Continuing the coverage of his new novel, Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro is interviewed in today’s Observer.
From his semi-detached house in suburban Golders Green, in north London, Kazuo Ishiguro has made himself an architect of singular, self-enclosed worlds. His writing traps us inside strange skulls. He spends, he says, around five years on each of his books and the first couple of these years, each time, involves little circumnavigations of the imaginative space of his novel, marking boundaries, testing structures, making himself at home. All of his quietly unsettling, intimate vantages have foundations in the voices that narrate them and he spends a good deal of time, too, ‘auditioning’ these voices, listening to different possibilities, before he settles on one.
John Self reviews Never Let Me Go on Palimpsest here.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel Never Let Me Go comes weighted and freighted with anticipation, particularly for me. As you know from the above I don’t believe any of his books would rate less than four-and-a-half out of five on some notional scale nicked from Amazon. Never Let Me Go continues that tradition, though I found in the end it was closer to the four side of four-and-a-half than some of the others…