Word: ishiguro
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...surgery for stomach ulcers; in London. With director James Ivory (also his life partner) and usually with screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the Indian-born Merchant oversaw more than 40 films over five decades, turning classic novels by authors like E.M. Forster (Howards End), Henry James (The Europeans) and Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) into box-office successes. Famous for his relentless, sometimes outlandish efforts to keep costs low (he was known to steal props and grab journalists as extras), he said, "I remember my college [dean] saying I could sell snowballs to Eskimos...
Whatever else the internet has done for or to the English language, it has popularized a very useful phrase that I will now invoke: spoiler alert. If you want to get the full effect of Kazuo Ishiguro's chilling, intensely moving novel Never Let Me Go (Knopf; 288 pages), read no further than the end of this paragraph. Never Let Me Go is the story of three people--Kathy, Tommy and Ruth--who at first appear to be ordinary children attending an exclusive and indefinably creepy but otherwise ordinary English boarding school. The only other thing you need to know...
This isn't a science-fiction extravaganza. Ishiguro wisely keeps the focus tight and close on everyday life. He follows the trio's feuds, their adolescent trysts (eventually they form a classic love triangle), their hopes and their slow awakening to and acceptance of the gruesome sacrifice that will be expected of them. ("After all, it's what we're supposed to be doing, isn't it?" says Ruth.) Cut off from the world, the children become pathetically obsessed with anything that might give them a tiny taste of what life is like for normal people. Ruth's most deeply...
Would the real Kazuo Ishiguro please stand up? The 50-year-old novelist is a tough man to classify. Born in Nagasaki, bred in Surrey (where he lived from the age of 5), he looks Japanese, but speaks with the accent of public-school England. Three of his six novels are set in the Far East, the other three explore the quintessence of Englishness. After the stately, hugely successful The Remains of the Day, which spawned the 1993 movie, Ishiguro went wild; his next two novels - The Unconsoled and When We Were Orphans - subjected their characters to chaos, violence...
...references to gangster and pop culture, recalls contemporary Japanese writers like the Murakamis (Haruki and Ryu), as well as the netherworlds of anime and manga - though her characters are hardly cartoons. Sato, who retains his dignity through crippling setbacks, could have stepped from the delicate pages of Kazuo Ishiguro or Jane Austen. Watanabe, resourceful despite his youthful delusions, would interest David Foster Wallace or Nick Hornby. Only Mary, fluent in Japanese but blind to the signals and intrigues of nearly everyone around her, can't seem to get a grip. Of course, in that failing she is no worse than...