WEBB, Jen

English

English author Kazuo Ishiguro has won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. For some weeks now, the bookies have been offering odds on the likely winner. Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was front runner earlier this week, followed closely by Japan’s Haruki Murakami. Ishiguro was some way down the list of favourites: a surprise win, no doubt, for the bookies, and one that is likely to generate plenty of discussions and debate

University of Canberra Research Repository

07/02/2019 Nobel-winner Kazuo Ishiguro shows us the illusion of connection with the worldhttps://theconversation.com/nobel-winner-kazuo-ishiguro-shows-us-the-illusion-of-connection-with-the-world-85329 1/3AuthorJen WebbDirector of the Centre for Creative andCultural Research, University of CanberraOn WritingThe craft of wordsAcademic rigour, journalistic ﬂair SubscribeNobel-winner Kazuo Ishiguro shows us the illusion ofconnection with the worldOctober 6, 2017 6.53am BSTEnglish author Kazuo Ishiguro has won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature. For some weeks now, thebookies have been offering odds on the likely winner. Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was front runnerearlier this week, followed closely by Japan’s Haruki Murakami. Ishiguro was some way down the listof favourites: a surprise win, no doubt, for the bookies, and one that is likely to generate plenty ofdiscussions and debate.The commentary about this year’s prize, though, is unlikely to run as hot as it did last year, followingthe bombshell announcement that Bob Dylan was the new Laureate. With Ishiguro, love him or not,we are unquestionably in the company of a noteworthy writer, one who has been widely honoured. Hehas been winning literary awards since 1982, when A Pale View of the Hills won the Winifred HoltbyMemorial Prize.Despite this record of success – or perhaps as an inevitable consequence of the current media climate— Ishiguro seems to have been caught unawares by the win. Not unlike Helen Garner’s first responseto the email telling her she’d won the Windham-Campbell prize, he thought the announcement of theaward was fake news.Kazuo Ishiguro in his garden in London. Neil Hall/EPA07/02/2019 Nobel-winner Kazuo Ishiguro shows us the illusion of connection with the worldhttps://theconversation.com/nobel-winner-kazuo-ishiguro-shows-us-the-illusion-of-connection-with-the-world-85329 2/3This year’s award was based on Ishiguro’s contribution as a writer “who, in novels of great emotionalforce, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”. Sara Danius,Permanent Secretary to the Nobel Academy, added that he is “a writer of great integrity”, one whotackles those complex and enduring themes of “memory, time, and self-delusion”.Personally, I’m delighted with the win. Ishiguro’s novels have helped giveshape and texture to my life. An Artist of the Floating World (1986;winner of the Costa Book Award) and Remains of the Day (1989; BookerPrize winner) accompanied me through long insomniac nights. Theuncertainty, barely-declared unhappiness and sense of dislocation foundin both narrators fitted perfectly with my experience of being a strangerin a strange land. When We Were Orphans (2000), with its awkwardmisfit narrator and its haunting/haunted location, might be consideredhis least successful book, but I found all that unresolved guilt andunconfirmed identity both compelling and disturbing.Never Let Me Go was named as Time Magazine’s Book of the Year in2005. Its exquisite voice, and exquisitely painful dystopia, seemed to fitperfectly the mood of anxiety threading through that decade, onecharacterised by both late capitalism and the rapidly changingenvironment associated with the Anthropocene. And, most recently, The Buried Giant (2015) catapulted readers back to post-Arthurian Britain,weaving narrative threads from across history and treating enduring loveand failing memory with equal compassion.Ishiguro is often described as an author who writes across and betweengenres, moving from speculative fiction, to crime fiction, to socialrealism and fantasy. However I don’t find it instructive to pigeonhole hisbooks into generic categories.If anything, his writing demonstrates the permeability of the rules of genre. His technical and literarycapacity, along with his closely observed — and coldly if tenderly rendered portraits - locate hiswriting outside formulae or conventions. The worlds he creates, and the characters that people them,are startlingly authentic - an empty term that I don’t like to use, but which feels right in this context.Alfred Nobel established the prize, in his will, as one that is designed to reward “the person who shallhave produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. “Ideal” isanother of those empty terms, but it seems to me that a writer who has consistently tackled problemsof ethical relationships, social responsibility, questions of memory, gaps in meaning and identity, anddone it all with a light touch and deep empathy fits that bill.Ishiguro’s characters are often hard to love, but easy to care for, and their struggles with “the abyssbeneath our illusory sense of connection with the world” offer ways of seeing and thinking about whatlies beneath our own feet.PREVIOUS POSTIshiguro’s 1989 novel The Remains of the Day. Goodreads07/02/2019 Nobel-winner Kazuo Ishiguro shows us the illusion of connection with the worldhttps://theconversation.com/nobel-winner-kazuo-ishiguro-shows-us-the-illusion-of-connection-with-the-world-85329 3/3Literature Fiction Writing Nobel Prize for Literature NovelsKazuo Ishiguro September 7, 2017 Grief, loss, and a glimmer ofhope: Josephine Wilson wins the 2017 MilesFranklin prize for Extinctions Jen WebbNEXT POSTOctober 19, 2017 Rape is a plot device in western literature, sold backto us by Hollywood Camilla NelsonWe produce articles written by researchers andacademics. Be part of The Conversation.Make a donationIshiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. GoodreadsK7

Nobel-winner Kazuo Ishiguro show us the illusion of connection with the world

https://researchsystem.canberra.edu.au/ws/files/25397510/Conversation_KazuoIshiguro.pdf

Nobel-winner Kazuo Ishiguro show us the illusion of connection with the world

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

University of Canberra Research Repository