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The Nobel Prize in Literature 2017 – Kazuo Ishiguro [pdf]

111 points by kgthegreat 9y ago

robin_reala 9y ago
If you’re willing to give it the space needed I’d definitely recommend The Unconsoled[1]. It’s by quite a long way the best description of dream state that I’ve ever read. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unconsoled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unconsoled
- bbctol 9y ago
  Yes! I might spend the rest of the day plugging The Unconsoled, which I think is one of those masterpieces that's doomed to forever be underrated because experiencing it is so unpleasant. It captures exactly what it feels like to have a long, stressful nightmare in a way that no other work of art has. Unfortunately, that means reading it feels exactly like having a long, stressful nightmare.
  - retsibsi 9y ago
    I'm not trying to be a smartarse or anything, this is a genuine question: what makes a book like that valuable to you? If it's very unpleasant to read, and captures an experience you are already familiar with, why are you glad that you read it? It seems to me that the value of unpleasant art is usually that it teaches us something: perhaps it helps us to empathise with people we previously didn't understand, or gives us a new perspective on a topic we care about, or makes us care about a topic we had previously neglected, etc. But if The Unconsoled precisely captured a feeling you were already familiar with, all I can see it doing is giving you a sense of connection: ah, yes, someone else really does get what my nightmares are like; I'm not alone. Which is not worthless, but seems likely to be outweighed by the unpleasantness of the reading experience. Am I just wrong on that last point, or have I missed something else entirely?
    - bbctol 9y ago
      I just... appreciate art, I guess? It's a beautiful book. The experience of reading it is unpleasant, but that's separate from aesthetic appreciation--I don't read books just to be taught lessons.
- archagon 9y ago
  Is it audiobook-able, or does he play with the structure of the text?
  - robin_reala 9y ago
    It suspect it would be OK, albeit confusing. On the other hand, it doesn’t exist on Audible so maybe not?
    - archagon 9y ago
      Google tells me there's an audiobook version out there, probably. (Audiobooks seem to be the only way I can get myself to read these days!)
  - twoodfin 9y ago
    Good question. On this recommendation, I immediately went to Audible, but they apparently don't have the '99 books-on-tape version. I can say that I've "read" more Ishiguro through audiobooks than paper, and that they've all been excellent. Rosalyn Landor's Never Let Me Go was particularly moving. The first-person perspective used by Ishiguro in several of his novels lends itself very well to the format. When We Were Orphans isn't typically considered one of his stronger works, but as a "told tale" I found it fascinating.
- tacomonstrous 9y ago
  Among my all-time favorites, and my recommending it to my now wife played a small role in us getting together, so I'll always have a soft spot for it. Certainly the most intense literary experience I've had.
danso 9y ago
I submitted this 2014 essay from Ishiguro, but no point in having 2 separate threads for the same Nobel Prize news/discussion. Thought some folks here would be interested in how a famous novelist does "crunch" weeks". In this 2014 op-ed for the Guardian, he describes how it took 4 weeks for him to create his most famous novel, "The Remains of the Day": https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/06/kazuo-ishiguro-the-remains-of-the-day-guardian-book-club https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/06/kazuo-ishiguro... tl;dr - Had the first chapter written the previous summer, but made no progress on it for about a year. - Even though he couldn't write that year, he did a "substantial amount of 'research'" about British life/politics/servitude of that time period. This is what led to his 4-week "Crash" session being productive: > he decision when to start the actual writing of a novel – to begin composing the story itself – always seems to me a crucial one. How much should one know before starting on the prose? It’s damaging to start too early, equally so to start too late. I think with Remains I got lucky: the Crash came just at the right point, when I knew just enough. During the 4-week "crash", he had a dedicated study in a house he recently moved in; his previous 2 novels were written at his dining table. His process during the 4-weeks was not at all structured (in the traditional sense): > Throughout the Crash, I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere – I let them remain and ploughed on. Note that he didn't finish the novel in 4 weeks. But he did reach the critical mass to make it a complete idea and story: > I kept it up for the four weeks, and at the end of it I had more or less the entire novel down: though of course a lot more time would be required to write it all up properly, the vital imaginative breakthroughs had all come during the Crash.
