Kazuo Ishiguro (1989) | Hacker News Reader

Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)

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46 pointsycombinete30 comments

The Remains of the Day might be my favorite book. It does have my favorite quote, which I won’t spoil for anyone who hasn’t read the book as I think the emotional impact is lessened out of context.

This book gave me the sense that the author once felt an emotion so deeply that he needed to write an entire novel in order to convey it.

I think I know exactly which line you are referring to.

I have read the book multiple times, and that line never fails to move me to tears, even when I know it is coming.

It's been on my list for years now. I just haven't got around to reading it. Once I have I'll have to ask you about the quote.

I think you should drop everything else and run to the bookstore, buy the book and read it. Come to think of it, I'm going to do it myself right now.

Very interesting. Is the impact similar in the film?

I think it is! There is an incredible amount of restraint and tension in that movie. It's in my top 2.

The Remains of the Day isn't just my favorite book from Ishiguro. It is my favorite book, period.

It is a book about many things, but one of the main themes is regret. As a younger person, I thought I would end up following the trajectory of Stevens. The narrative matched mine so much that I thought it was a description of an inexorable path in life that someone like me was bound to follow. As I got older, I realized the opposite: that Stevens was an anti-hero, that I did NOT have to follow the his trajectory, and that I had the agency to make different choices in life. In that way, the book's anti-message guides me today.

p.s. with regards to Ishiguro, despite liking RotD, I didn't care for any of his other works. I didn't like Never Let me Go (which was highly acclaimed), nor the Buried Giant, nor When we were Orphans. Admittedly I have not read "An Artist of the Floating World".

I really enjoyed the movie, great performances by Hopkins and Thompson. I started reading "the Unconsoled", but stopped after feeling a strong sense of dread about the description of characters not having talked to their father for many years. I steer clear of his work for now my own mental health. His work contains a strong sombre element, it's beautiful but it's not for me.

No one has talked about An Artist of the Floating World here. I'll try without giving too much away and taking away the potential enjoyment of someone who could read it in future.

So much of what we read, fact and fiction, stands on the foundation of an omniscient first- or third-person narrator. We do not even think of questioning what the narrator tells us. Even mystery or suspense stories only hide a secret with the protagonist "peeling an onion" to find answers progressively. Deceptive incidents, the doubts of the detective, inconsequential objects, descriptions of crime scenes serve to distract us and we know we are being distracted and it is part of the game.

But unreliable narrators are a different beast altogether. As the story progresses, there are hints of doubt created in our minds regarding description of events, feelings of characters, gaps in some story lines which we hope will be reconciled later (and which are). A great author can do this so subtly that if you do not follow along closely it is easy to miss or, worse, mistake this to be a problem with the author's storytelling.

Fight Club is one such story. It is non-linear which serves to disorient the reader and at the end we realize the narrator was also unreliable. There are sentences like "Today I almost ate Marla's mother" and we are left wondering what that means until a few paragraphs later it is revealed. The non-linearity masks the narrator's reliability. The book is well-done even though the story-telling is . But you have to read An Artist of the Floating World to see what a master can do with ordinary events, conversations, descriptions of places by (someone who we will later in the story consider as) an unreliable narrator. Stories like these serve as a reminder that every one sees the world differently. We consider others unreliable while forgetting that everyone sees what they want to.

I‘m a huge fan of Ishiguro. I find it fascinating that through most if his books he stays very close to his main themes – memory, introspection, self-deception – while playing with and exploring various different genres: historical, dystopia, detective, fantasy... The Buried Giant for example is a quite unsual fantasy novel, one that really moved me.

Have you read A Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes? It's a stunning exploration of those same themes: memory, introspection, self-deception.

Yes, I have, and I enjoyed it! Thanks for the tip.

If curious see also these threads from 2017:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15428846

cool article, not much discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408463

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408194

Thanks, dang. I've been checking for reposts, before posting lately, but forgot with this one.

Reposts aren't a problem after a year or so! See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. The reason I post links to previous discussions is just because they're interesting sometimes.

I think it would be an interesting feature of HN to allow you to see some reports when you are actually posting something; it is just quite time-consuming to do that check manually every single time.

I've heard that "Remains of the day" is Jeff Bezos' favorite book of all time. Some reference here: [0].

[0]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-jeff-bezos-was-ecstati...

Not to go off on a tangent but this really struck me:

“ KI

There is a big difference between someone in my position and someone who has come from one of the countries that belonged to the British Empire. There is a very special and very potent relationship between someone brought up in India, with a very powerful notion of Britain as the mother country, and the source of modernity and culture and education.”

Perhaps someone from India could give their opinion but as someone from another country that was made part of the British empire this strikes me as nonsense - of course there are some small circles in my country where the idea might persist in some attenuated form but in general the above would considered utterly offensive and - more importantly - just plain wrong.

