![]() ![]() ![]() The Saddest Music in the World, a screenplay that Ishiguro wrote in the 1980s, was rewritten by Guy Maddin and George Toles. ![]() Even their titles run the scale of a minor key: A Pale View of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, The Unconsoled, When We Were Orphans, Never Let Me Go, Nocturnes, The Buried Giant. Ishiguro is a manipulator, a masterful one. “What is that? I think it’s something about feeling very clearly manipulated, maybe.” “I think he’s very good, yes, although to be honest there is something snobbish in me that never quite lets myself say he is one of my favorite writers,” a friend wrote to me recently. Others back away slowly, admitting grudging respect but no enthusiasm. When you tell a fellow admirer that you are a recent convert, as I am, you often get something like a shrug, as if you have just suggested that The Great Gatsby is a ripper of a yarn. Still, faddism alone doesn’t explain the silence around Ishiguro. Fashion recycles the past, but literary taste, for the new and the newly reissued, has a brutally short memory: Roberto Bolaño, Robert Walser, Renata Adler, Chris Kraus, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante - the wheels spin on. Why does nobody talk about Kazuo Ishiguro? Never in my life has someone recommended an Ishiguro novel to me, and I am a person to whom people frequently recommend novels. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |