Present Tensed

On Ishiguro’s Visit to UCHICAGO

To: Kazuo Ishiguro

Sir –

I got the oppor­tu­nity to hear you speak at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago in April regard­ing your lit­er­ary career and your new book “Never Let Me Go”.

Obvi­ously, like most who’ve read “Remains of the Day”*, I hold you in high esteem. I’ve often called that book one of those few per­fect clas­sics of the eng­lish lan­guage. The dogged­ness with which we pur­sue the liv­ing of our lives often blinds us to the life itself. It is both an impor­tant real­iza­tion and one that lit­er­a­ture is well-equipped to con­vey. Stevens suc­ceeds in being metaphor for any num­ber of dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions. “Remains…” is one of those few books that I tend to give to peo­ple when they visit me for any length of time ( Inter­preter of Mal­adies , Coun­try of My Skull , Fault Lines are cur­rently also in this cat­e­gory of book that I con­tin­u­ously buy, give away, and buy again). I read it for the first time while I was serv­ing in the Peace Corps and some­thing about the book hit a nerve, and I’ve revis­ited the book twice in the last 4 years. I enjoyed the book so much, that I can’t bring myself to watch the film — even­though no less an author­ity than you your­self has said it is a good kins­man to the book. Any­how, it’s a great feel­ing when the peo­ple you read end up sound­ing like the intel­li­gent and rea­son­able peo­ple you’d guess they’d be. Your talk gave me much to think about in terms of the writ­ing process. Your approach — to take the core idea that you want to write about, develop it, nur­ture it, and then build the story around it — suits my tem­pera­ment. I like the idea of sep­a­rat­ing these things out, and feel­ing free to move the set­ting in time or space to bet­ter serve the core idea/message/observation/question. Too often these things (the ideas, the details, the rest) become a jum­bled whole too quickly and we are defeated by the small­est of failings.

I was impressed with your answers in the Q&A ses­sion. Too many of the ques­tions were focused on the rela­tion­ships between books & film (truth be told, I expected bet­ter ques­tions from a uchicago crowd) but your answers were insight­ful. I espe­cially liked the idea of the “unfilmable book” as a wor­thy goal for a lit­er­ary expe­ri­ence (the idea that in the mod­ern world, a per­son who sits down to read a book should get a lit­er­ary expe­ri­ence… not a pseudo cin­e­matic expe­ri­ence, which would pale next to a gen­uine cin­e­matic experience).

I’ll go and get a copy of “never let me go” later this sum­mer when I can claw out more time to read.
thanks,

–SR.

Note:
I enjoyed When we were Orphans and The Uncon­soled evenif they didn’t change my life.

[Orig­i­nally posted at Mis­sives for the Masses]

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