I submitted this 2014 essay from Ishiguro, but no point in having 2 separate threads for the same Nobel Prize news/discussion.<p>Thought some folks here would be interested in how a famous novelist does "crunch" weeks". In this 2014 op-ed for the Guardian, he describes how it took 4 weeks for him to create his most famous novel, "The Remains of the Day":<p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/06/kazuo-ishiguro-the-remains-of-the-day-guardian-book-club" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/06/kazuo-ishiguro...</a><p>tl;dr<p>- Had the first chapter written the previous summer, but made no progress on it for about a year.<p>- Even though he couldn't write that year, he did a "substantial amount of 'research'" about British life/politics/servitude of that time period. This is what led to his 4-week "Crash" session being productive:<p>> <i>he decision when to start the actual writing of a novel – to begin composing the story itself – always seems to me a crucial one. How much should one know before starting on the prose? It’s damaging to start too early, equally so to start too late. I think with Remains I got lucky: the Crash came just at the right point, when I knew just enough.</i><p>During the 4-week "crash", he had a dedicated study in a house he recently moved in; his previous 2 novels were written at his dining table.<p>His process during the 4-weeks was not at all structured (in the traditional sense):<p>> <i>Throughout the Crash, I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere – I let them remain and ploughed on.</i><p>Note that he didn't <i>finish</i> the novel in 4 weeks. But he did reach the critical mass to make it a complete idea and story:<p>> <i>I kept it up for the four weeks, and at the end of it I had more or less the entire novel down: though of course a lot more time would be required to write it all up properly, the vital imaginative breakthroughs had all come during the Crash.</i>
Great! Not that the Nobel prize means anything to me, but I simply love Kazuo Ishiguro. His surreal novels are always moving to me. I absolutely love how he plays with unreliable narrators, like in "The Remains of the Day", "A Pale View of Hills" and "When We Were Orphans". He shows how they are flawed, sometimes self-sabotaging, but we (or rather, I) still empathize with them.<p>The ending of "The Remains of the Day" always moves me, almost to tears. How the butler, having realized he threw his life away for people who were not worth it, is at it again, repeating the same mistakes and having learned (almost) nothing. And still, I root for him.
I have a Goodreads tag[1] where I've tried to gather as many "definitive" or "best" books by Literature Nobel winners as I could find. (Subjective, of course: based on Goodreads scores, thegreatestbooks.org ranking, etc.) I've never even heard of a lot of the winners over the years, so I thought it might help vary up my reading a bit. Will look forward to adding a new name!<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2196584-archagon?shelf=nobel-laureates" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2196584-archagon?shelf...</a>
I'm very happy about this, what a good choice.<p>To me, Ishiguro's most distinguishing characteristic is the tremendous empathy for the people he portrays. Even his weaker novels manage to take you deep into these characters that seem to carry decades within every thought and expression, even though it may ultimately come at the expense of world-building for the plot at hand (I'm thinking of "Buried Giant"). And of course his best novels are something else, like crystals.
If you’re willing to give it the space needed I’d definitely recommend The Unconsoled[1]. It’s by quite a long way the best description of dream state that I’ve ever read.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unconsoled" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unconsoled</a>
I am the sole not happy one on this selection. There must have been a reason why he was not in any short list.
I'm only a movie expert but the 5 movies based on his books are all overly simplistic, cheasy and just terrible.
Still better than Jelinek though.