Kazuo Ishiguro: Dragons and ogres and pixies! Oh my!
No question about it, Kazuo Ishiguro is a man of many literary talents. With four Man Booker Prize nominations, including a 1989 win for his novel The Remains of the Day, he is considered to be one of the great contemporary writers of our time. Novelist, lyricist, writer of screenplays and short stories, Ishiguro graced the stage at the Bram & Bluma Appel Salon on March 17, in conversation with freelance journalist Tina Srebotnjak.
Srebotnjak referred to Ishiguro’s first novel in a decade, The Buried Giant, as “the literary event of the year.” Set in Arthurian England and incorporating fantastical elements such as dragons, ogres, pixies, and a mysterious mist that causes people to forget, the story is about lost memories, love, revenge and war.
The setting for the book was the last piece of the puzzle, according to Ishiguro. He struggled to find a location that would lend itself to memory loss for an entire society. He contemplated different approaches, some involving futuristic societies and some that set the book outside of this galaxy, but ultimately he found a home for the story after reflecting on our own world’s past. During his conversation with Srebotnjak, Ishiguro explained:
“I was actually thinking about many contemporary historical situations. Things that happened in the 1990s, when Yugoslavia disintegrated, or the Rwandan genocide, the situation in South Africa after apartheid. Situations where societies had to grapple with this question: To what extent should we remember our past? To what extent should we forget it? …Rather than write a novel actually about Bosnia or wherever these places are… I wanted to write something a little bit more metaphorical.”
As for the ogres and pixies…
“It didn’t occur to me they were going to be an issue! I was just trying to get my book to work, and I really needed, you know, ogres and pixies. This is a landscape that I chose and it seemed to me very natural that there would be ogres and pixies in this landscape. That’s partly why I wanted them,” said Ishiguro, receiving chuckles from the audience.
Ishiguro’s novels, The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, and his screenplay The White Countess, have been developed into movies starring the likes of Anthony Hopkins, Emma Thompson, Andrew Garfield, Kiera Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, and Natasha Richardson. When a questioner from the audience asked Ishiguro why he didn’t write the screenplays for The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro shared his view that it may not be the best idea for authors to be creatively involved. “I do want the film to be a work of art in its own, right.” He joked:
“Films and books should be seen not as translations, you know. Yes, the French edition of The Remains of the Day should really be a translation of my version of The Remains of the Day. I’d be pretty upset if the translator said ‘Well, I wanted to express myself!’”
Will fans have to wait another 10 years for his next novel? Ishiguro admitted that it is near impossible to write while on tour but nevertheless finds the tour process very stimulating. “A lot of ideas are formulating in the back of my mind simply because I’m engaged in conversations like this,” Ishiguro told his audience.
Follow the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #AppelSalon
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