Kazuo Ishiguro and Writers I Used to Like

Amy wonders, "Who, in the coming decades, will read The Remains of the Day?"

I hope lots of people. Amy's larger point is about how films can make the books they are based upon sadly irrelevant.

I certainly feel that Remains holds its value well, in no small part because it is so different from the film. The film was a love story. The book was about what it meant to be a certain kind of Englishman in the middle of the 20th century. The movie is great too, although I have to wonder what relevance it has today. I almost never hear it discussed by anyone unless they fell in love with it when it came out. Emma Thompson has basically stopped working in Hollywood, while Hopkins moved there and became a mainstream film star.

But this got me thinking a bit about the author of Remains, Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro was born in Japan and then moved to England with his family when he was 6. He started out as an English chronicler of Japan, with his first works A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World. I got into Ishiguro in college and thought these books were great, as I did with his first non-Japanese based work The Remains of the Day. But after that, I began to feel increasingly indifferent toward Ishiguro. The Unconsoled is certainly an interesting and challenging novel, but it's hard to figure out what it really did for me in the end. Set in an unnamed central European country, it felt like Ishiguro was trying too hard to be a classic European novelist. Then in 2000, When We Were Orphans came out. Ishiguro turned to a version of crime fiction in this story set in 1930s China, but it never engaged me. I've left Ishiguro behind since then.

This makes me wonder about a lot of authors I used to like that I have stopped reading. Sometimes I wonder what I saw in them in the first place. I know people who adore Richard Ford for instance, and I read Independence Day when it came out. I liked it then and read a few other things, but it's been a decade or so since I've read anything by Ford. I hear that a sequel to Independence Day recently came out. I've thought about reading it but I'm not sure that I'm willing to put the time into it. It's kind of sad though because I'm just too busy to read very much fiction. I plan on reading as much as I possibly can when I am in Bolivia this summer, but I'm sure that when I get back to teaching in August that it will go away again. I used to do a good job of fitting fiction into my days, at least sometimes. But that sure fell off the cliff this year.