KAZUO ISHIGURO’S NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE IS A SIGN OF GOOD IN UNCERTAIN TIMES
British novelist hopes all Nobel awards can be a positive force for the world
Kazuo Ishiguro won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. The announcement was made in Stockholm by Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, who said that Ishiguro, “in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”.
Ms Danius described the 62-year-old as a cross between Jane Austen, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust and praised him as a “writer of great integrity … We hope it will make the world happy,” she said.
Ishiguro becomes the 114th Nobel laureate and the 11th from the United Kingdom to win the prize: the last was Doris Lessing in 2007.
Born in Nagasaki in 1954, but resident in England since he was five, Ishiguro is the author of seven novels, including A Pale View of the Hills, When
We Were Orphans and Never Let
Me Go. His most recent book is The Buried Giant, published in 2015, which Ms Danius declared her favourite.
Asked if Ishiguro’s pathos was apposite for our troubled time, Ms Danius said that his books “explore what you have to forget in order to survive”.
It was a sentiment echoed by Ishiguro himself. “The world is in a very uncertain moment and I would hope all the Nobel prizes would be a force for something positive in the world as it is at the moment. I’ll be deeply moved if I could in some way be part of some sort of climate this year in contributing to some sort of positive atmosphere at a very uncertain time,” he told the BBC after the award was announced.
Uncertain times are Ishiguro’s forte. His most famous work is probably The Remains
of the Day, which won the Booker Prize in 1989, and was made into an Oscar-winning film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
Set partly during the buildup to the Second World War, the plot is driven gently by a delicate story of unrequited love between Stevens, a dignified but emotionally repressed butler, and his cherished colleague, Miss Kenton. Running parallel to Ishiguro’s excavation of their suppressed relationship are revelations of a different sort: the Nazi sympathies of Stevens’ erstwhile employer, Lord Darlington.
The novel typifies many of Ishiguro’s literary virtues: a prose style whose elegant surfaces conceal and reveal human secrets, frailties and desires to the eagle-eyed reader. Ms Danius called The Remains
of the Day “a true masterpiece which starts out as aP G Wodehouse novel and ends as something Kafkaesque”.
Other terms commonly applied to Ishiguro’s writing include exquisite, understated, heartbreaking and grace. It was not always so.
Recalling reviews of his earliest works, Ishiguro told an audience at the Hay Literary Festival in 2015: “It was only when I started to publish and started to read the reviews – because it was a novelty that someone with a Japanese background was writing novels in English – all the metaphors tended to be Japanese-y. They would talk about a very still pond. With carp.”
One could also add diverse to the list of Ishiguro critical epithets. From the beginning, he has been unafraid to experiment with form and genre, incorporating elements of science fiction into Never Let Me Go and fantasy into The Buried
Giant. “I was shocked by the level of sheer prejudice that exists against ogres,” he told the Hay Festival in 2015.
“In the end I became quite militant on behalf of my ogres and pixies. If there are battle lines being drawn along literary snob lines, I’m going to stand on the side of the ogres. I’m against the imagination police telling me what I can and can’t do in my writing.”
Although not a shock on the scale of Bob Dylan’s triumph last year, Ishiguro’s win did come as a surprise – not least to Ishiguro himself, who told the BBC that he initially thought the news was a hoax. He said: “It’s a magnificent honour, mainly because it means that I’m in the footsteps of the greatest authors that have lived, so that’s a terrific commendation.”
In the days before the announcement, the favourites had included the South Korean poet Ko Un, Kenya’s Ngugi wa Thiong’o and, with some irony given Ishiguro’s birthplace, Japan’s Haruki Murakami.
Other commentators speculated that a woman might win after the Nobel Committee posted a picture on Twitter of the 14 female Nobel laureates. Canada’s Margaret Atwood was among those touted, not least because her dystopian masterpiece The Handmaid’s Tale has enjoyed fresh attention after a highly praised television adaptation.
Speaking after the announcement, Ms Danius deflected potential criticisms of the selection of an English-speaking, European male writer. Over the past 50 years, just 16 Nobel laureates have hailed from outside Europe and the northern United States; of these, just eight have been women.
“We are always on the lookout for new and interesting writers,” Ms Danius said.
Early reaction combined surprise, happiness and a series of jokey references to Dylan’s victory last year.
A photograph of Ishiguro holding a guitar has already done the rounds on Twitter.
At 62, Ishiguro is about median age for a Nobel laureate. Never the most prolific writer (he averages a novel every seven years), he clearly has more new works in him yet.
Despite once saying that most novelists peak at 45, he is already looking to fellow Nobel laureate, Bob Dylan, for help with the ageing process.
“There’s another kind of late style which I rather like – people like Leonard Cohen, or Bob Dylan about 10 years ago,” he said two years ago. “They seem to go out of their way to embrace the ageing process and beautify it without quite evading the inevitable sorrow and patheticness of ageing.’
I became quite militant on behalf of my ogres and pixies. If there are battle lines being drawn along literary snob lines, I’m going to stand on the side of the ogres KAZUO ISHIGURO