Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro

Understanding Contemporary British Literature

by Brian W. Shaffer

In Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro, Brian W. Shaffer provides the first critical survey of the life and work of the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day. One of the most closely followed British writers of his generation, the Japanese-born, English-raised and -educated Ishiguro is the author of four critically acclaimed novels: A Pale View of Hills (1982, Winifred Holtby Prize of the Royal Society of Literature), An Artist of the Floating World (1986, Whitbread Book of the Year Award), The Remains of the Day (1988, Booker Prize), and The Unconsoled (1995, Cheltenham Prize). Shaffer's study reveals Ishiguro's novels to be intricately crafted, psychologically absorbing, hauntingly evocative works that betray the author's grounding not only in the literature of Japan but also in the great twentieth-century British masters - Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, E. M. Forster, and James Joyce - as well as in Freudian psychoanalysis. All of Ishiguro's novels are shown to capture first-person narrators in the intriguing act of revealing - yet also of attempting to conceal beneath the surface of their mundane present activities - the alarming significance and troubling consequences of their past lives.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

146 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

My university lit soc (ahem book club ;) decided to read An Artist of the Floating World, & as I’ve read that and all but 2 other of Kazuo Ishiguro’s books, I thought I shouldn’t be lazy and instead try “understanding” one of my all time favourite authors... I’m still not sure I understand him, haha, but Shaffer has certainly given me some interesting things to think about. Obviously, being published when it was, this book only concentrates on Ishiguro’s first four novels (of which I’ve read three).

One thing I found v interesting, Ishiguro mostly lists English & Russian writers as his inspiration, including EM Forster (another favourite of mine), which is a link I had always imagined ... although how much Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins being on the cover of my charity-shop The Remains of the Day has to do with it, im not sure (they’re also in the Merchant Ivory Howards End film)...

Oh, and he has a daughter a year older than me!! Can’t even imagine what it’s like to be her... or actually, for her it must be completely natural. But still, I found this a very exciting fact! However I have just realised that he has a poisoned cat of the same name as her in an early short story, hmmm...

And a final summing up Ishiguro quote, from the horse’s mouth: “I try to put in as little plot as possible”

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short little book analyzes Ishiguro's first four novels: A Pale View Of Hills, An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, and The Unconsoled.

Ishiguro "attempts to avoid openly postmodern elements in his books; he seeks to avoid the trap of writing novels that can be taken as meditations on 'the nature of fiction.' ...He says that "the kind of book whose raison d'etre is to say something about literary form [is] very tedious...I''m only interested in literary experiment insofar as it serves a purpose of exploring certain themes with an emotional dimension. I always try to disguise those elements of my writing that I feel perhaps are experimental." ... "Rather, Ishiguro appears to be more interested in tackling and reworking his culture's dominant myths, in communicating a vision, and in exploring what 'is perhaps the scariest arena in life,' the 'emotional area.'" [pp. 10-11]

[Sophiaalmaria · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book shed no light on why Ishiguro writes the way he does. Consequently I still can't 'understand' him although I do love him.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book’s insights into three of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels from the 80s and 90s: An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, and The Unconsoled. It is a short and accessible companion to the novels and useful for readers looking to delve deeper. I was particularly fascinated by the discussion of the narrator of The Remains of the Day, the butler Stevens. There were ideas that I hadn’t considered before such as the way Lord Darlington features as a kind of surrogate father for Stevens, and how Stevens, through serving Darlington - a Nazi sympathizer - was indirectly working for Hitler and supportive of fascism. It helped me reflect upon my own reading of Ishiguro’s masterpiece and its complex and self-deceiving narrator.