- e15ctr0n 9y ago
  For anyone who hasn't seen the movie based on the novel, I would highly recommending watching it[0]. Superb, nuanced performances by Sir Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. The movie would also serve as an introduction to the Merchant-Ivory oeuvre[1]. [0] The Remains of the Day (1993) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107943/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107943/ [1] Merchant Ivory Productions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Ivory_Productions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Ivory_Productions
archagon 9y ago
I have a Goodreads tag[1] where I've tried to gather as many "definitive" or "best" books by Literature Nobel winners as I could find. (Subjective, of course: based on Goodreads scores, thegreatestbooks.org ranking, etc.) I've never even heard of a lot of the winners over the years, so I thought it might help vary up my reading a bit. Will look forward to adding a new name! [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2196584-archagon?shelf=nobel-laureates https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2196584-archagon?shelf...
- mercer 9y ago
  Oh, that's very nice! I added your list to one of my lists.
zwieback 9y ago
I can get behind this one. Never Let Me Go haunts me to this day. Buried Giant was disappointing but everything else he wrote is fabulous.
- drallison 9y ago
  Never Let Me Go is a favorite of mine. I have read it twice, and I NEVER read novels twice.
- andyjohnson0 9y ago
  +1 for Never Let Me Go. I read it last week and found it very moving. Mark Romanek's film version is excellent too.
the_af 9y ago
Great! Not that the Nobel prize means anything to me, but I simply love Kazuo Ishiguro. His surreal novels are always moving to me. I absolutely love how he plays with unreliable narrators, like in "The Remains of the Day", "A Pale View of Hills" and "When We Were Orphans". He shows how they are flawed, sometimes self-sabotaging, but we (or rather, I) still empathize with them. The ending of "The Remains of the Day" always moves me, almost to tears. How the butler, having realized he threw his life away for people who were not worth it, is at it again, repeating the same mistakes and having learned (almost) nothing. And still, I root for him.
- projectramo 9y ago
  Here is my question (as someone who also loves Ishiguro and has mixed but generally positive feelings about the prize): if the committee picks an author you adore, doesn't that increase your respect for the prize? And make you want to check out other authors who won it?
  - throw-away-8 9y ago
    No. It's just a coincidence like a stopped clock that is correct twice a day. Otoh, the list of authors who never got the prize is truly impressive starting with such giants as Leo Tolstoy, Joyce, Kafka, Proust, Musil, Nabokov, Pynchon, etc. Same with poets...
evtothedev 9y ago
Pro tip: "Never Let Me Go" is best read if you know absolutely nothing about its plot.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
  Oh good. Now I won't read it, since I've already seen MST3K really speak to this issue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WspeHC7eoOI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WspeHC7eoOI
  - twoodfin 9y ago
    I hope you’re being sarcastic! I was “spoiled” going in, but if anything it strengthens the novel’s undercurrent of dread & enhances the contrast between the importance imbued by the children into their prosaic struggles and the unfathomable horror of their ultimate fate. The premise is really just the launching point for what the book is about. It’s not explored in at all the manner you’d expect from a typical “dystopian sci-fi” novel.
Gaussian 9y ago
Never Let Me Go is relevant and chilling. Most books fade in my memory; this isn't one of them.
pavlov 9y ago
I'm very happy about this, what a good choice. To me, Ishiguro's most distinguishing characteristic is the tremendous empathy for the people he portrays. Even his weaker novels manage to take you deep into these characters that seem to carry decades within every thought and expression, even though it may ultimately come at the expense of world-building for the plot at hand (I'm thinking of "Buried Giant"). And of course his best novels are something else, like crystals.
rurban 9y ago
I am the sole not happy one on this selection. There must have been a reason why he was not in any short list. I'm only a movie expert but the 5 movies based on his books are all overly simplistic, cheasy and just terrible. Still better than Jelinek though.

