Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro

Abstract

In Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro, Brian W. Shaffer provides a critical survey of the life and work of the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day. One of the most closely followed British writers of his generation, the Japanese-born, English raised and educated is the author of four critically acclaimed novels: A Pale View of the Hills (1982, Winifred Holtby Prize of the Royal Society of Literature), An Artist of the Floating World (1986, Whitbread Book of the Year Award), The Remains of the Day (1988, Booker Prize), and The Unconsoled (1995, Cheltenham Prize). Ishiguro's reputation also extends beyond the world of English language readers as his work has been translated into 27 foreign languages, and The Remains of the Day has been produced as a feature film and nominated for eight Academy Awards. Shaffer's study reveals Ishiguro's novels to be intricately crafted, psychologically absorbing, hauntingly evocative works that betray the author's grounding not only in the literature of Japan but in the great 20th-century British masters - such as Joseph Conrad, Ford Maddox Ford, E.M. Forster and James Joyce - as well as in Freudian psychoanalysis. All of Ishiguro's novels are shown to capture first person narrators in the intriguing act of revealing - yet also of attempting to conceal beneath the surface of their mundane present activities - the alarming sigificance and troubling consequences of their past lives. Conceived of as a companion to the author's subtle and complex fictions, Understanding Kazuo Ishiguro examines and clarifies the works of this critically acclaimed international writer.