5 ms·

Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)

46 points by ycombinete 6y ago

dang 6y ago
If curious see also these threads from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15428846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15428846 cool article, not much discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408194
- ycombinete 6y ago
  Thanks, dang. I've been checking for reposts, before posting lately, but forgot with this one.
  - dang 6y ago
    Reposts aren't a problem after a year or so! See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. The reason I post links to previous discussions is just because they're interesting sometimes.
    - simonebrunozzi 6y ago
      I think it would be an interesting feature of HN to allow you to see some reports when you are actually posting something; it is just quite time-consuming to do that check manually every single time.
nfg 6y ago
Not to go off on a tangent but this really struck me: “ KI There is a big difference between someone in my position and someone who has come from one of the countries that belonged to the British Empire. There is a very special and very potent relationship between someone brought up in India, with a very powerful notion of Britain as the mother country, and the source of modernity and culture and education.” Perhaps someone from India could give their opinion but as someone from another country that was made part of the British empire this strikes me as nonsense - of course there are some small circles in my country where the idea might persist in some attenuated form but in general the above would considered utterly offensive and - more importantly - just plain wrong.
- paganel 6y ago
  I think the interview shows its age, so to speak, I don’t think similar things would be said nowadays compared to 1989.
  - graeme 6y ago
    Notably that’s only 41 years after the handover in India, and 20-30 years after handovers in many other colonies. Whereas we’re now at 72 and 51-61 years. Big time difference. That doesn’t make him correct, but the comment has to be read about popular attitudes back then, not now.
- agakshat 6y ago
  Definitely so. Indian children are always taught about our glorious freedom movement in detail, glorifying leaders like Gandhi and Bhagat Singh. There are sadly still remnants of British culture throughout, like statues or names of streets or buildings, but I don’t think anyone looks at British rule as anything but a dark age where India went from one of the most prosperous nations in the world to.. very much not so.
  - mangamadaiyan 6y ago
    Well, there really wasn't an Indian nation before the Brits sailed in and did their thing; India was a loosely-knit (if at all) bunch of "kingdoms". In addition, you don't have to look further than the transformer at the end of your street, or the nearest Railway line, (or the language in which you wrote your post) for a remnant of British culture.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      To provide a not-quite-equivalent-but-parallel example, you don't have to look farther than your phone's navigation system for a remnant of Nazi culture (via satellites via rockets).
    - mangamadaiyan 6y ago
      BTW -- being a fully resident citizen of said nation who was born a few decades after 1947 -- I personally do have an ambivalent attitude towards the British Raj. I guess not all of the administrators were merciless tyrants and scoundrels, and neither were all of them benevolent angels. I don't subscribe to Ishiguro's views expressed in the quote under discussion, either. That said, one cannot wish the facts away, which is what I was trying to put across, albeit ham-handedly, in my earlier comment.
cauthon 6y ago
The Remains of the Day might be my favorite book. It does have my favorite quote, which I won’t spoil for anyone who hasn’t read the book as I think the emotional impact is lessened out of context. This book gave me the sense that the author once felt an emotion so deeply that he needed to write an entire novel in order to convey it.
- Retardo_88 6y ago
  I think I know exactly which line you are referring to. I have read the book multiple times, and that line never fails to move me to tears, even when I know it is coming.
- ycombinete 6y ago
  It's been on my list for years now. I just haven't got around to reading it. Once I have I'll have to ask you about the quote.
  - kyberias 6y ago
    I think you should drop everything else and run to the bookstore, buy the book and read it. Come to think of it, I'm going to do it myself right now.
- Darthy 6y ago
  Very interesting. Is the impact similar in the film?
  - SNACKeR99 6y ago
    I think it is! There is an incredible amount of restraint and tension in that movie. It's in my top 2.
- wenc 6y ago
  The Remains of the Day isn't just my favorite book from Ishiguro. It is my favorite book, period. It is a book about many things, but one of the main themes is regret. As a younger person, I thought I would end up following the trajectory of Stevens. The narrative matched mine so much that I thought it was a description of an inexorable path in life that someone like me was bound to follow. As I got older, I realized the opposite: that Stevens was an anti-hero, that I did NOT have to follow the his trajectory, and that I had the agency to make different choices in life. In that way, the book's anti-message guides me today. p.s. with regards to Ishiguro, despite liking RotD, I didn't care for any of his other works. I didn't like Never Let me Go (which was highly acclaimed), nor the Buried Giant, nor When we were Orphans. Admittedly I have not read "An Artist of the Floating World".
niklasd 6y ago
I‘m a huge fan of Ishiguro. I find it fascinating that through most if his books he stays very close to his main themes – memory, introspection, self-deception – while playing with and exploring various different genres: historical, dystopia, detective, fantasy... The Buried Giant for example is a quite unsual fantasy novel, one that really moved me.
- ycombinete 6y ago
  Have you read A Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes? It's a stunning exploration of those same themes: memory, introspection, self-deception.
  - niklasd 6y ago
    Yes, I have, and I enjoyed it! Thanks for the tip.
run2arun 6y ago
No one has talked about An Artist of the Floating World here. I'll try without giving too much away and taking away the potential enjoyment of someone who could read it in future. So much of what we read, fact and fiction, stands on the foundation of an omniscient first- or third-person narrator. We do not even think of questioning what the narrator tells us. Even mystery or suspense stories only hide a secret with the protagonist "peeling an onion" to find answers progressively. Deceptive incidents, the doubts of the detective, inconsequential objects, descriptions of crime scenes serve to distract us and we know we are being distracted and it is part of the game. But unreliable narrators are a different beast altogether. As the story progresses, there are hints of doubt created in our minds regarding description of events, feelings of characters, gaps in some story lines which we hope will be reconciled later (and which are). A great author can do this so subtly that if you do not follow along closely it is easy to miss or, worse, mistake this to be a problem with the author's storytelling. Fight Club is one such story. It is non-linear which serves to disorient the reader and at the end we realize the narrator was also unreliable. There are sentences like "Today I almost ate Marla's mother" and we are left wondering what that means until a few paragraphs later it is revealed. The non-linearity masks the narrator's reliability. The book is well-done even though the story-telling is . But you have to read An Artist of the Floating World to see what a master can do with ordinary events, conversations, descriptions of places by (someone who we will later in the story consider as) an unreliable narrator. Stories like these serve as a reminder that every one sees the world differently. We consider others unreliable while forgetting that everyone sees what they want to.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
I've heard that "Remains of the day" is Jeff Bezos' favorite book of all time. Some reference here: [0]. [0]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-jeff-bezos-was-ecstatic-over-todays-nobel-prize-announcement-2017-10-05 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-jeff-bezos-was-ecstati...

