British novelist Ishiguro wins Nobel
NEW YORK — Kazuo Ishiguro, the Japanese-born British novelist who in “The Remains of the Day,” ”Never Let Me Go” and other novels captured memory’s lasting pain and dangerous illusions in precise and elegant prose, won the Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday.
The selection of the 62-yearold Ishiguro marked a return to citing fiction writers following two years of unconventional choices by the Swedish Academy for the $1.1 million prize. It also continues a recent trend of giving the award to British authors born elsewhere — V.S. Naipaul, the 2001 winner, is from Trinidad and Tobago; the 2007 honoree, Doris Lessing, was a native of Iran who grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).
“Some of the themes that I have tried to tackle in my work — about history, about not just personal memory but the way countries and nations and communities remember their past, and how often they bury the uncomfortable memories from the past — I hope that these kinds of themes will actually be in some small way helpful to the climate we have at the moment,” Ishiguro said Thursday, speaking in his backyard in north London.
Ishiguro already was one of Britain’s most celebrated writers, winning the Booker for “The Remains of the Day,” receiving an Order of the British Empire medal and appearing frequently on lists of the country’s greatest authors. The academy called Ishiguro’s eight books, which also include “An Artist of the Floating World” and “The Buried Giant,” works of emotional force that uncover “the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”
Many know him best for “The Remains of the Day,” a million-seller published in 1989 and, thanks to the Nobel, in the top 10 Thursday on Amazon. com. Ishiguro’s novel reads like a darker take on P.G. Wodehouse’s comic Jeeves stories, with a butler at a grand house looking back on a life in service to the aristocracy.
The gentle rhythms and “Downton Abbey”-style setting gradually deepen into a haunting depiction of the repressed emotional and social landscape of 20th-century England and the deadly rise of fascism so many failed to perceive or prevent.