111 points by kgthegreat 9y ago

If you’re willing to give it the space needed I’d definitely recommend The Unconsoled[1]. It’s by quite a long way the best description of dream state that I’ve ever read. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unconsoled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unconsoled

bbctol 9y ago
Yes! I might spend the rest of the day plugging The Unconsoled, which I think is one of those masterpieces that's doomed to forever be underrated because experiencing it is so unpleasant. It captures exactly what it feels like to have a long, stressful nightmare in a way that no other work of art has. Unfortunately, that means reading it feels exactly like having a long, stressful nightmare.
- retsibsi 9y ago
  I'm not trying to be a smartarse or anything, this is a genuine question: what makes a book like that valuable to you? If it's very unpleasant to read, and captures an experience you are already familiar with, why are you glad that you read it? It seems to me that the value of unpleasant art is usually that it teaches us something: perhaps it helps us to empathise with people we previously didn't understand, or gives us a new perspective on a topic we care about, or makes us care about a topic we had previously neglected, etc. But if The Unconsoled precisely captured a feeling you were already familiar with, all I can see it doing is giving you a sense of connection: ah, yes, someone else really does get what my nightmares are like; I'm not alone. Which is not worthless, but seems likely to be outweighed by the unpleasantness of the reading experience. Am I just wrong on that last point, or have I missed something else entirely?
  - bbctol 9y ago
    I just... appreciate art, I guess? It's a beautiful book. The experience of reading it is unpleasant, but that's separate from aesthetic appreciation--I don't read books just to be taught lessons.
archagon 9y ago
Is it audiobook-able, or does he play with the structure of the text?
- robin_reala 9y ago
  It suspect it would be OK, albeit confusing. On the other hand, it doesn’t exist on Audible so maybe not?
  - archagon 9y ago
    Google tells me there's an audiobook version out there, probably. (Audiobooks seem to be the only way I can get myself to read these days!)
- twoodfin 9y ago
  Good question. On this recommendation, I immediately went to Audible, but they apparently don't have the '99 books-on-tape version. I can say that I've "read" more Ishiguro through audiobooks than paper, and that they've all been excellent. Rosalyn Landor's Never Let Me Go was particularly moving. The first-person perspective used by Ishiguro in several of his novels lends itself very well to the format. When We Were Orphans isn't typically considered one of his stronger works, but as a "told tale" I found it fascinating.
tacomonstrous 9y ago
Among my all-time favorites, and my recommending it to my now wife played a small role in us getting together, so I'll always have a soft spot for it. Certainly the most intense literary experience I've had.

danso 9y ago

I submitted this 2014 essay from Ishiguro, but no point in having 2 separate threads for the same Nobel Prize news/discussion. Thought some folks here would be interested in how a famous novelist does "crunch" weeks". In this 2014 op-ed for the Guardian, he describes how it took 4 weeks for him to create his most famous novel, "The Remains of the Day": https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/06/kazuo-ishiguro-the-remains-of-the-day-guardian-book-club https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/06/kazuo-ishiguro... tl;dr - Had the first chapter written the previous summer, but made no progress on it for about a year. - Even though he couldn't write that year, he did a "substantial amount of 'research'" about British life/politics/servitude of that time period. This is what led to his 4-week "Crash" session being productive: > he decision when to start the actual writing of a novel – to begin composing the story itself – always seems to me a crucial one. How much should one know before starting on the prose? It’s damaging to start too early, equally so to start too late. I think with Remains I got lucky: the Crash came just at the right point, when I knew just enough. During the 4-week "crash", he had a dedicated study in a house he recently moved in; his previous 2 novels were written at his dining table. His process during the 4-weeks was not at all structured (in the traditional sense): > Throughout the Crash, I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere – I let them remain and ploughed on. Note that he didn't finish the novel in 4 weeks. But he did reach the critical mass to make it a complete idea and story: > I kept it up for the four weeks, and at the end of it I had more or less the entire novel down: though of course a lot more time would be required to write it all up properly, the vital imaginative breakthroughs had all come during the Crash.

