Volume 56, Number 16 · October 22, 2009
Come Rain, Come Shine
By Claire Messud
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Knopf, 221 pp., $25.00
Kazuo Ishiguro is a writer unlike any other. This may seem a truism—what writer, after all, is not unlike others?—but Ishiguro's fiction is, in fact, very strange indeed. His celebrated gift lies in illuminating the hidden emotional complexities beneath a mundane surface—something canonically accomplished in The Remains of the Day, and again, more menacingly, in his last extraordinary novel, Never Let Me Go. But he is also the author of two deeply mysterious books, The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans, in which reality itself is called into question, and the fiction's only firm ground is Ishiguro's unerringly calm, even placid, prose. Perhaps what is strangest about Ishiguro's work is precisely that: the marriage of a narrative style of almost thrilling banality and a surreal, often dark imagination.
Review, 3517 words
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