I think the interview shows its age, so to speak, I don’t think similar things would be said nowadays compared to 1989.

Definitely so. Indian children are always taught about our glorious freedom movement in detail, glorifying leaders like Gandhi and Bhagat Singh. There are sadly still remnants of British culture throughout, like statues or names of streets or buildings, but I don’t think anyone looks at British rule as anything but a dark age where India went from one of the most prosperous nations in the world to.. very much not so.

Well, there really wasn't an Indian nation before the Brits sailed in and did their thing; India was a loosely-knit (if at all) bunch of "kingdoms". In addition, you don't have to look further than the transformer at the end of your street, or the nearest Railway line, (or the language in which you wrote your post) for a remnant of British culture.

To provide a not-quite-equivalent-but-parallel example, you don't have to look farther than your phone's navigation system for a remnant of Nazi culture (via satellites via rockets).

BTW -- being a fully resident citizen of said nation who was born a few decades after 1947 -- I personally do have an ambivalent attitude towards the British Raj. I guess not all of the administrators were merciless tyrants and scoundrels, and neither were all of them benevolent angels. I don't subscribe to Ishiguro's views expressed in the quote under discussion, either.

That said, one cannot wish the facts away, which is what I was trying to put across, albeit ham-handedly, in my earlier comment.

Any development which the British did was purely to serve their own purposes and improve the efficiency and speed of their looting the country. Why should we be grateful for that? The opportunity cost there for the Indian subcontinent (if not India as a nation) was massive, and the British took it from us.

I’m proud to say I’m not ambivalent about it in the least.

I think what you're missing is that the distribution of wealth was probably just as uneven - if not worse than it is now. Most of it was concentrated in the hands of a few. So what was looted wasn't going to be used for the good of the common folk anyway. The ruling royals (most of them; there were a few exceptions like Mysore and a few of the Holkars) were worse governments than the Brits ever were.

You're free to believe whatever you want to, and feel pride in whatever makes you feel good. That is your prerogative - but do mind the facts!

Edit: To be clear, I'm _not_ trying to justify what the Brits did. Bear in mind though, the royals that they replaced were in many cases much worse administrators - so the argument about the opportunity cost holds little water.

I agree with him as far as there is definitely a specail relationship between Britain and it's ex-colonies. It's just not always positive.

I'm South African, and I've definitely noticed it. There's often a mild animosity towards Britain from the many groups that comprise South Africa. Especially amongst the indiginous and Afrikaans people, but also the English speakers. Of a similar sort to what I percieve in the US media.

The postive side is almost always from the English speakers. In fact the Afrikaans people have a nickname for the English South Africans: soutie, which is short for 'soutpiel'. Literally 'salty-penis'. The idea being that they aren't real South Africans: one foot in England, and the other in South Africa, with their penis dangling in the ocean. Even this characterisation is becoming anachronisting though, as newer generations simply see themselves as South African.

(I grew up in India in the 90s and 2000s.)

As a sibling comment said, the history taught in schools focuses heavily on the freedom movement. In fact students learn basically nothing about World War 1 and 2, since the freedom movement lasted from 1857 to 1947, so there's no time to talk about what was going on in the rest of the world. Every educated Indian will agree that getting independence was better than staying under British rule.

However, contrary to what that comment says, I think you could safely get educated Indians to agree that the British rule was better than the fragmented mess that India was before the East India Company. British education infrastructure in general was responsible for the state of India today. Many of the leaders of the freedom movement had higher educations as a consequence of being British subjects, eg Gandhi and Nehru both studied law in England. So I would say the British rule definitely would be considered to be the source of modernity and education.

Edit: The British also did a bunch of uplifting to get rid of shit like sati (widows being forced to be cremated in their husband's funeral pyre for religious reasons) and child marriage, though it wasn't completely effective and also required a bunch of effort in post-independence India.

It isn't offensive but for the current generation it is plain wrong as you say. I think what he (KI) says might have been quite true for the generations living during, and for a few decades after, British India, but no longer. Keep in mind Britain has changed drastically too in these decades. It is no longer the cultural power it was, and countries like India now have plenty of our own problems for anyone to even think about the past.

Besides it is nothing but romanticism. No invading country is truly altruistic. They give with half an hand and take with the rest one-half hands.

Also culture and modernity are subjective concepts.

I'm not Indian, but I've worked closely with Indian colleagues and friends for a large part of my career.

India is a huge country with varied religions, cultures and subcultures, so I don't know if you can really infer anything from replies, but I'll add an anecdote into the mix.

As a Brit, I've been interested in how Indians relate to the UK today. To my great surprise, I've always had replies that are magnanimous, and even grateful for the things the empire left behind - a unified India, democracy, the English language, and thebl railways. For context, everyone I've spoken to works in the IT industry, and they don't think India would play such a role in the global IT industry if it hadn't been a British colony.

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