Nobel prize in Literature winner Kazuo Ishiguor is best of the best
I AM really thrilled and happy to know that one of my most favorite writers, Kazuo Ishiguro, the British author was chosen as the 29th English-language novelist to receive the award for the ‘novels of great emotional force’ - The Nobel prize in Literature 2017.
The Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually since 1901, to an author from any country who has, in the words of the will of Alfred Nobel, produced “in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”.
Despite the fact that individual works are sometimes cited as being particularly noteworthy, here “work” refers to an author’s work as a whole. The Swedish Academy decides the winner in any given year and normally announces the name of the chosen laureate in early October. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895; the others are the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Nobel Prize in Physics, Nobel Peace Prize, and Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Last year I was exceptionally happy too for my good old favorite songwriter and singer Bob Dylan, the poet laureate of the rock era who has sold millions of records with enigmatic songwriting, was conferred with the similar award, an honor that elevated him into the company of T. S. Eliot, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison and Samuel Beckett.
Born in 1954 in Nagasaki, Japan, the son of an oceanographer, Ishiguro moved to Surrey, England, when he was five years old, and attended Woking County Grammar School, a school (according to him) that was “probably the last chance to get a flavor of a bygone English society which was already rapidly fading.” Ishiguro fell upon literature as a young boy when he lucked into Sherlock Holmes stories in the local library. After studying English and philosophy at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, he spent a year writing fiction, eventually gaining a Master of Arts in creative writing, and studied with writers like Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter.
As a young man, Ishiguro wanted to be a singer and songwriter. He played at folk clubs and went through several stylistic evolutions including a purple, poetic phase before settling into spare, confessional lyrics. He never succeeded in the music business, but writing songs helped shape the idiosyncratic, elliptical prose style that made him one of the most acclaimed and influential British writers of his generation.
In his career that traverses some 35 years, Ishiguro has acquired wide recognition for his austere, emotionally encumbered prose. His novels are often written in the first person, with unreliable narrators who are in denial about truths that are gradually revealed to the reader. The resonance in his plots often comes from the rich subtext, the things left unsaid, and gaps between the narrator’s perception and reality.
He published his first novel, “A Pale View of Hills”, about a middle-aged Japanese woman living in England, in 1982, and followed with “An Artist of the Floating World,” narrated by an elderly Japanese painter, set in postWorld War II Japan.
His deep understanding of the social conventions and affectations of his adopted homeland shaped his third novel, “The Remains of the Day”, which won the Booker Prize and featured a buttonedup butler, who was later immortalized in a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in 1993.
I have read this title at least four times and watched the movie too. It is a subtle masterpiece of quiet desperation, a story of unspoken love for anyone who’s ever held their true feelings back. The story is about a butler, Mr Steven who served an English lord in the years leading up to World War II. He was so burdened by propriety that he allowed the love of his life slip through his fingers. As the novel opens, in the summer of 1956, he was set to undertake a motoring trip to visit Miss Kenton ... I must not elaborate further here lest I spoil your interest to read the book or watch the movie.
His other famous book “Never Let Me Go”, tells a melancholy dystopian love story set in a British boarding school. Ishiguro has obsessively returned to the same themes in his work, including the fallibility of memory, mortality and the porous nature of time. His body of work stands out for his inventive subversion of literary genres, his acute sense of place and his masterly parsing of the British class system.
What a brilliant choice for Ishiguro is ‘sui generis’ constituting a class of its own. I congratulate and agree with the finding of the Academy that Ishiguro is an absolutely brilliant novelist and is someone who is very interested in understanding the past. He is not out to redeem the past but he is exploring what you have to forget in order to survive in the first place as an individual or as a society.
According to the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, Ishiguro is ‘a writer of great integrity’, who doesn’t look to the side because he has developed an aesthetic universe all his own. She opined that, “If you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka then you have Kazuo Ishiguro in a nutshell, but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix”.
Having won the award, I salute the humble nature of Ishiguro who said that part of him feels like an imposter and part of him feels bad that he had got the award before other living writers such as Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy whom he had high respect. He felt he is too young to be winning the Nobel Prize.
Is 62 too young for his age? Not at all. I beg to defer. I have no doubt that Kazuo Ishiguro is the best of the best.