Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro

  

Just because one wrote Never Let Me Go one doesn't necessarily need to write something that often reads like its rip-off. 

I guess dystopian novels sell, in particular in the current climate. And I guess once you win a Nobel prize you can pretty much do whatever you want. But in this case I'll do what I want too, and openly declare that I found Klara and the Sun to be as cold as its titular character, and I felt as detached from the plot and its twists as the Artificial Friend is detached from the reality around her (I wanted to like the novel, and Klara wants to understand and be part of the human world, but neither of us could).

A Pale View of Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro

A very battered copy of this book made its way to me from the Turin airport book-crossing shelves (via my mom). And maybe it could have stayed on those shelves and waited for someone able to better appreciate it.

I absolutely love Ishiguro when he writes about posh British people, or about a dystopian British future, but whenever he writes about Japan he somehow sounds trite to me (and in terms of how he "sounds", well, in interviews he just gives me the impression of being a British aristocrat).

An Artist of the Floating World had virtually the same effect on me - I just find Ishiguro's portraits of Japan quite unimaginative, despite liking his decision to tell the story from a woman's perspective, and despite wondering whether the narrator is telling her own story or that of "a friend".

An Artist of the Floating World – Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo, don’t let me down (you have found her, now go and get her)! Seriously, I picked this book from the Blackheath book sale because it was meant to be one of his best novels, and I was really quite disappointed.

While it is interesting reading about an artist who was “on the wrong side” during WWII and his justification for his actions, I find the prose and its tones to be, quite frankly, way too bland and pastel-like. On top of that, I’ve always found artists who don’t engage in politics because they are preoccupied with the “floating world” (or at least they are telling themselves that) to be the antinomy of a true artist.

Maybe, had I not had high expectations from this book, I would have enjoyed it more – but I hold Ishiguro to a (much) higher standard than this…

Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro

One of the many books that I have picked up from the local (very urban) farm. Yet another solid 50p investment!

Being ultimately ignorant, I always assumed that Ishiguro just wrote novels like The Remains of the Day. As most literate people will be able to confirm, however, that’s not the case. Throughout the book I felt as if Hailsham was actually Homerton College in Cambridge – something that probably says a lot about my memories of the place!

I honestly can’t say that I loved the novel – I really enjoyed the parts about the relations between the clones (this felt mostly like a very dark and fundamentally humour-less campus novel), but when Ishiguro turns too science-fictionesque he starts to lose me (and my interest) a little bit. Never Let Me Go is a very well-written dystopian novel, but so are countless others (not McCarthy’s The Road – that’s a work of art!) 

The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

Having already seen (and loved) the movie, Ishiguro’s novel really had no surprises for me – but boy was it lovely…

From an historical point of view, Ishiguro does a remarkable job of highlighting how easy it is to be harsh on British appeasers in hindsight because of the consequences of their actions (personally, I think they were fools who thought they understood Hitler and his depravity, but they were also dealt a remarkably bad hand…). And, also, he describes how the patterns of international diplomacy (once the happy game of the chosen few who had moved in the same circles for centuries) changed between the wars as those positions became way more professionalized.

And as for Mr Stevens, much like Penny does with Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory (not the most cultural of references, I know), I wanted to hug him at times and try to explain things that are obscure to him (like banter…) in the simplest possible way.

Too bad that, yet again, I found myself thinking what those people would have voted for in the EU referendum…