Michelle Bailat-Jones

Writer, Translator, Reader

Posts from the ‘Kazuo Ishiguro’ category

Kazuo Ishiguro – A Pale View of Hills

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I am trying to get back into the habit of taking some notes of my reading and finding time to write up thoughts in this space. I’ve neglected this blog over the last two years and this feels a little unsteadying. I am never quite as happy as when I have time to think (which for me means writing) about a book. But I’ve gotten into the habit of thinking about each book as a potential “review” and this has kept me from writing a bit more freely about the books I’m reading.

A few months ago a good friend passed me Ishiguro’s first novel, A Pale View of Hills. I’ve read him before, and in fact, An Artist of the Floating World as well as Never Let Me Go are both favorites of mine—although for very very very different reasons. But A Pale View of Hills is one of those books that went on the special shelf I reserve for books I end up thinking of as “perfect”.

I found it perfect for a number of reasons—in its prose style mainly (Ishiguro is a quiet writer who writes directly and simply but still achieves an overall lyrical feel) but also its structure and the way the time jumps inform the front story in surprising ways.

The novel is told by Etsuko and she begins by telling us something of her two daughters—Niki, who is younger and half-English, and Keiko, who is Japanese. The novel takes place over the course of Niki’s five-day-visit to Etsuko in her countryside home in England—that is the present framework—but the story is actually one of Etsuko going back into the past, into post WWII Japan and telling the reader something of her life at that time, before she came to England.

It isn’t just Niki’s visit to her mother that inspires these memories, but the recent suicide of the older daughter Keiko. Ishiguro writes this devastating sentence on page two:

The English are fond of their idea that our race has an instinct for suicide, as if further explanations are unnecessary; for that was all they reported, that she was Japanese and that she had hung herself in her room.

That “as if further explanations are unnecessary” is so key here. Not only does it reflect the depth of bitterness and maybe even resignation that Etsuko is dealing with, but it also gives the reader the entire reason for the story she is about to tell.

The book then very quickly jumps into the past and Etsuko begins to tell the story of a woman she once knew, a woman named Sachiko with whom she was not really friends but with whom she spent much of a summer while she was pregnant with Keiko. Etsuko tells us about Sachiko and Sachiko’s daughter Mariko. We learn that Sachiko has fallen on hard times and is living on the fringes of town. Etsuko helps her find a job and begins to look after Mariko from time to time.

Sachiko is one of those marvelous fictional characters who presents the reader with many questions. What kind of woman is she? Are her actions (many of which seem cruel and self-centered) coming from her own innate character or from her difficult situation? Or what measure of each? Mariko, the daughter, is a difficult and mysterious child. She is badly behaved and sullen. And yet I found myself achingly sad as I read her story because Ishiguro reveals her loneliness and fear in disturbing ways.

This story from the past takes up most of the book, but the way the two timeframes speak to each other is really where the book affected me. Generally, I love books that do this (a past story informing a present-tense story) but A Pale View of Hills is one of the best examples. I don’t want to give anything away, so it’s hard to be too detailed, but it wasn’t just that because of Etsuko’s memories of that summer we understand something more of her relationship with her two daughters, it was more that we begin to question Etsuko’s memories and what she is actually trying to say. By the time we get to the end we realize that Ishiguro has been laying out a series of fascinating parallels that change almost everything about what we think we’ve understood all along.

And finally, throughout the past-tense story are hints that this is also a book of the war, of a Japan that is sorting out its future. This idea remains fairly muted but it is very powerful when looked at alongside the more personal stories of Etsuko and Sachiko and what happens to their lives.

I haven’t said nearly half of what I wanted to write about for this book, but it will have to do for today. I have a short stack of books I read over the summer and this fall that I’d like to write about as well, including Ramuz’s first novel Aline (1905), Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse, Justin Torres’s We the Animals, and Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation, which I absolutely loved. I hope to get to these books soon. I am slowly reading Kathryn Davis’s Duplex right now, and it’s such an odd book. It’s strangely beautiful and often a little disturbing, which I think is the intended effect, but I am enjoying it and enjoying the work involved in trying to understand it.

Reading Writer – Never Let Me Go cont.

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Narrator, narrator, narrator. What a powerful creature you are.

On Tuesday evening, I started reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and then I finished it up on Wednesday afternoon. It’s a rare treat to focus on a book in what feels like essentially one sitting. This kind of intensive reading exaggerates the feeling I get of having completely exited my own reality and gone visiting another. And the smooth, unwavering quality of Never Let Me Go’s narrator Karen kept me firmly within the confines of the story.

