Nocturnes
Kazuo Ishiguro
Knopf
2009
Ishiguro on his book: “One of my oldest friends comes round to play music and we’re still close. He’s a person I’ve known since I was 12, and we’ve managed to keep that friendship going really by pretending that I’m not a successful writer. Well, we’re not pretending that I’m not. We just don’t refer to it. So I’m aware that some people are having experiences like the people in this book, they have built up quite carefully a protection around them, or they comfort each other by saying it’s impossible to achieve dreams without severely compromising yourself.”
Themes
Hitchens, NYT: The story that most justifies its inclusion under the book’s title is “Cellists,” where it is only by means of a slowly developed series of “movements” and after a long sequence of late après-midis that we are led to appreciate the world of mania and deception that can underlie, as with the world of chess, the universe inhabited by the fanatically musical.
Messud, NYRB: …the book’s subtitle is odd: “Five Stories of Music and Nightfall.” Strictly speaking, each piece is engaged with music—four are narrated by musicians, the fifth by a lover of music—and almost all unfold, at least in part, at the end of day.
But “nightfall” in this context is a more nuanced allusion: these are stories about the fate of dreams and illusions in the morass of mid-life, and the “nightfall” is a darkening of possibility—of love, of success, of happiness. Similarly, “music” too strains against its literal interpretation—by which the stories seem, at times, a little forced, their links an easy conceit—to include the rhythms of human interaction, the play of major and minor characters, like major and minor chords; as well as the need for recurring melodies or themes, and both the satisfaction and the limitation of that need.
Kermode, LRB: As his title and subtitle suggest, all five are concerned with music… Much of the action takes place at night, or in darkness. A more substantial recurrent theme is that of threatened or collapsing marriages or relationships, some of which are sad and some heartlessly funny. Much of the pleasure of the reader derives from these recurrences of detail, and from the virtuosity of the dialogue.
Language
CH: Understatement is one thing, but in aiming for it Ishiguro generally achieves the merely ordinary… I became dispirited as I noticed that Ishiguro almost never chose a formulation or phrase that could be called his own when a stock expression would do.
FK: Here Ishiguro has concerned himself with devising fragile connections – of language, plot or atmosphere – between disparate stories or parts of stories [...] the dialogue is distinguished by fascinating moments when remarks are ignored, or understood only after the talk has moved on to other subjects – which I take to be a novel variation on traditional practice.
Final Take
CH: …these five too-easy pieces are neither absorbingly serious nor engagingly frivolous: a real problem with a musical set, and a disaster, if only in a minor key, when it’s a question of prose.
CM: Ishiguro’s particular talent—rendering the muffled cloud of the quotidian only to pierce it with unnerving aperçus—may flourish best in more expansive form; or it may be that we have yet to learn how to read these five apparently easy pieces.
FK: Brilliant… Art, its dangers, its pains and its gaiety [are] all topics seriously considered in this accomplished book.
More on Music and Nocturnes
I found it surprising that, with exception of Kermode’s, none of these reviews explicitly touched upon the author’s obviously well-refined appreciation of music. Take, for example, “Nocturne,” where Steve, the hapless saxophonist, proudly describes the emotionally rich landscape of his recording of “The Nearness of You”: “that moment as we come out of the middle eight, when the band go III-5 to VIx-9 while I rise up in intervals you’d never believe possible and then hold that sweet, very tender high B-flat. I think there are colors there, longings and regrets, you won’t have come across before.” For the characters in these stories who have ears to hear it (and the stories make clear some do not), music transports them to these places of “longings and regrets.” Throughout there are also hints of other places accessed by music- ones of joy, satisfaction- but Ishiguro mainly sticks the other pole of the stories, nightfall, which as Hitchens notes in his review, imposes that mood of “the gathering shade of evening that very often gives rise to our most intense, and sometimes necessarily our most melancholy, moments of reflection and retrospect.”
In this regard, Ishiguro lists a wonderfully appropriate soundtrack. The title of the stories immediately recalls Chopin’s or Debussy’s several piano nocturnes, but it’s clear throughout that the author rather has in mind artists and recordings associated with the vocal jazz standards of the 1950s- Sarah Vaughan, Chet Baker, Peggy Lee. Ishiguro clearly has an appreciation of these American “greats,” the “old pros”, as his characters variously name them, and these stories recurrently invoke jazz, particularly vocal jazz, with its powerful, stripped-down arrangement as a means of accessing characters’ hidden or forgotten emotional depths. Janeck, the Eastern European guitar player in “Crooner,” comes close to naming this dynamic exactly when he remarks that Tony Gardner sings “like all the best American singers [...] there was that weariness in his voice, even a hint of hesitation, like he’s not a man not accustomed to laying open his heart this way. That’s how all the greats do it.”
One might note that Claire Messud seems to read Ishiguro’s fiction similarly, observing that “His celebrated gifts lies in illuminating the hidden emotional complexities beneath a mundane surface,” and in that sense, adding to the already too many analogies of this work as a musical composition, the one most apt to my mind is precisely the kind so celebrated in the stories.
BEN
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