Tag: Kazuo Ishiguro

Screening Room: ‘Living’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

What would you do if you discovered you had six months to live? That’s the premise of Oliver Hermanus’ Living, respectfully adapted by Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) from Akira Kurosawa’s great Ikiru (1953).

Living opens today in limited release and expands around the country in January. My review is at PopMatters:

Living keeps the early 1950s time period, transposing Kurosawa’s story quite neatly from Tokyo to London, another capital city smothered under war trauma, social stricture, and emotional repression. Bill Nighy plays Williams, the head of a small unit of Public Works bureaucrats. His emotional register leaves as narrow a footprint as the work his people never seem to accomplish. Having buried himself in routine since the death of his wife, Williams keeps the world itself at bay by very simply never engaging…

Here’s the trailer:

In Books: Ursula K. Le Guin is Right About ‘The Buried Giant’

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

buriedgiant-coverIn Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel The Buried Giant, the author of Remains of the Day takes on a different kind of period setting: A fantastical yesteryear in which ogres roam the land, King Arthur is only recently departed, and a great dragon threatens the land.

It’s not the easiest fit for Ishiguro, who never quite seems comfortable in his own setting. He continually holds the reader’s hand, taking them aside for background notes on what they are witnessing instead of just letting the story flow. The flatness of his language, which was more appropriate to the subject of a novel like Never Let Me Go and its story of stunted humanity, here keeps the reader from ever engaging with his deeper, fascinating-in-theory themes of memory and selective amnesia.

When Ishiguro was interviewed about working in a different metier than he was used to, he seemed uneasy that readers might think of the novel as being fantasy. Which, of course, it was. You wouldn’t think that authors would still hold such prejudices against genre, given how porous the borders between literary fiction and fantasy and science fiction have become. Just see the reaction to Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road a few years back. Now everybody can play.

Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness) took exception with Ishiguro’s defensiveness, as well as his seeming nervousness, “Are they going to say this is fantasy?”

I respect what I think he was trying to do, but for me it didn’t work. It couldn’t work. No writer can successfully use the ‘surface elements’ of a literary genre — far less its profound capacities — for a serious purpose, while despising it to the point of fearing identification with it. I found reading the book painful. It was like watching a man falling from a high wire while he shouts to the audience, “Are they going say I’m a tight-rope walker?”

Le Guin is right in her judgment. Ishiguro’s inability to commit to the wild strangeness of his story kills any joy or mystery the reader might have found in it. Perhaps the natural chilliness of Ishiguro’s prose makes it a better fit for certain other types of genre writing (again, like he was able to deliver much more powerfully in the mournful science fiction of Never Let Me Go).

The Buried Giant is fantasy. It’s just not very good fantasy.

There’s an excerpt from the novel here. You can also see Ishiguro reading from it here.

Writer’s Desk: Listening to Your Wife

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

Writers aren’t known for their eagerness to take advice. Some work well in collaborative environments where their text is ever being reworked by colleagues (newsrooms, say). But in the main, their tendency is resistance to outside meddling. It’s a common side effect of the stubbornness needed to sit down at that desk every day, even when the sun is shining and the last thing they want to do is grind out another couple pages of that damn novel.

The_Buried_GiantIt was refreshing, then, to read this in a recent profile of Kazuo Ishiguro, whose newest novel The Buried Giant is hitting stores soon. According to Ishiguro, he asked his wife to read his first pages:

“She looked at it and said, ‘This will not do,’ ” he recalled. ” ‘I don’t mean you need to tweak it; you need to start from scratch. None of this can be seen by anybody.’ “

He put the book away and didn’t go back to it for six years. It’s impossible to say, of course, whether Ishiguro’s wife was correct. But what’s almost certain is that more writers would be better off listening to that trusted confidant when they say, albeit lovingly: Don’t show this to anybody.