46 points by ycombinete 6y ago

dang 6y ago

If curious see also these threads from 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15428846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15428846 cool article, not much discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408194

ycombinete 6y ago
Thanks, dang. I've been checking for reposts, before posting lately, but forgot with this one.
- dang 6y ago
  Reposts aren't a problem after a year or so! See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. The reason I post links to previous discussions is just because they're interesting sometimes.
  - simonebrunozzi 6y ago
    I think it would be an interesting feature of HN to allow you to see some reports when you are actually posting something; it is just quite time-consuming to do that check manually every single time.

nfg 6y ago

Not to go off on a tangent but this really struck me: “ KI There is a big difference between someone in my position and someone who has come from one of the countries that belonged to the British Empire. There is a very special and very potent relationship between someone brought up in India, with a very powerful notion of Britain as the mother country, and the source of modernity and culture and education.” Perhaps someone from India could give their opinion but as someone from another country that was made part of the British empire this strikes me as nonsense - of course there are some small circles in my country where the idea might persist in some attenuated form but in general the above would considered utterly offensive and - more importantly - just plain wrong.

paganel 6y ago
I think the interview shows its age, so to speak, I don’t think similar things would be said nowadays compared to 1989.
- graeme 6y ago
  Notably that’s only 41 years after the handover in India, and 20-30 years after handovers in many other colonies. Whereas we’re now at 72 and 51-61 years. Big time difference. That doesn’t make him correct, but the comment has to be read about popular attitudes back then, not now.
agakshat 6y ago
Definitely so. Indian children are always taught about our glorious freedom movement in detail, glorifying leaders like Gandhi and Bhagat Singh. There are sadly still remnants of British culture throughout, like statues or names of streets or buildings, but I don’t think anyone looks at British rule as anything but a dark age where India went from one of the most prosperous nations in the world to.. very much not so.
- mangamadaiyan 6y ago
  Well, there really wasn't an Indian nation before the Brits sailed in and did their thing; India was a loosely-knit (if at all) bunch of "kingdoms". In addition, you don't have to look further than the transformer at the end of your street, or the nearest Railway line, (or the language in which you wrote your post) for a remnant of British culture.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    To provide a not-quite-equivalent-but-parallel example, you don't have to look farther than your phone's navigation system for a remnant of Nazi culture (via satellites via rockets).
  - mangamadaiyan 6y ago
    BTW -- being a fully resident citizen of said nation who was born a few decades after 1947 -- I personally do have an ambivalent attitude towards the British Raj. I guess not all of the administrators were merciless tyrants and scoundrels, and neither were all of them benevolent angels. I don't subscribe to Ishiguro's views expressed in the quote under discussion, either. That said, one cannot wish the facts away, which is what I was trying to put across, albeit ham-handedly, in my earlier comment.