I don’t want to go into too many details about the actual story of Never Let Me Go because I think it would spoil the fun of reading the book for those who don’t know anything about it. Suffice it to say the novel presents an alternate version of contemporary reality where certain scientific decisions require a new kind of social segregation. I’ve heard the novel labeled science fiction and I suppose that might be true, but I think it’s really beside the point. The point for me is the writing, combined with the novel’s careful exploration of Ishiguro’s idea.

I want to focus on the narrator. I was dubious of Ishiguro’s handling of Karen at first. I wanted her to have a different kind of voice – less explanatory, less hesitant, less flat. I felt like I wasn’t in good hands and that the way she told the story needed to be cleaned up or edited or smoothed somehow. I was worried it might be a case of a very successful writer not being held to certain standards anymore, which is something I do think happens as editors become less certain whether they can criticize or offer changes. And I held tight to that criticism for nearly a third of the book until it slowly dawned on me that Ishiguro was doing this on purpose and for a very good reason.

From the very beginning, Karen’s overall tone is one of jaded resignation. And it was driving me insane. I couldn’t detect the level of emotion I thought she should have. Nor could I understand why she felt compelled to do so much over-explaining. Until the details of Ishiguro’s frightening world started coming into clearer focus and then it all made sense. Especially when we remember that Karen begins her story at the end, when she’s eight months from leaving her job and taking on her “real” role in society, when what she has to tell us has already happened. It’s only when we get to the end, that it makes sense why she has the tone of voice she has. She’s worse than resigned. That’s the whole point.

But the point of letting this kind of narrator tell her story (something I think most writing classes or instructors would tell you to avoid like the plague because in essence she is lifeless) is where I think Ishiguro made a clever decision. Her tone of voice is specifically calculated for who she is. This sounds silly and maybe what I’m saying won’t make sense unless you’ve read the book. But she isn’t just telling her story – she IS the story. And her voice, her resignation, her understanding of herself at the end, becomes the greatest piece of evidence of the novel’s tragedy.

And Ishiguro gives us everything we really need to know about her right on page one. Pretty damn clever.

Kazuo Ishiguro – Never Let Me Go

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There are times I wish I knew a lot more about sociology or psychology, when I wish I knew more about what we’ve discovered in terms of human emotional and behavioral development, for example, or how our psycho-social needs shape our transformation into functional members of society. I have some basic assumptions about social conditioning but nothing in depth. Nothing I’m definite about or feel confident in adopting as a theory. 

However, this seems to be what Kazuo Ishiguro is exploring in his novel Never Let Me Go. What is the emotional or intellectual essence of being human? The fictional construct he’s come up with to explore this idea is a good one – at least it struck me as well-suited to his purpose. I don’t want to give too much away, however, because I think the experience of reading this particular novel is a lot more interesting if you know nothing about the story at all. A lot of the tension for me came about through my labored understanding of what exactly was going on.  

In the most basic terms, the novel concerns a trio of individuals who have grown up together. The story centers on their coming-of-age, as it were, and their understanding of their role in a larger society. That sounds all rather ordinary, doesn’t it? But it’s not at all. I’ll recycle a line from my other post on Never Let Me Go, in an attempt to explain without giving too much away – the society they’re meant to live in, because of certain scientific discoveries, requires a strict and terrifying kind of social segregation. And our trio is on the wrong side. 

What comes out of Ishiguro’s construct is an attempt to locate the soul. Maybe that seems rather lofty, but I do think that’s what he’s getting at. Do we have a soul because all human beings necessarily have a soul, or do we learn what having a soul means and therefore have one? And what if, finally, it actually doesn’t matter whether we have a soul? Of all the novel’s questions, this one struck me as the most frightening. 

I wrote above that a lot of the novel’s tension comes through the reader’s slow understanding of the details of Ishiguro’s fictional world – we keep imagining the worst and waiting for some kind of confirmation or denial. But there’s something else in terms of reader-narrator tension: as the story progresses, the narrator entertains similar questions about the soul and free will as the reader does and the reader keeps waiting for the moment when the narrator might hazard a realization. But it slowly becomes apparent that everything about the narrator’s life precludes her from being able to form the questions in the same way as the reader. To me, that fundamental difference is Ishiguro’s attempt at answering his own question. 

I’ll definitely be adding more Ishiguro to my mountain of books to be read someday. Several years ago I read An Artist of the Floating World and if I remember correctly it has a similar aesthetic – disturbing but quiet. Thoughtful but mildly strange.  

I’m switching gears somewhat for the weekend and finishing up Rosy Thornton’s intricate Hearts and Minds. And I hope to settle down and read Nadine Gordimer’s fourth (and very short) novel The Late Bourgeois World. Other than that I will see what leaps off the shelf! 

Also, before I forget – Victoria from Eve’s Alexandria has put together an informative and witty post about the Orange Prize long list. Some of these look really interesting.