Last year, the Swedish Academy both shocked and outraged the world by awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to American musician, Bob Dylan. Almost everyone protested the decision and even Dylan seemed ambivalent about the decision and refused to acknowledge it for days before declining to attend the awards ceremony.
When the Academy announced its laureate for this year, Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the academy said she hoped the committee’s choice would “make the world happy.” And some say it has made the world happy.
The Washington Post describes Ishiguro as the traditional “great writer that everybody likes to see win the Nobel Prize” and the Swedish academy describes him thus:
“If you mix Jane Austen and Franz kafka then you have Kazuo Ishiguro in a nutshell, but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix”
The New York times describes the author thus:
“Mr. Ishiguro, 62, is best known for his novels “The Remains of the Day”, is a book about a butler serving an English lord in the years leading up to World War II, and “Never Let Me Go”, a melancholy dystopian love story set in a British Boarding school. He has obsessively returned to the same themes in his work, including the fallibility of memory, mortality and the porous nature of time. His body of work stands out for his inventive subversion of literary genres, his acute sense of place and his masterly parsing of the British class system.”
Mr. Ishiguro discovered literature as a young boy when he came upon Sherlock Holmes stories in the local library. “I was around 9 or 10, and I not only read obsessively about Holmes and Watson, I started to behave like them. I’d go to school and say things like: ‘Pray, be seated’ or ‘That is most singular,’ he said in an interview with The Times Book Review.
“People at the time just put this down to my being Japanese.”
After studying English and philosophy at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, he spent a year writing fiction, eventually gaining a Master of Arts in creative writing, and studied with writers like Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter.
Mr. Ishiguro stood out early among the literary crowd. In 1983, he was included in Granta Magazine’s best of young British writers list, joining luminaries such as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie.
He published his first novel, “A Pale View of Hills,” about a middle-aged Japanese woman living in England, in 1982, and followed with “An Artist of the Floating World,” narrated by an elderly Japanese painter, set in post-World War II Japan.
His deep understanding of the social conventions and affectations of his adopted homeland shaped his third novel, “The Remains of the Day,” which won the Booker Prize and featured a buttoned-up butler, who was later immortalized in a film starring Anthony Hopkins. Mr. Ishiguro, who writes his first drafts by hand, later said he had written the book in four weeks in a feverish rush.
When he published “The Remains of the Day,” Mr. Ishiguro worried that he was repeating himself by writing another first-person novel with an unreliable narrator, but critics saw the book as an extreme departure.
Ishiguro mentioned that his win came as a shock as there has been a proliferation of fake news in circulation recently. He said in an interview that:
“It was completely not something I expected, otherwise I would have washed my hair this morning, it was absolute chaos. My agent phoned to say it sounded like they had just announced me as the Nobel winner, but there’s so much fake news about these days it’s hard to know who or what to believe so I didn’t really believe it until journalists started calling and lining up outside my door.”
But at least one very important person doesn’t see anything “corrective” about the Swedes’ latest choice. Among those who weren’t disappointed by Dylan’s win last year is the new laureate himself.
“Bob Dylan was my creative hero when I was growing up, when he won the Nobel, I was ecstatic. It’s an added thrill that I follow directly in his footsteps.”
