"The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain" by Kazuo Ishiguro

One item on a page of new books caught my eye – a new work by Novel Prizewinner Kazuo Ishiguro entitled The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain. The last work I’d read by him was The Buried Giant, something of a early medieval story set not long after the age of King Arthur’s reign. I loved the story, so I went looking to find out more about this new work. 

Ishiguro was born in Japan but raised and educated in Britain. He’s likely best known for two works that out-British the British – Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day (which won the Booker Prize in 1989).  But among many other books, he’s written stories set in Japan, delved into crime fiction (When We Were Orphans), and most recently written Klara and the Sun, which might be defined as literary science fiction.

 

And now he’s written song lyrics, many of which look suspiciously like poetry.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

A Burning Spear: Poetry and the Rebellion of Small, Good Things – Paul Pastor at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

“A Lament,” poem by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

By the Rues: A Poem for Veterans Day – Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

 

After Apple-Picking – poems by Megan Willome (and Rpbert Frost).

 

“A Spur to Genius,” poem by Charles Woodward Hutson – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Buried Giant”

Some books you read just click with you and your psyche. Others take time, and persistence, to grasp and understand. Still others you grapple with and wrestle with and sometimes force yourself to read, but you never really believe the story. And then there are those you begin to read and discover they’re lousy.

I fell in love with The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro almost from the first page.

He’s the author of several novels and others works, but I had only previously read the novel Never Let Me Go and Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (I reviewed Nocturnes here in 2011). I have not read what is his best known work, The Remains of the Day, but I did see the movie, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson (1993).

But The Buried Giant is something else entirely, a story of post-Arthurian Britain that is an unusual love story, a journey to find a son, a tale of intrigue and conspiracy, and ultimately a beautifully done essay on memory.

Axl and his wife Beatrice are elderly Britons, living what is inside a hollowed-out hill in community with other Britons. The Romans abandoned the country many years before, but locals still find their ruined country houses and other buildings. One wave of Saxons has arrived, and peace, if uneasy, exists between the Saxons and the Britons.

The couple can remember they had a son, but not much more than that. In fact, everyone’s memory seems to suffer, and it’s not a result of age for memory loss afflicts the young as well. Eventually Axl and Beatrice leave their community to find their son.

They first stop in a Saxon village, and find the villagers in great agitation. An ogre has carried off a village boy of 12 named Edwin. He’s rescued by a visiting warrior named Wistan, but the villagers discover the buy has a bite mark on his stomach, and it is not the mark of the ogre. To save the boy’s life from his own village, Wistan convinces Axl and Beatrice to take the boy with them, and Wistan joins them as well. Wistan is something of a mystery, on a quest for something he doesn’t disclose.

Along the way they encounter an aging Sir Gawain, he of Arthur’s Roundtable; they take refuge in a monastery where they find friends and enemies. They gradually learn what is causing the problem with people’s memories. And, yes, there’s even a dragon.

Kazuo Ishiguro

The relationship of Axl and Beatrice are the heart of the story, and the reason the novel hooked me from the beginning. Their love for each other is palpable; Axl refers to his wife as “Princess.” They are on a journey together, and as time passes they are remembering things about each other, not all of them good. But their love is steadfast, and of all the things “the buried giant” could refer to, I finally decided it was the love between this aging and sometimes infirm couple.

It’s a beautiful story, filled with a bit of both literal and figurative magic (Merlin hasn’t been gone that long, after all). In a culture where everything is changing – the last vestiges of Roman rule disappearing, the threat of more Saxons and other tribes coming, the breakdown of law and order before the rise of feudalism, it is the love of two elderly people that holds fast.

Top photograph: An early 7^th-century Anglo-Saxon helmet from the burial ship found at Sutton Hoo.

Kazuo Ishiguro's "Nocturnes"

I think of a nocturne, and I think of a composition for the piano, played best in the evening, the time for considering the day just past, the time for quiet dreams leading to sleep.

The five stories in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes have that dream-like quality about them. They are all about music but not, interestingly enough, the piano. And this is purposeful on Ishiguro’s part, for these stories are all about relationships that should be about one thing but are about something else, something slightly off, and the music flowing through them is also about something else.

In “Crooner,” a guitar player from Eastern Europe is hired by an aging American singer in Venice to play while he sings to his wife, he in a gondola and she on the balcony. These are love songs, special songs the two share, but they also turn out to be farewell songs, for he is planning, with her understanding and support, to divorce her to marry a younger woman and so help rejuvenate his career.

In “Come Rain or Come Shine,” an old friend comes to London from Spain to visit a couple he’s known since college and often visits; he shares a love for old American popular songs with the wife. But he finds this visit is unlike any other, with his friends each seeking to use him to resolve their marital problems.

In “Malvern Hills,” a guitar player trying to get his footing in the industry visits his sister and brother-in-law in the English countryside, and meets a German couple on vacation. Nothing is what it seems for any of the characters.

In “Nocturne,” the title story, the wife from “Crooner: is recovering from plastic surgery in a luxury hotel, as is a saxophone player trying to relaunch his not-quite-successful career. Their faces wrapped in bandages, they explore the hotel at night, and in the process explore their own motivations and desires.

And in “Cellists,” a young Russian cellist playing in Venice in cafes and the occasional recital is adopted and mentored by an older American woman. She guides him and herself into beautiful music, and an almost certain beautiful failure.

Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day, writes in a plain style, almost reminiscent of Isak Denison (these stories have that same kind of simple and slightly ironic sense to them common in many of Denison’s stories). But he has his own unique voice, almost the voice of the outsider, telling the stories of once-great, never-great and never-likely-to-be-great singers and musicians. For the characters of these stories, life will be at best a nocturne, never a symphony.