Interview with Ishiguro

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.

cover of 'never let me go'

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…

Email as database?

BBC has an article along similar lines to those I mentioned here.

“If a friend is excited about a concert and that gives me an idea for a birthday gift, I will store the info on e-mail,” says Georges Harik, the man in charge of search-engine Google’s Gmail service.

Stuart Anderson, Microsoft’s Hotmail business manager in the UK, keeps online shopping receipts in his mailbox in case he has to query anything later.

“People are keeping a lot more information in their e-mail accounts for retrieval at a later date,” says Yahoo!

Web-based e-mail services like Hotmail, Yahoo!, Gmail and AOL Mail on the Web are becoming databases by default as a growing number of people use them, to store data and photos so they can retrieve them from anywhere.

Big interview with Frank Rijkaard

From the Guardian today:

“I try to stay in the moment,” Frank Rijkaard says quietly as he studies the thick cloud of smoke hanging over his head. “Whether the moment is one of joy or difficulty or just sitting here right now, in my office, talking to you, I always think it’s best to stay in the moment. You know what I mean?”

Rijkaard takes a big drag, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs, staring quizzically at me through narrowed eyes. He exudes the kind of cool nonchalance that makes you wonder if he’s making a profound existential point or simply relishing his latest fag in the long chain he lights in his dingy office in the bowels of Camp Nou. He’s smart enough to do both.

Guardian Unlimited Football | News | Big interview with Frank Rijkaard

Kazuo Ishiguro

The Guardian profile Kazuo Ishiguro today.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s early career set a modern benchmark for precocious literary success. Born in 1954, in 1982 he won the Winifred Holtby award for the best expression of a sense of place, for his debut novel A Pale View of Hills . In 1983, he was included in the seminal Granta best of young British writers list, alongside Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, Rose Tremain and Pat Barker. Three years later his second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, picked up the Whitbread book of the year and in 1989 his third, The Remains of the Day, won the Booker. David Lodge, chair of the judges, praised the depiction of a between-the-wars country-house butler’s self-deception as a “cunningly structured and beautifully paced performance”, which succeeds in rendering with “humour and pathos a memorable character and explores the large, vexed theme of class, tradition and duty”. At 34, Ishiguro’s place in the literary firmament was already secure and he felt as if he’d only just begun.

Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Profile: Kazuo Ishiguro

Next read

After The Wasp Factory, which shouldn’t last much longer than this evening, I am going to have a crack at this:

Middlesex

Some good Palimthoughts from the ever reliable Self here.