Year: 2010 (2009)
Publisher: Wahlström & Widstrand
Language: Swedish (Translator Rose-Marie Nielsen)
For those
of you, if indeed there are any, who choose to waste portions of your lives
reading my reviews, it may have become apparent that I have somewhat engulfed
myself in short stories and novellas in recent times, starting with Jean-Paul
Sartre’s “The Wall”, through Nicolai Gogol and Thomas Mann only a short while
ago. I only recently discovered this format and am finding it increasingly
rewarding. It poses a particular challenge to the writers, as it forces them to
distil the narrative down to one plot, one message, or one emotion. The subject
of today’s review is again a collection of short stories. This time Nobel
Prize-winning, British novelist Sir Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2009 collection
”Nocturner” (”Nocturnes – Five Stories of Music and Nightfall”).
This, my
friends, is an unparalleled piece of story-telling magic! The collection of
five exquisitely crafted stories (with the possible exception of “Malvern Hills”
which is the least interesting of them) is a most supreme delight to read. The
stories are wrought on the common theme of music. All but one are told from the
first-person perspective of skilled but unsuccessful musicians. None of them is
about the musicians themselves, but rather told through their observing eyes.
The first
story “Schlagersångaren” (The Crooner”) is about an aging Frank Sinatra-like
superstar at the dusk of his fame, who asks a young street musician in Venice to
accompany him as he sets out to serenade his wife, Lindy, whom he is about to
divorce. The second, “Come Rain or Come Shine”, follows a washed-up middle-aged
English teacher who is invited to spend time with his vastly more successful
friends from college only to realise that the purpose of his visit is for him
to help them mend their dilapidated marriage. The third story, “Malvern Hills”
is told by a talented but unrecognised singer-songwriter who reluctantly
accepts to spend the summer as a helping hand at his sister’s hostel in the
mountains. The fourth, “Nocturne” re-introduces us to Lindy from the first
story, now freshly divorced and recovering from plastic surgery in a hospital,
and recounts her brief friendship with a brilliant but little known saxophonist
who is similarly recovering in the room
next to hers. The fifth, and perhaps the most interesting of them, “Cellister”
(“The Cellists”), is told by a club musician about a young and ambitious
cellist who encounters an elderly woman who claims to be a cello virtuoso and
offers to help him polish his performance.
With his trademark
low-key but by no means tardy narration technique, Ishiguro gently ushers the
reader into the tender haze between the real and the pretended. His five
Nocturnes lay bare the impotence of the everyday pretention and charade we deploy
in our desperate pursuit to connect with a universe which we have long ceased
to understand. By an intricate patchwork of manufactured masks, coatings,
coulisses, and smoke screens, Ishiguro’s characters effectively ensnare
themselves in a web of vanity they convince themselves is the inescapable reality
of life when in fact, it is entirely of their own making. Artists and
performers, who make up a category of people who actively seek the attention
and accolade of the many, are particularly useful subjects for a study of this
sort and Ishiguro, known to be somewhat of an archaeologist into the ruins of the
human psyche, certainly makes the most of it. The result is sad, hilarious, and
absorbing.
Ishiguro’s
choice to make music the centrepiece of his collection is not entirely
unexpected. A great lover of jazz music and an accomplished guitarist himself,
he must have found the struggles of a musician to be the perfect backdrop for
his somewhat melancholic stories. As artists who seek the limelight, his
protagonists provide the ideal fusion of act and reality. By their very nature,
they embody the conflict that Ishiguro seeks to highlight in this literary
quintet.
"Nocturnes" is hands down the best piece of literature I have read this year and the first book ever that I re-read directly after having finished it the first time. This is how I would aspire to write if I were a writer! I add Ishiguro’s name to Thomas Mann's, Agneta Pleijel's, and José Saramago's in the pantheon of my literary house gods.
