Ogres in passing

Lorien Kite interviews Kazuo Ishiguro at the FT (site registration required):

“About 50 or 60 pages in, maybe slightly more, I thought, well, maybe I’ll show Lorna this,” says Ishiguro. “And she looked at it and said: ‘This is appalling — this won’t do.’ I said: ‘So what’s wrong with it? What should I change?’ She said: ‘You can’t change anything. You’ll just have to start again from scratch; completely from scratch.’”

Ishiguro couldn’t face the job of reconstruction immediately, turning instead to the short-story collection that would be published as Nocturnes in 2009. But when he did return to the Dark Ages, the approach was different. “The first time I had a go at this thing it was a bit like Sir Walter Scott, over-egged with a kind of period vernacular. The second time around I just tried to keep the language as simple as possible. I worked more at taking words from what you or I would say rather than adding things like ‘prithee’ — just by removing prepositions or the odd word here and there, I ended up with something that sounded slightly odd or slightly foreign.”

First editions, second thoughts

At the FT, Liz Jobey on PEN's fundraising auction of first editions annotated by their authors (site registration required). Various bits of note, including Kazuo Ishiguro:

“I’ve always been drawn to the ‘diary entry’ way of narrating a story in which the timeframe keeps shifting as the book progresses and the narrator’s emotional and intellectual position keeps shifting with it. This method is particularly good for highlighting a character’s levels of self-deception, I find.”

Treat!

I am not much of a one for Halloween, but I got home on Monday just as large numbers of highly excited children were congregating in the building lobby for the annual Halloween party and maniacal subsequent hallway-and-stairwell trick-or-treating, and was swept up in the hospitality of some neighbors I like very much but don't see too often!  Walked away from their place an hour or so later feeling the soothing effects of cheese, beer and candy but also with a real treat tucked under my arm: an advance copy of Heidi Julavits's The Vanishers, a novel I have been coveting ever since I first heard about it a few months ago. 

I am very happy to report that it is divinely satisfactory, her best book yet (which is saying quite a lot).  It is also curiously and perfectly suited to my own reading tastes: imagine faint shades of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled and Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, a way with steeply pitched verbs that's slightly reminiscent of Gary Lutz or Sam Lipsyte ("magneted," "throttled up," "pay-per-viewing"), a quasi-Parkian reflection on disambiguation and an amazing new definition of override, an eclectic and idiosyncratic mix of occult and spiritualist references, the notions that the "oblique glimpses into the lives of cinema strangers" one gets from seeing foreign films might be the only thing that would partly compensate one for the cessation of "psychic forays" and that parapsychologists would never use social networks due to the fact that they're "'a boon for psychic attackers.'" In short, an unusual and memorable first-person narrator, a fantastic and compelling story - strongly recommended...

Two other things I also liked very much this week: N. K. Jemisin's novel The Kingdom of Gods, the final volume of her excellent Inheritance trilogy; and a gripping Kindle Single by Mishka Shubaly, The Long Run.

Shifting, shifty

At the Guardian, Teju Cole's top ten novels of loneliness. I am excited about this list as it gives me several good new things to read (persuasive to me via the fact that the thoughts on Sebald, Naipaul and Davis are so much what I would choose to note myself, though I dissent from the verdict on Ishiguro's Remains of the Day - I spin out from The Unconsoled as a hub and view Remains and Never Let Me Go as useful clarification of the master project). Naipaul's Enigma of Arrival is surely one of the great underrated books of modern literature, well worth a look for those who have not read it.

(More common style - not criticizing! - on these Guardian lists is to use up several spots, uselessly, on things like Robinson Crusoe - this is more practical.)

Life after potential

Decca Aitkenhead interviews Kazuo Ishiguro for the Guardian.

Songs After Dark

And I did go to the Doveman Footloose show and am extremely glad that I did, it was an unusual and quite moving show...

(Also I am glad to say that I heard the voice of reason - I had dinner with training partner S. and his lovely wife beforehand, and resolutely told 'em that I could not meet S. this morning for our projected 9am run because of a deep psychological need for a morning without having to set the alarm! In fact between cat and insomnia I am well up already, but it was the right thing, made for a much less stressful later part of the evening! I will run tomorrow instead...)

This project actually involves Thomas Bartlett a.k.a. Doveman covering the songs from the album accompanying the 80s film Footloose. It was spurred by Thomas's friend Gabriel, who writes as follows:

When I was very young, my half-sister Jenny died tragically. She was a teenager, and it was the 80's. She left behind a wardrobe of brightly colored clothes, rainbow stickers, life-size paintings, doodles on lined paper, and hundreds of tapes. These constitute most of my memories of her. It's sad for me to look at these things, and usually I don't. But a couple of summers ago I found a tape of hers with a startling cover photograph - this was Footloose. I couldn't stop listening: it was a portrait of 80's love, desire, pain, freedom, and frenzy; of being a teenager in a time of change.

He described the tape, when he spoke before the show last night, as a message in a bottle, and it's an interesting notion. I think in some ways that the project/performance/album is a failed experiment, but that the partial failure itself becomes part of the magic of hearing the music played live - it's very lovely to listen to, because all of Thomas's music is, but in fact the Footloose songs do not speak directly and immediately to the audience, so that the music prompts thoughts about absence and loss and the ways in which an emotion might be forcibly reproduced or remembered without being anchored to anything one can really hold onto.

The medium of the cassette tape is the perfect way of thinking about this stuff, too. I don't think it's really because of high-culture things like Krapp's Last Tape - it's more just that Beckett saw exactly the thing about the medium that others would also later see and muse upon. What I was most strongly reminded of: the use of the tape in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

I will cannibalize my own blog post on that book, given here in slightly redacted form, having long since given that copy (and several others - but the book and the tape are two quite different media, in my opinion!) away:

A prized possession--in this case, the narrator Kathy H.'s cassette tape of Songs After Dark by Judy Bridgewater--remains prized in spite of the fact that "the music has nothing to do with anything. It's an object, like a brooch or a ring, and especially now Ruth has gone, it's become one of my most precious possessions." .... The "students" at Hailsham misunderstand a teacher's casual reference to Norfolk as England's "lost corner," conflating it with the fact that the "lost corner" is where lost property is kept at the school: "Someone--I can't remember who it was--claimed after the lesson that what Miss Emily had said was that Norfolk was England's 'lost corner', where all the lost property found in the country ended up. Somehow this idea caught on and soon had become accepted fact virtually throughout our entire year." Kathy's precious tape is lost, but she finds another copy years later (this may sound clunky, but it's actually an extremely subtle counterpoint to the cloning stuff): "Norfolk came to be a real source of comfort to us, probably much more than we admitted at the time, and that was why we were still talking about it--albeit as a sort of joke--when we were much older. And that's why, years and years later, that day Tommy and I found another copy of that lost tape of mine in a town on the Norfolk coast, we didn't just think it pretty funny; we both felt deep down some tug, some old wish to believe again in something that was once close to our hearts."