Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels begin as if with no story in mind, and finish with no end in sight. His narratives hold nothing more than a drift of banalities, the latency of meaning slowly revealed by the accumulating welter of broken thoughts, fractured recollections and fragmented moments of awareness that hazily reflect a crippled and riven world. His characters stand distant from one another, fumbling at the meaning of each other’s sentences, reaching out clumsily and desperately for the companionship of another human being but finally unable to find sincerity, interminably subverted and thwarted by lapses of understanding and lengths of awkward Pinteresque silences. But amidst the anguish and anticipation of human interaction, nobody remains unaware of the indelible influences of age and change in a world that has quietly left them behind. In the last pages of Ishiguro’s most recent novel, he leaves no space even for catharsis; there is no sense of direction nor even the finality of death. Meaning and memory ebb away into an endless vanishing point: “I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up… The fantasy never got beyond that — I didn’t let it — and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be.”