What does it take to prove someone/something has a soul? And are we only willing to accord decent treatment to those we accord a soul? We treat animals a certain way based on our personal perceptions of them; for the most part we ignore how they are feeling/living/dying because it is easier to eat our meat that way. As for other humans, it is easier to bomb the hell out of a community if we can point out their inhumanity: take away their souls and you remove their claim to life. Ignore their dreams and it is easier to take those dreams (homeland, peace) away.
So how to determine who has a soul? Where is the evidence? Proof is in the pudding, perhaps; it is in one's ability to understand beauty and suffering, to be both sympathetic and empathetic. But what of the twisted, deformed soul of the man who wants only to inflict suffering; and what of those who ignore suffering? Ignore or inflict, are both proof of no soul at all? Perhaps we can just deny any existence of soul at all: can you just flat out say there no such thing? I am an agnostic and yet I cannot say there is no soul in living things. Perhaps the soul is the purpose of living, upholding life and celebrating it, agonizing over it, and choosing it.
Ishiguro is an amazing story teller, skilled at tightening the strings of tension, suspense, and desire around us. We want to know the full story as much as the characters -- maybe even more so because we have less to lose, less to hide from: oh, the horror and the beauty of the truth. Ishiguro is also so good, in all his books, at raising questions and then attempting answers through the story and through his characters, but mostly through the reactions of his readers to his story and characters.
In Never Let Me Go, the questions center on what is it to be human. What is our purpose? The children in the book are raised for a purpose but also allowed to express beauty, feel beauty and have fun, and experience sex. But for what purpose? What purpose has any of our lives, after all? What holds us up? Our dreams? Our dignity? One of the teachers in this novel wants to tell her students about their future, and remove any dreams of what cannot be: is that kind or cruel? So many questions are raised by this book. Deep leanings of the mind....deeper yearnings of the soul. And no man has the right to determine who or what holds that soul. This novel is science fiction, sure, but it is much more, an exploration of how we perceive the world and how we assign -- or take away -- the souls and the dreams of others.
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