The Nobel Prize in Literature 2017 – Kazuo Ishiguro [pdf]
nobelprize.org
nobelprize.org
Thought some folks here would be interested in how a famous novelist does "crunch" weeks". In this 2014 op-ed for the Guardian, he describes how it took 4 weeks for him to create his most famous novel, "The Remains of the Day":
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/06/kazuo-ishiguro...
tl;dr
- Had the first chapter written the previous summer, but made no progress on it for about a year.
- Even though he couldn't write that year, he did a "substantial amount of 'research'" about British life/politics/servitude of that time period. This is what led to his 4-week "Crash" session being productive:
> he decision when to start the actual writing of a novel – to begin composing the story itself – always seems to me a crucial one. How much should one know before starting on the prose? It’s damaging to start too early, equally so to start too late. I think with Remains I got lucky: the Crash came just at the right point, when I knew just enough.
During the 4-week "crash", he had a dedicated study in a house he recently moved in; his previous 2 novels were written at his dining table.
His process during the 4-weeks was not at all structured (in the traditional sense):
> Throughout the Crash, I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere – I let them remain and ploughed on.
Note that he didn't finish the novel in 4 weeks. But he did reach the critical mass to make it a complete idea and story:
> I kept it up for the four weeks, and at the end of it I had more or less the entire novel down: though of course a lot more time would be required to write it all up properly, the vital imaginative breakthroughs had all come during the Crash.
[0] The Remains of the Day (1993) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107943/
[1] Merchant Ivory Productions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Ivory_Productions
Unfortunately could not find the movie anywhere (YouTube has some bad versions). If anyone has any pointers, to where we can find it online, would be good.
Well-worth the money. It’s stunningly produced, faithful to the novel, and both Hopkins and Thompson are outstanding.
Ideally, I want to be able to just buy a movie from somewhere, without needing to subscribe to the entire service.
The premise is really just the launching point for what the book is about. It’s not explored in at all the manner you’d expect from a typical “dystopian sci-fi” novel.
The ending of "The Remains of the Day" always moves me, almost to tears. How the butler, having realized he threw his life away for people who were not worth it, is at it again, repeating the same mistakes and having learned (almost) nothing. And still, I root for him.
if the committee picks an author you adore, doesn't that increase your respect for the prize?
And make you want to check out other authors who won it?
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2196584-archagon?shelf...
To me, Ishiguro's most distinguishing characteristic is the tremendous empathy for the people he portrays. Even his weaker novels manage to take you deep into these characters that seem to carry decades within every thought and expression, even though it may ultimately come at the expense of world-building for the plot at hand (I'm thinking of "Buried Giant"). And of course his best novels are something else, like crystals.
It seems to me that the value of unpleasant art is usually that it teaches us something: perhaps it helps us to empathise with people we previously didn't understand, or gives us a new perspective on a topic we care about, or makes us care about a topic we had previously neglected, etc. But if The Unconsoled precisely captured a feeling you were already familiar with, all I can see it doing is giving you a sense of connection: ah, yes, someone else really does get what my nightmares are like; I'm not alone. Which is not worthless, but seems likely to be outweighed by the unpleasantness of the reading experience.
Am I just wrong on that last point, or have I missed something else entirely?
I can say that I've "read" more Ishiguro through audiobooks than paper, and that they've all been excellent. Rosalyn Landor's Never Let Me Go was particularly moving.
The first-person perspective used by Ishiguro in several of his novels lends itself very well to the format. When We Were Orphans isn't typically considered one of his stronger works, but as a "told tale" I found it fascinating.