NOCTURNES - FIVE STORIES OF MUSIC AND NIGHTFALL

Author: Sir Kazuo Ishiguro
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.