Kazuo Ishiguro Reading Guide

 I finally read Kazuo Ishiguro in prison. He is another one who I really admire, and that shows on what I have managed to publish here.

The Guardian has published another of its reading guides, Where to start with: Kazuo Ishiguro. The Guardian has done its usual grand work.

The entry point

Ishiguro’s first two novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, had both directly addressed his lost Japanese background – he came to Britain with his family when he was five and did not visit Japan again for nearly 30 years, by which time he was a celebrated author. Both novels had developed his vision of people looking back on their lives in puzzlement and regret, leaving much to the reader to interpret.

Both are fine books, the second improving on the first, but it is his third take on much the same theme that remains the definitive entry point to his work: The Remains of the Day. Set this time wholly in Britain in the 1950s, Stevens the butler, a believer in the elusive concept of “dignity”, recalls his life of service to a man who was, we come to realize, a Nazi sympathizer. Stevens’s misplaced dedication has cost him his own chance of love and fulfilment, a realisation he comes to all too late.

The Remains of the Day is wonderfully funny and sad at the same time, “both beautiful and cruel”, as Salman Rushdie said. It won the Booker prize and was turned into a successful film, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, winning eight Oscar nominations.

Ishiguro admitted that he had in effect written the same novel three times, getting closer and closer to what he wanted to say. The result is a book that is perfection in its own terms.

sch 6/4