Worthy of the accolade
Jon Day, last year’s Man Booker Prize judge, says this year’s Nobel Literature Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro thoroughly deserves the accolade
NOBEL laureate Bob Dylan was a controversial choice last year but no one can deny Kauo Ishiguro thoroughly deserves the 2017 prize: he is a writer of novels of immense but often hidden skill, and extraordinary emotional intensity.
He is a quieter writer than some of his peers, both on the page and off it.
Unlike Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan, he is not in the habit of making public pronouncements.
His seven novels are more reserved, too: less prone to stylistic fireworks. At their best, they are studies of human dignity: poised, delicate, and often devastatingly moving.
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 but his family moved to England when he was five, his father working as an oceanographer at the National Institute of Oceanography in Surrey.
His early fiction has a sense of outsiderness. His first novel, A Pale View of The Hills (1982), was about the relationship between a middle-aged Japanese woman in England and her daughter.
His second, An Artist of the Floating World (1986), told of a Japanese painter reflecting on his life and experiences in the early 20th century.
His international reputation was made by The Remains of the Day (1989), which won the Booker Prize and was made into a film starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins. After that his novels became freer and looser.
The Unconsoled (1995) is a Kafkaesque novel about a pianist lost in an indistinct European country (and is perhaps Ishiguro’s most bafflingly enjoyable book); When We Were Orphans (2000) a familial detective story set in Shanghai; Never Let Me Go (2005), about children bred to be organ donors, is his masterpiece.
Twenty years ago, he said novelists write their best work in their late 30s. But The Buried Giant (2015), an Arthurian story of repressed memory and trauma, is one of his most inventive and assured.
After last year’s Nobel laureate Bob Dylan outraged the literary world by not really being a writer, Ishiguro is a more predictable but worthier winner.
ý Jon Day is a lecturer at King’s College, London, and was a Man Booker Prize judge last year.