#31. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
It's been a dog's age since I've updated in this community. A bunch of things happened: I applied for and got a job in another country, I moved to Japan, I adjusted to life in the middle of a wild nowhere, I turned out to have a lot of trouble settling back in to important old routines like doing writing, and reading in English. Anyway, I'm getting back into it now. Then there was a death recently and that bumped me.
So anyway, I'm back and really quite glad to be picking up the thread of this. I obviously totally did up not wind up reading 50 books by people of color in under a year, but it's such a valuable project (for me, anyway, and maybe even beyond myself, I cannot be sure but I also haven't ruled that possibility out), and I am happy to be tucking back into it. (The thread of this project being co-integrated with getting back into reading books, books, books, generally.)This entry is for Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day. This is actually the second of Ishiguro's books I have read over the past year and I will get to updating with a post on Never Let Me Go, which I read almost a year ago, a little later on.
I am sorry to say that I have been profoundly disappointed by both Ishiguro's books, and by Ishiguro in general.
I had been expecting good, if not great, things from The Remains of the Day because, seriously, when you go and look it up and stuff, it's called a modern English classic and it's in the lists of the Whitbread and Booker awards and even on lists of, like, the greatest English novels of the century, and so on and so on. Ishiguro is also referred to as "one of England's greatest living novelists." You don't have to look far to find these kinds of descriptions. It's not just Wikipedia, either.
What I would like to know is, what are these people smoking? Because, seriously, Ishiguro has all the prose texture and nuance and subtlety of a fourteen-year-old in his first writing workshop. Okay, maybe that's harsh, but The Remains of the Day is written in a "voice" and with a heavyhandedness of both tone and plot mechanics that I would expect of a first novel by a slightly less-talented-than-average MFA student, _before most of the rewriting or editing_. Seriously. I mean, I am not imagining this stuff. This novel has no subtlety at fucking all. And the prose is almost unreadable. Seriously, Ishiguro? You're going to use "quite" and "rather" _multiple times in a single sentence_ in order to "convey" the "voice" of your point-of-view character, a "traditional English butler"? In your THIRD PUBLISHED NOVEL?
And NO ONE LINE-EDITED YOU?
And this piece of work is then treated like THE PINNACLE OF MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE?
I do not know what is distressing me more at this point, the relative badness of the work or the terrible, terrible implications of the critical "consensus" about it. What is this mystery?!... I mean, okay: yes, in The Remains of the Day, the structure has some things to recommend it. But even that needed rewriting, for subtlety, integration, and flow -- as it is you can see those chunky, clunky MFA-workshop edges, they're all hanging right out -- and the transitions are _idiotic_ and first-draft-like, and the voice, as I say, is pretty much more or less unreadable. I would have given up on this well before the halfway mark if I hadn't a) been on a mission, and b) so deeply, distressingly baffled about the blatant disjunction between the praise heaped on this book, and what I was actually finding myself wading through.
Ishiguro is a hack, and not even in the kind of inspired Philip K. Dick way. I am sort of sorry to say such a blunt and uncharitable thing, and honestly I do not think I would feel so deeply disappointed if this motherfucker weren't heaped so high with accolades. But he really cannot write very well at all. This is not a good novel, and Ishiguro is a terrible, terrible prose stylist.
I have more criticisms to make, but I guess I'll save them for Never Let Me Go.
Anyway, I am disappointed. I will close this post by quoting the response of a friend of mine, who wrote to in great distress while I was still in the midst of wading through this frequently steaming pile. She responded, "Ishiguro is one of those writers whose books make great movies because his ideas are good and in a movie you don't have to deal with the style. Read someone better."
I suspect I am probably going to treat him that way from here on. Ishiguro is pretty much officially the first "literary" writer about whom I can be sure that the movies of his books will be better than the original, _without having to bother to read the books_ -- a notion that is pretty much normally anathema to me. But I am more or less sorry to say that I have at this point determined to my satisfaction that Kazuo Ishiguro cannot, in fact, write prose worth reading. I know this in the same way and for essentially the same reasons I know it about, e.g., Dan Brown. He seems to be trying. I have read several of his attempts. But he does not have the fucking knack.
tages: japanese-english, english, lit fic, novel