Word: ishiguroã
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...Ishiguro??s short stories are well-executed, witty, and will not fail to disappoint his past readers. However, the stories still feel more like the technical toying of a master musician than a lyrical melodic narrative. Unlike Debussy’s carefully nuanced grey that covers the whole of the emotional spectrum, Ishiguro??s “Nocturnes” are filled with the grey of blanketed emotion. Shimmering scenes occasionally rise up out of the narrative, only to be dragged back into the monotony of ordinary life...
...they want, it’s pop I play. R&B? Fine. Car commercials, the walk-on theme for a talk show, I’ll do it. I’m a jazz player only when I’m inside my cubicle.” Ishiguro??s on-the-spot prose makes for a delicious reading experience, but it functions better as a placeholder for the characters’ context than as a vehicle for their development...
...finished yet.… You have to be prepared to make a lot of changes, some of them hard ones. You change the way you are. You even change some things you love.” It is frustrating to watch Ishiguro??s characters push away their small share of contentment or achievement—the one saving grace against the mediocrity of middle age—in such a mundane and illogical manner. This makes up the simultaneously brilliant and irritating quality of Ishiguro??s work; his characters may not delve deeply into their...
...While Ishiguro??s depiction of the confrontation with failure appears wanting, his examination of protective psychological mechanisms remains one of the strongest points of the collection, underscoring both life’s pathos and surrealism. Ishiguro examines the absurdity of how humans protect themselves from the outside world and the moment in which this protection begins to wear down. Eloise McCormack, the self-professed virtuoso cellist who coaches young Tibor on his technique, eventually confesses that she cannot play the cello. She justifies this by claiming that other, less-gifted teachers would have destroyed her innate gift...
...With a bandaged head, wearing a night-gown. That’s all it is, I see it now. It’s just that he’s got a chicken or something on the end of his arm.” This seems to be Ishiguro??s conceptualization of the human protective mechanism: the bizarrely funny and nonsensical vision of two people with mummified heads standing on a stage, subjected to the fierce currents of the outside world while barely reacting to them...