e15ctr0n 9y ago
For anyone who hasn't seen the movie based on the novel, I would highly recommending watching it[0]. Superb, nuanced performances by Sir Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. The movie would also serve as an introduction to the Merchant-Ivory oeuvre[1]. [0] The Remains of the Day (1993) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107943/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107943/ [1] Merchant Ivory Productions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Ivory_Productions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Ivory_Productions

archagon 9y ago

I have a Goodreads tag[1] where I've tried to gather as many "definitive" or "best" books by Literature Nobel winners as I could find. (Subjective, of course: based on Goodreads scores, thegreatestbooks.org ranking, etc.) I've never even heard of a lot of the winners over the years, so I thought it might help vary up my reading a bit. Will look forward to adding a new name! [1]: https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2196584-archagon?shelf=nobel-laureates https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2196584-archagon?shelf...

mercer 9y ago
Oh, that's very nice! I added your list to one of my lists.

zwieback 9y ago

I can get behind this one. Never Let Me Go haunts me to this day. Buried Giant was disappointing but everything else he wrote is fabulous.

drallison 9y ago
Never Let Me Go is a favorite of mine. I have read it twice, and I NEVER read novels twice.
andyjohnson0 9y ago
+1 for Never Let Me Go. I read it last week and found it very moving. Mark Romanek's film version is excellent too.

the_af 9y ago

Great! Not that the Nobel prize means anything to me, but I simply love Kazuo Ishiguro. His surreal novels are always moving to me. I absolutely love how he plays with unreliable narrators, like in "The Remains of the Day", "A Pale View of Hills" and "When We Were Orphans". He shows how they are flawed, sometimes self-sabotaging, but we (or rather, I) still empathize with them. The ending of "The Remains of the Day" always moves me, almost to tears. How the butler, having realized he threw his life away for people who were not worth it, is at it again, repeating the same mistakes and having learned (almost) nothing. And still, I root for him.

projectramo 9y ago
Here is my question (as someone who also loves Ishiguro and has mixed but generally positive feelings about the prize): if the committee picks an author you adore, doesn't that increase your respect for the prize? And make you want to check out other authors who won it?
- throw-away-8 9y ago
  No. It's just a coincidence like a stopped clock that is correct twice a day. Otoh, the list of authors who never got the prize is truly impressive starting with such giants as Leo Tolstoy, Joyce, Kafka, Proust, Musil, Nabokov, Pynchon, etc. Same with poets...

evtothedev 9y ago

Pro tip: "Never Let Me Go" is best read if you know absolutely nothing about its plot.

0xdeadbeefbabe 9y ago
Oh good. Now I won't read it, since I've already seen MST3K really speak to this issue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WspeHC7eoOI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WspeHC7eoOI
- twoodfin 9y ago
  I hope you’re being sarcastic! I was “spoiled” going in, but if anything it strengthens the novel’s undercurrent of dread & enhances the contrast between the importance imbued by the children into their prosaic struggles and the unfathomable horror of their ultimate fate. The premise is really just the launching point for what the book is about. It’s not explored in at all the manner you’d expect from a typical “dystopian sci-fi” novel.

Gaussian 9y ago

Never Let Me Go is relevant and chilling. Most books fade in my memory; this isn't one of them.

pavlov 9y ago

I'm very happy about this, what a good choice. To me, Ishiguro's most distinguishing characteristic is the tremendous empathy for the people he portrays. Even his weaker novels manage to take you deep into these characters that seem to carry decades within every thought and expression, even though it may ultimately come at the expense of world-building for the plot at hand (I'm thinking of "Buried Giant"). And of course his best novels are something else, like crystals.

rurban 9y ago

I am the sole not happy one on this selection. There must have been a reason why he was not in any short list. I'm only a movie expert but the 5 movies based on his books are all overly simplistic, cheasy and just terrible. Still better than Jelinek though.