YEY! ISHIGURO!!! ishiguro is one of my favorite authors, and never let me go is my favorite book -- i read it at least twice a year -- so i was super, super excited for this week.
first event! on march 18, 2015. kazuo ishiguro and caryl phillips at the 92Y! they both read for roughly 20 minutes each, and the moderator took questions from the audience (submitted on index cards) and selected questions to ask.
things to note: ishiguro's newest book is the buried giant (knopf, 2015), and phillips' newest book is the lost child (FSG, 2015). ishiguro's ambition when he was younger (before he was a writer) was to become a singer/songwriter. phillips and ishiguro have been friends for decades, since the time they were both starting out as writers. phillips calls ishiguro "ish," and ishiguro calls phillips "caz."
- ishiguro (before he read): "i felt like i should be proud of my pixies and ogres [...] and not apologize for them."
- his little rule of thumb while writing the buried giant: if the people of that time could reasonably hold a belief, then i would allow that to literally exist in my fictional world.
- decided to respect what we might today call superstition.
- ishiguro read chapter 11 of the buried giant. phillips read different sections from the lost child.
- Q: do you usually utilize rules of thumb?
- ishiguro: no, not usually. if i'm creating a world that's slightly tilted away from reality, then i like to have one.
- like many of his generation, he often quotes bob dylan.
- likes to control the element of surprise.
- "guidelines to keep my world coherent."
- Q to phillips about taking inspiration from the brontës.
- didn't have any intention of taking inspiration from wuthering heights.
- "it sort of ... intruded, impressed itself."
- started writing and the moors started to intrude.
- "i grew up in the city, so i'm used to concrete ... and dog poop."
- prefers to think of it as there being a conversation with the brontës throughout.
- the brontës were a dysfunctional family, and the father was an irish immigrant who tried to scrape the brogue from his tongue, which is common of migrants, this idea of the amount of accent as demonstrative of how much they belong.
- ishiguro: has oftentimes felt some kind of pressure that perhaps he ought to be addressing more of the immigrant and multicultural experience.
- personally finds he can't find much artistic energy as a writer on it.
- "when i'm writing a novel, i feel like i'm writing from another part of myself."
- thinks he took it upon himself early on not to take on the immigrant issue -- had other themes he was obsessed with and wanted to explore.
- phillips doesn't think any migrant is under any obligation to explore that experience. he also thinks it's different for ishiguro -- japan wasn't a colony.
- phillips: "a colonial migrant has a different sort of obligation inculcated into his soul early on."
- ishiguro: listening to music is a good way to get away from the world of words.
- ishiguro finds it important to keep the musical side of his creative process alive.
- when we're writing novels, we feel like it needs to be very rational, very logical.
- oftentimes, though, finds himself having to make decisions that don't seem logical and feels like he makes them in the ways that musicians do --> a more instinctive way.
- "music is important to me but not as music when i'm writing."
- phillips: this man knows more about music than he's saying.
- phillips can listen to music while he writes as long as there are no words.
- ishiguro doesn't think he thinks about music on a prose level. he thinks more about music on a larger structural level.
- ishiguro thinks that part of the way he writes has to do with his former goals of being a singer-songwriter -- his first-person narratives as being like songs expressing things to a small group of people. it's why he likes first person and why he likes words that muddle things because they're like songs -- they have to leave room for more than the lyrics.
- phillips: "i think i've learned more from poetry than i've realized."
- phillips does look for that cadence of rise and fall on the line level.
- Q: what does a longstanding literary friendship mean to each of you?
- phillips: "we have known each other a long time."
- phillips: "i don't want to talk about it like it's over." ishiguro: "maybe after tonight."
- phillips: we met in thatcher's regime, and now we're here in obama's america.
- phillips: "writers don't want to write a book; they want a career. they want to write a shelf of books."
- ishiguro: learned very quickly that it's slightly taboo for writers to talk about their work, at least in britain, so he doesn't think he and phillips ever really discussed their work.
- ishiguro explains that he calls phillips "caz" and phillips calls him "ish" even though his name is kazuo, and he finds that confusing.
- phillips: "i'm confused why we're wearing the exact same thing."
second event! on march 19, 2015. kazuo ishiguro with john freeman at the congregation beth elohim! event by community bookstore.
- Q: what about memory interests you in general? why do you keep coming back to it? (or did you forget?)
- kind of got hooked on memory in the beginning of his writing career because a lot of his personal motivation was remembering his early childhood in japan.
- not memory as in autobiographical memory.
- left japan at age 5 and grew up in britain and had this idea of japan.
- wanted to preserve that world in a book.
- memory became a means by which to explore human nature.
- this time, the buried giant is about societal memory, how a nation remembers and forgets -- when should a nation face the things it's hiding from? the same Qs are also applied to a marriage: when is it better to forget some of the darker passages so the relationship can carry on?
- the disintegration of yugoslavia and the genocide in rwanda were both catalysts for these Qs about societal memory.
- didn't contemplate setting the novel in "real" places.
- most people in britain don't know much about arthurian legends beyond monty python.
- he also doesn't know that much about them either.
- the buried giant doesn't lean heavily on the legends. he took more from history, though he constantly took pains to remind the reader that all this history is debatable and has no consensus.
- Q: have you ever been on a quest?
- "most books i've written feel like that."
- has to go on his way, pretending like he knows where he's going.
- in his 20s, he spent a lot of time arguing with people about moral values, political views, philosophies, etcetera, thinking that, if he could figure out a blueprint then, he could cling to it for the rest of his life. as he's gotten older, he's realized that, although it's fun to figure out and set all these values and such, you can't really stick to that plan. it's more like, when you get to certain points in your life, you pretend that you intended to get there all along.
- in never let me go, he wanted to explore the heroic.
- it's a vision of how human nature is an optimistic one.
- thinks of it as a cheerful book.
- thought that he wasn't going to make this a book about human frailty but the beautiful sides of humanity -- that, when people are faced with the end of their lives, the insignificant things like amassing fortune or getting vengeance fall away.
- the buried giant as another love story: often, when we use this term "love story," we think of it as "courtship story" that tells about the pursuit and the happy end of marriage.
- "i kind of think a love story should be about what happens after that" ... where you have to keep that flame going.
- "i am interested in a lot of the shared memories of marriage." [...] "i think shared memories are really important."
- Q of, can love continue if these shared memories have been taken away?
- the strategy of never let me go was that readers might start off thinking of the characters as Other but to recognize they are more and more familiar.
- "i have a habit of auditioning characters for narrator."
- "i think it was the singer [part of singer/songwriter] that was wrong."
- re: christianity and its idea of infinite mercy (a God who will forgive as long as you ask in the appropriate way): is there a danger in that? especially given the horrid brutalities and atrocities committed by christians throughout history around the world?
- "i do worry that we're going to end up a homogenized literary culture."