British novelist wins Nobel Literature Prize
Choice follows two years of unconventional selections
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.
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 9-million-kronor ($1.1 million) prize. Friday’s selection also continues a recent trend of recognizing 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 millionseller 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.
“What can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?” Ishiguro writes. “The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of this world who employ our services.”
Ishiguro would explain that he saw the butler as a metaphor for both emotional and political detachment. An Associated Press review from the time noted that “Ishiguro neatly reverses the cliche of ‘what the butler saw’ by building a novel around what the butler didn’t see.”
The 1993 film adaptation by the Merchant-Ivory production team starred Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson and was nominated for eight Academy Awards.
Like “The Remains of the Day,” his 2005 novel “Never Let Me Go” is a story of deception and uncertainty. What appears to be a narrative of three young friends at a boarding school gradually reveals itself as a dystopian tale with elements of science fiction that asks unsettling ethical questions. The movie adaptation starred Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley.
“I’ve always liked the texture of memory,” Ishiguro told
around the time “Never Let Me Go” came out.
“I like it that a scene pulled from the narrator’s memory is blurred at the edges, layered with all sorts of emotions, and open to manipulation. You’re not just telling the reader: ‘this-and-this happened.’ You’re also raising questions like: Why has she remembered this event just at this point? How does she feel about it? And when she says she can’t remember very precisely what happened, but she’ll tell us anyway, well, how much do we trust her?”
Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki but moved to England as a boy after his father, an oceanographer, was invited by the head of the British National Institute of Oceanography.
An admirer of “Jane Eyre” from early on, Ishiguro studied English and philosophy at the University of Kent.