Kazuo Ishiguro wins 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature

I’ve been looking for someone who mentions this. Is this not the first for a sci fi, fantasy author?

I need to read The Buried Giant again. It didn't compare to The Unconsoled, but not much does...

I've heard The Unconsoled is actually the technically "messiest" of Ishiguro's novels. I need to read Pale View of the Hills and An Artist of the Floating World before tackling The Unconsoled...

My problem with the claim, if it's true, is that I want to grab Rushdie by the lapels and shake him and say, "Why the hell did you write those books, man? Was it for the awards? Because if it was, then not only don't you deserve the awards, but you don't deserve to have written the books either!"

I'm sure you categorize Midnight's Children was one of the brilliant ones; how are you ranking his others? Or rather, which are the other ones to which you are referring?

True. And that doesn't contradict what I'm saying. Magic realism has been honored through Garcia Marquez, and the depiction of the post-colonial world was similarly honored through Chinua Achebe. I don't see the Nobel committee awarding the prize for the conflation of two streams of literature that have both already received consideration.

That's one way to put it. More generally (as with the other Nobel Prizes, by the way), the Laureate should be someone who somehow broke new grounds. IMHO

Personally I thought that the content of NLMG was not as poor as the structure. The adventure the kids go on is, as many have said, an important message. However the temporally loose plot made it hard for me to follow in many ways, and waiting until the very end to explicitly out the characters as clones annoyed me. If he would have said up front they were clones, readers could go the whole time thinking critically about the story in an entirely different way. Instead, all I got was confusion as to why these three people were so lost and soul searching. If Ishiguro would have been more clear in the purpose of the book, I think it would have been much more powerful and enjoyable for me. He took an artistic risk, but I feel it flopped a bit for readability and poignancy.

As far as The Buried Giant... more temporal fluidity and confusion. I couldn't even finish it, even though I was super excited to read a post-Arthurian novel. It just did not deliver for me.

This is exactly like me, having only read that and failing to understand the widespread acclaim. I think I will start to read more of his work, but only because I'm curious if I will agree that he has earned the prize.

I like his short stories. He can get a bit cloying long-form.

Same.

Only his first two novels have anything to do with Japan. From there he shifted into thoroughly British novels such as The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, or The Buried Giant. These novels were why he has won acclaim, and all drew heavily upon his native familiarity and comfortableness with British culture. Comparatively, Murakami, is a Japanese author through and through, albeit an unorthodox one.

It is thorough because it is a culture in which he grew up naturally and thoroughly. This is a simple concept to grasp, your unsureness notwithstanding.

Is your issue simply with the word "thoroughly"? You would agree that he is 'British', right?

Why the hell are you being downvoted. He certainly is less likely to have grown up with tea and crumpets

Not original commenter, but I am the Big Murakami Fan™ so I'm gonna offer my thoughts on his style.

His newer works definitely have tended more towards the unrisky, but I think that's due to his overall thematic shift which started germinating around Kafka on the Shore or After Dark, and were fully realised in 1Q84 – specifically, his tendency away from emotionally isolated, withdrawn protags, and towards protags who actively sought out connections with the world and with the people in that world. Lemme give a concrete comparison from the oeuvre (sorry for any spoilers).

In Wind-up Bird Chronicle (my personal favourite Murakami, and one of my top-3 favourite books period for many years), the protag Okada Toru's main goal is to recover a lost cat, which stands in for his crumbling marriage. However, the dude is so blasé and apathetic towards his career, his wife and his life in general, he's not even aware that his wife is the one trying to have phone sex with him on the 2nd damn page of the novel. He's characterised by his emotional isolation, and his growth as a character also comes from a place of isolation within the dry well. His encounters with the teenager Kasahara May result in her eventually choosing to pursue a sort of asceticism in a faraway rural factory town. The same thing happens with the woman he becomes sexually involved with, Kano Creta, whose connection with him seems implied to potentially have greater merit, but she moves to the Mediterranean. The novel ends not really on a note of hope, but rather one that seems to become content with emotional isolation and long-distance connections.

By contrast, with 1Q84 we have two main characters, Kawana Tengo and Aomame Masami, whose arcs in the novel both rely on their devotion and connection to other characters (Tengo to Fuka-Eri, Aomame to the Dowager) and also on their active search for each other across realities. Also, our old friend Ushikawa from Wind-up Bird makes an appearance, which even serves to form a concrete connection back to another Murakami work and enrich the "connectedness" of 1Q84 itself. The goals of the characters are to join together, in spite of the forces that seek to split them apart, and growth is found both from a desire for connection, and the achievement of that connection. Ultimately, I think the novel is overlong and bloated, but the difference in Murakami's mindset and goal as an author is pretty clearly different.

To get back finally to the aspect of "risk-taking" and how it relates to these two different phases of Murakami's writing, I think it comes down to how the reader relates to the characters, and how directly Murakami puts the reader in the path of the action. With his earlier style, the emotionally passive, indifferent attitudes of the characters, along with the first-person style, allowed the reader to experience the signature mixture of absurdism, surrealism and mundanity that Murakami is known for. The reader and the narrator both work their way through the bizarre situations at the same pace, which allows the absurdity to feel more fresh to the reader, therefore "riskier" as material. With his later works, by giving more clear emotional development and exposition of the protags, as well as moving to a 3rd-person style for additional novels and short stories, his novels become a little more traditional, and the absurd and surreal situations seem to be things happening just to the protag, rather than to the protag+reader shared experience. Since Murakami's surrealism is always pretty gentle, for lack of a better word, it just becomes things happening to characters, and seems less impactful.

At any rate, that's my impression and evaluation after reading Murakami for 10+ years. His newest novel seems to be more of a return, at least stylistically, to his earlier work. I'm getting a Hardboiled Wonderland vibe with flavours of Kafka on the Shore, at least from the first couple chapters (I'm a slow reader in Japanese). Hopefully a translation isn't too far away!

Ishiguro is popular but not middle-brow, so the argument stays.

It's such a shame that his work is considered middlebrow purely because it relies more on characters resonating with a reader as opposed to daring prose.

Also don't know how the committee can give a prize to Bob Dylan a and then turn around and sneer at middlebrow fiction. Dylan was a great lyricist, but he wasn't writing War and Peace. Not that they necessarily are sneering at it, but...kinda feels that way sometimes

What about William Gass! That man deserves one far more than the rest, he has done more for the metaphor than anyone else in the modern day.

"Might as well" is a very deserving argument /s

Pynchon is objectively a greater writer than Atwood though.

I don't care for Pynchon generally, but it's hard to deny that he's a once-in-a-generation type talent. GR defined postmodern lit, and to think that Mason & Dixon was written by the same guy is pretty astounding.

Yes. I think she is a splendid writer and a poet. Her feminist concerns and environmental themes make her writing a rare blend of great fiction and social value. Ishiguro is a mediocre storyteller, and the quality of his prose which is SO much better suited for screenplays depends on drama and plot- for which I want Stephen King to win, not Murakami or Ishiguro.

the only people who think that he deserves the prize are his already fans who haven't read any other author who could be a potential candidate.

Well, them and the Nobel Prize judges. Presumably they've read other potential candidates.

Well best means nothing in such things as art, all of these awards on books, writers, movies, songs, everything like these are just a sense of boost of popularity and doesn't mean anything related to better,worse,best. A reward which has a value is in a categories are sports, games and things as such.

May I ask you to expand on that? I'm generally trying to read all Nobel laureates (working backwards), and Mo Yan is next on the list. Any recommendations?

Christ do I want this to happen so badly now

Sartre was the real OG