Saturday, April 19, 2003
Thursday, April 17, 2003
Wednesday, April 09, 2003
Saturday, April 05, 2003
Artist of the Missing World
An interview with Kazuo Ishiguro
Part II
Yemassee: I found When We Were Orphans both similar to your previous novel, The Unconsoled, and different. Both have protagonists who are faced with a kind of obstacle course toward reaching a goal, which only seems to recede further away. But Orphans is a good deal more earthbound. Was it a conscious move on your part, to do something where the surfaces are a little more solid?
Ishiguro: I guess so. The Unconsoled, I decided, would kind of take place in this dream-logic world. I didn't necessarily see the need to carry on setting all my books in that dream world. To some extent, I'd probably had enough of it. I spent about four years immersed in that dream world. A lot of people just couldn't make head or tail of The Unconsoled, though I'm gratified to see that over the years here in England people seem to be coming around to it, reading it again and so on. When my book came out here in April, a lot of the reviews spent a lot of the space talking about The Unconsoled, so a lot of people wanted to write about that book as well as the new book. It was a book that baffled a lot of people, frustrated a lot of people, made a lot of people angry. In a way, I wanted to talk about some similar themes through a completely different kind of technique, using a relatively fast-paced story.
Yemassee: When We Were Orphans struck me as quite cinematic. The action of the book was so exterior. It moved at a very rapid pace.
Ishiguro: I used plot in this book perhaps more than I've used it before. Even books like The Remains of the Day, which is a pretty accessible book, is not very plotty. This is the first time I had a go at a traditional plot, if you like, and there's a kind of traditional denouement at the end, when Uncle Philip appears at the end and says what happened. To some extent, it began as an idea to do a kind of pastiche of a certain kind of adventure story or detective story of that time. I didn't really have that much heart in terms of wanting to do a full-blown pastiche. That kind of faded away a little. But when I started the book I did have this notion that yes, it should actually contain a plot. That wouldn't be the most important thing about it, but there should be a kind of mystery, and it should actually have a proper resolution, you should actually find out what happened to people. It just came with the territory. It was this kind of book I was writing.
Yemassee: Do you find Christopher markedly different from your other characters? In this book, unlike some of your others, the evil is less inside the character than outside him, threatening to engulf him.
Ishiguro: He's in quite a different position from people like Stevens the butler [in The Remains of the Day] or the artist [in An Artist of the Floating World]. Those earlier characters are certainly people who are trying to come to terms with something. They're trying to come to terms with ideals that took them somewhere they didn't want to go, and they realize that perhaps it is too late now to redeem their lives. They've given the best they had to something they didn't want to support. It's all about their struggle to come to terms with what's happened. That's not really Christopher's battle.
That character who looks back and very painfully comes to terms with a less than flattering reflection of himself -- that was a character who did fascinate me in the earlier part of my writing career. But after The Remains of the Day I felt I had covered that fairly thoroughly. I finished The Remains of the Day in my thirties and somewhere in between my mid-thirties and the time I hit 40, I think there was something about the way I viewed life in general that that way of looking at life didn't appeal to me much anymore. In a way, it's kind of a young man's way of looking at life, that you set out with a set of principles, political views, whatever, and then you go out there on the playing field and you use these principles as a guide and at the end of the game you see whether you've done well or not.
In a way, books like The Remains of the Day were written with that assumption in mind, that you measured your life toward the end by how well you stuck to your ideals and you may well find, because you didn't know enough or the world was too complicated a place, you took a wrong turn here or there, but you can see a clear road down which you've come, and perhaps you can identify the wrong turnings. I think somewhere along the way, after I'd finished The Remains of the Day, that pattern of how one views one's life didn't really ring true for me anymore. I thought things were perhaps not as controlled as that. Laterally, I've become much more interested in the fact that a lot of what we do is beyond one's control. We're often motivated by completely irrational things, and we often choose our vocation, who we associate with, who we live our lives with, who we marry according to some crazy irrational scenario, of wanting to fix something that can never be fixed.
