Ishiguro
By 
I approve of this “artists Scott Lemieux reveres” trend in the Nobel Prize for Literature. Dwight Garner has a good appraisal:
He creates worlds that are clear in a sentence-by-sentence way, but in which the big picture recedes against the horizon. His novels are about discovery and revelation, and how slowly they arrive even for the most meticulous observer.
Ishiguro is best known for his third novel, “The Remains of the Day” (1989), which is related from the perspective of Stevens, a punctilious English butler. A teacup of strong Earl Grey, it won the Booker Prize and was made into an indelible film with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.
It escaped no one’s notice that an immigrant to England had written the most moving, witty, ironic and British book of its time. Ishiguro’s fluid command of Stevens’s idiom never faltered.
“The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost,” Stevens tells us. “They will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing. They were their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstance tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone.” Stevens’s sang-froid was matched by Ishiguro’s own.
Ishiguro — his friends call him Ish — became a public figure in 1989, but to anyone paying attention he seemed to have arrived fully formed as a writer. His excellent first two novels, “A Pale View of Hills” (1982) and “An Artist of the Floating World” (1986), were set in Japan. One turns to “A Pale View of Hills” today and realizes how resonant it is from its first sentences:
“Nikki, the name we finally gave my younger daughter, is not an abbreviation; it was a compromise I reached with her father. For paradoxically it was he who wanted to give her a Japanese name, and I — perhaps out of some selfish desire not to be reminded of the past — insisted on an English one.” The book’s tone never slips.
The Remains of the Day is a masterpiece, and I agree that it’s one of the few first-rate literary novels to have been adapted successfully to film (although I still prefer the novel.) Friend of the blog Jacob Levy hypothesizes that Never Let Me Go has the greatest gap between the quality of novel and film ever. I don’t know about that, but I will say that while I’ve seen many worse movies I’ve read very few better novels, and somehow the bland, uncomprehending mediocrity of the film adaption is more offensive than an ambitious disaster would have been. An Artist of the Floating World is also superb.
Not all of his work comes up to that level — When We Were Orphans is a pleasant read but not very memorable, and while The Unconsoled is more interesting and haunting at its best I can’t say it’s fully successful. But I’m still very happy to see this.