[The Daily] Kazuo Ishiguro Wins the Nobel

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2017 has been awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro, “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world,” announces the Swedish Academy. Ishiguro is probably best known for his 1989 novel The Remains of the Day, which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction that year. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Harold Pinter would adapt the novel for producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory and the 1994 film, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, would score eight Oscar nominations and a slew of awards from critics’ associations. Ishiguro wrote the original screenplay for Merchant and Ivory’s The White Countess (2005).

Last year, Peter Beech wrote in the Guardian that “The Remains of the Day does that most wonderful thing a work of literature can do: it makes you feel you hold a human life in your hands. . . . It’s about how class conditioning can turn you into your own worst enemy, making you complicit in your own subservience. It’s probably quite an English book—I can’t imagine readers in more gregarious nations will have much patience with a protagonist who takes four decades to fail to declare his feelings. ‘Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,’ as Pink Floyd sang. It’s a book for anyone who feels they’ve ever held themselves back when something that truly mattered was within their grasp.”

Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go was adapted by Alex Garland for the 2010 film directed by Mark Romanek and starring Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan, and Andrew Garfield. As Manohla Dargis wrote in the New York Times, “this coming-of-age story involves three British friends who are raised with others of their kind in a group home that proves more Orwellian than Dickensian. . . . One of the pleasures of Never Let Me Go, on the page and on screen, comes from the detective work the story requires, whether you’re noting Mr. Ishiguro’s use of verbs like ‘huddle’ and ‘wander,’ or the way that Mr. Romanek groups actors in the image.”

In 2003, Guy Maddin directed Isabella Rossellini in The Saddest Music in the World, based on a story by Ishiguro.

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