cauthon 6y ago

The Remains of the Day might be my favorite book. It does have my favorite quote, which I won’t spoil for anyone who hasn’t read the book as I think the emotional impact is lessened out of context. This book gave me the sense that the author once felt an emotion so deeply that he needed to write an entire novel in order to convey it.

Retardo_88 6y ago
I think I know exactly which line you are referring to. I have read the book multiple times, and that line never fails to move me to tears, even when I know it is coming.
ycombinete 6y ago
It's been on my list for years now. I just haven't got around to reading it. Once I have I'll have to ask you about the quote.
- kyberias 6y ago
  I think you should drop everything else and run to the bookstore, buy the book and read it. Come to think of it, I'm going to do it myself right now.
Darthy 6y ago
Very interesting. Is the impact similar in the film?
- SNACKeR99 6y ago
  I think it is! There is an incredible amount of restraint and tension in that movie. It's in my top 2.
wenc 6y ago
The Remains of the Day isn't just my favorite book from Ishiguro. It is my favorite book, period. It is a book about many things, but one of the main themes is regret. As a younger person, I thought I would end up following the trajectory of Stevens. The narrative matched mine so much that I thought it was a description of an inexorable path in life that someone like me was bound to follow. As I got older, I realized the opposite: that Stevens was an anti-hero, that I did NOT have to follow the his trajectory, and that I had the agency to make different choices in life. In that way, the book's anti-message guides me today. p.s. with regards to Ishiguro, despite liking RotD, I didn't care for any of his other works. I didn't like Never Let me Go (which was highly acclaimed), nor the Buried Giant, nor When we were Orphans. Admittedly I have not read "An Artist of the Floating World".

niklasd 6y ago

I‘m a huge fan of Ishiguro. I find it fascinating that through most if his books he stays very close to his main themes – memory, introspection, self-deception – while playing with and exploring various different genres: historical, dystopia, detective, fantasy... The Buried Giant for example is a quite unsual fantasy novel, one that really moved me.

ycombinete 6y ago
Have you read A Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes? It's a stunning exploration of those same themes: memory, introspection, self-deception.
- niklasd 6y ago
  Yes, I have, and I enjoyed it! Thanks for the tip.

run2arun 6y ago

No one has talked about An Artist of the Floating World here. I'll try without giving too much away and taking away the potential enjoyment of someone who could read it in future. So much of what we read, fact and fiction, stands on the foundation of an omniscient first- or third-person narrator. We do not even think of questioning what the narrator tells us. Even mystery or suspense stories only hide a secret with the protagonist "peeling an onion" to find answers progressively. Deceptive incidents, the doubts of the detective, inconsequential objects, descriptions of crime scenes serve to distract us and we know we are being distracted and it is part of the game. But unreliable narrators are a different beast altogether. As the story progresses, there are hints of doubt created in our minds regarding description of events, feelings of characters, gaps in some story lines which we hope will be reconciled later (and which are). A great author can do this so subtly that if you do not follow along closely it is easy to miss or, worse, mistake this to be a problem with the author's storytelling. Fight Club is one such story. It is non-linear which serves to disorient the reader and at the end we realize the narrator was also unreliable. There are sentences like "Today I almost ate Marla's mother" and we are left wondering what that means until a few paragraphs later it is revealed. The non-linearity masks the narrator's reliability. The book is well-done even though the story-telling is . But you have to read An Artist of the Floating World to see what a master can do with ordinary events, conversations, descriptions of places by (someone who we will later in the story consider as) an unreliable narrator. Stories like these serve as a reminder that every one sees the world differently. We consider others unreliable while forgetting that everyone sees what they want to.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

I've heard that "Remains of the day" is Jeff Bezos' favorite book of all time. Some reference here: [0]. [0]: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-jeff-bezos-was-ecstatic-over-todays-nobel-prize-announcement-2017-10-05 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-jeff-bezos-was-ecstati...