Sunday, October 8, 2017

Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates and more on Kazuo Ishiguro's Nobel win

Kazuo Ishiguro
Poster by T.A.

Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates and more on Kazuo Ishiguro's Nobel win

As Ishiguro is named the 2017 recipient of Nobel prize in literature, his fellow authors reflect on a writer who ‘moves the furniture around inside your head’

Sebastian Barry, Joyce Carol Oates, Neil Gaiman, Andrew Motion, Salman Rushdie and Madeleine Thien

Friday 6 October 2017 09.41 BST

Sebastian Barry

Kazuo Ishiguro has won the Nobel prize. His fellow writers, his readers, his friends, his colleagues and translators all over the world, will have sat up straighter suddenly with an exclamation of simple joy at the news. With the death of Seamus Heaney you had the gnawing sense that the heart had gone out of the writing world. Seamus was a radiant and extraordinary soul, and you can apply exactly the same words to the great Ishiguro.

How clever and astute are the Nobel prize committee. Having given the prize last year to Bob Dylan, they have given this year’s prize to Dylan’s biggest fan. Joseph Conrad busied himself with writing seven or eight masterpieces in a row; Ishiguro has done exactly the same. Are we allowed to say that he, like Seamus, is one of the most truly gentlemanly writers in the history of the literary world, the most agreeable, the most storied, the most kind? Perhaps none of that should matter – but it does, somehow. Between genius and gentleness he has taken his measure of the world, and is himself a measure of the best that humankind can be. How delightful that the Nobel has alighted in his garden.

Joyce Carol Oates

In his sparely written, melancholy works of fiction that suggest a monochromatic De Chirico, Ishiguro explores questions of identity that seem particularly relevant to our fractured time. Where does the self reside? Is there a “self”? His most famous novel is The Remains of the Day, deservedly honoured by being adapted into a ravishingly beautiful Merchant Ivory film. But my favourite of his fiction is the dystopian parable Never Let Me Go – a convincing and timely horror story narrated in the most unassuming prose.

Neil Gaiman

I just feel unalloyed delight about the news. Kazuo Ishiguro is a good, serious, brilliant and hardworking writer who has never been afraid to tackle big themes, nor to use science fiction (Never Let Me Go) or fantasy (The Buried Giant) as the vehicles he needed to drive his ideas.

It’s a refreshing and intelligent choice by the Nobel committee. The only cloud I can imagine would be if this takes Ish too long away from his writing desk.

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'I thought it was a hoax': Kazuo Ishiguro on winning the Nobel prize in literature – video

Andrew Motion

Ishiguro’s imaginative world has the great virtue and value of being simultaneously highly individual and deeply familiar – a world of puzzlement, isolation, watchfulness, threat and wonder.

How does he do it? Among other means, by resting his stories on founding principles which combine a very fastidious kind of reserve with equally vivid indications of emotional intensity. It’s a remarkable and fascinating combination, and wonderful to see it recognised by the Nobel prize-givers.

Salman Rushdie

Many congratulations to my old friend Ish, whose work I’ve loved and admired ever since I first read A Pale View of Hills. And he plays the guitar and writes songs, too! Roll over Bob Dylan.

Madeleine Thien

Kazuo Ishiguro gets into your thoughts and moves the furniture around inside your head. He takes things – words like completion, detective, donation – and rotates them into something else, rotating you with them. People pass in and out of his novels, unconsoled by the paths their lives have taken. There are doubles: Ryder and Brodsky, Christopher and Akira, Kathy and her original. Or are the doubles a kind of mistaken identity? We hardly know ourselves. Time and selfhood get mixed in with the half-truths and partial vision, and it’s alarming how supremely natural it all feels.

I have loved his novels from the beginning. Book after book, Ishiguro goes on destabilising us – and, one imagines, himself – and somehow he does it with rigour and lightness. He writes with an inner freedom that is significant and rare. If the structure of a novel can be seen as a physical space of its own, he has been building wild and endlessly subtle things.

THE GUARDIAN