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Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
(Audio, 2009)
Other Editions...
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
As in his masterful THE UNCONSOLED, Booker Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro's NOCTURNES: FIVE STORIES OF ...
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Details
Synopsis
As in his masterful THE UNCONSOLED, Booker Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro's NOCTURNES: FIVE STORIES OF MUSIC AND NIGHTFALL uses music both as a subject, and as a metaphor for the things that are rarest and dearest in our lives: love, art, and other ethereal issues. In the opening story, a Polish guitarist in Venice is hired by a famous old crooner to serenade his wife from a gondola in an attempt to save their marriage--the results are not exactly what the guitarist or husband expects. Later, in another story, a saxophone player gets plastic surgery to help his career, and while waiting to recovery in a hotel, he meets the crooner's wife (now divorced), herself wrapped in surgical gauze. From under their bandages, the two discuss issues of love and failure. Ishiguro's writing style has genetic similarities to classical music in the brilliant but subtle ways themes and variations resonate and linger in the reader's mind. He also has a love for the comic and absurd--a woman in one story is convinced that she is a cello virtuoso though she cannot play the instrument--though these absurdities are delivered in the same measured elegant prose he uses for his tragedies. NOCTURNES is a beautiful book, full of heartache, brought off with aplomb by one of our most brilliant literary performers.
| Size | | Height: | 6.0 in | | Width: | 5.0 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 4.8 oz |
Industry Reviews
"Over the years Ishiguro has come to seem the most consistent writer of his generation: consistent in his formal choices, and consistent too in the quality of his work....He has a complete mastery of a particular kind of narrative structure, in which we move always towards anticlimax."
(05/08/2009)
"Questions of identity, artistic integrity, and success shape each of the five meshed stories in this droll and enrapturing collection. Each tale of musicians, muses, and users is funny and incisive; each is a fable about the dream of mastery and the nightmare of pragmatism; and each dramatic story line delivers arresting psychological transformations." (starred review)
(08/01/2009)
"Characters in contemporary fiction often suffer from Multiple Epiphany Disorder. Part of what makes Ishiguro so refreshing is that he leaves the epiphanies to the reader. We emerge feeling as if we have grasped insights that elude the characters, as if we have glimpsed the shapes of their lives and perhaps something significant about life itself."
(09/20/2009)
"Ishiguro, whose complex ambiguity is his form of affirmation, simultaneously shatters and restores characters. He reduces them to dust but, as in the Spanish poet Francisco Quevedo's sonnet, it is 'enamored dust.' No consolation there, for them or us."
(11/15/2009)
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