An interview with Kazuo Ishiguro
Part II
Yemassee: I found When We Were Orphans both similar to your previous novel, The Unconsoled, and different. Both have protagonists who are faced with a kind of obstacle course toward reaching a goal, which only seems to recede further away. But Orphans is a good deal more earthbound. Was it a conscious move on your part, to do something where the surfaces are a little more solid?
Ishiguro: I guess so. The Unconsoled, I decided, would kind of take place in this dream-logic world. I didn't necessarily see the need to carry on setting all my books in that dream world. To some extent, I'd probably had enough of it. I spent about four years immersed in that dream world. A lot of people just couldn't make head or tail of The Unconsoled, though I'm gratified to see that over the years here in England people seem to be coming around to it, reading it again and so on. When my book came out here in April, a lot of the reviews spent a lot of the space talking about The Unconsoled, so a lot of people wanted to write about that book as well as the new book. It was a book that baffled a lot of people, frustrated a lot of people, made a lot of people angry. In a way, I wanted to talk about some similar themes through a completely different kind of technique, using a relatively fast-paced story.
Yemassee: When We Were Orphans struck me as quite cinematic. The action of the book was so exterior. It moved at a very rapid pace.
Ishiguro: I used plot in this book perhaps more than I've used it before. Even books like The Remains of the Day, which is a pretty accessible book, is not very plotty. This is the first time I had a go at a traditional plot, if you like, and there's a kind of traditional denouement at the end, when Uncle Philip appears at the end and says what happened. To some extent, it began as an idea to do a kind of pastiche of a certain kind of adventure story or detective story of that time. I didn't really have that much heart in terms of wanting to do a full-blown pastiche. That kind of faded away a little. But when I started the book I did have this notion that yes, it should actually contain a plot. That wouldn't be the most important thing about it, but there should be a kind of mystery, and it should actually have a proper resolution, you should actually find out what happened to people. It just came with the territory. It was this kind of book I was writing.
Yemassee: Do you find Christopher markedly different from your other characters? In this book, unlike some of your others, the evil is less inside the character than outside him, threatening to engulf him.
Ishiguro: He's in quite a different position from people like Stevens the butler [in The Remains of the Day] or the artist [in An Artist of the Floating World]. Those earlier characters are certainly people who are trying to come to terms with something. They're trying to come to terms with ideals that took them somewhere they didn't want to go, and they realize that perhaps it is too late now to redeem their lives. They've given the best they had to something they didn't want to support. It's all about their struggle to come to terms with what's happened. That's not really Christopher's battle.
That character who looks back and very painfully comes to terms with a less than flattering reflection of himself -- that was a character who did fascinate me in the earlier part of my writing career. But after The Remains of the Day I felt I had covered that fairly thoroughly. I finished The Remains of the Day in my thirties and somewhere in between my mid-thirties and the time I hit 40, I think there was something about the way I viewed life in general that that way of looking at life didn't appeal to me much anymore. In a way, it's kind of a young man's way of looking at life, that you set out with a set of principles, political views, whatever, and then you go out there on the playing field and you use these principles as a guide and at the end of the game you see whether you've done well or not.
In a way, books like The Remains of the Day were written with that assumption in mind, that you measured your life toward the end by how well you stuck to your ideals and you may well find, because you didn't know enough or the world was too complicated a place, you took a wrong turn here or there, but you can see a clear road down which you've come, and perhaps you can identify the wrong turnings. I think somewhere along the way, after I'd finished The Remains of the Day, that pattern of how one views one's life didn't really ring true for me anymore. I thought things were perhaps not as controlled as that. Laterally, I've become much more interested in the fact that a lot of what we do is beyond one's control. We're often motivated by completely irrational things, and we often choose our vocation, who we associate with, who we live our lives with, who we marry according to some crazy irrational scenario, of wanting to fix something that can never be fixed.