Product Description

One of the most celebrated writers of our time gives us his first cycle of short fiction: five brilliantly etched, interconnected stories in which music is a vivid and essential character.

A once-popular singer, desperate to make a comeback, turning from the one certainty in his life . . . A man whose unerring taste in music is the only thing his closest friends value in him . . . A struggling singer-songwriter unwittingly involved in the failing marriage of a couple he’s only just met . . . A gifted, underappreciated jazz musician who lets himself believe that plastic surgery will help his career . . . A young cellist whose tutor promises to “unwrap” his talent . . .

Passion or necessity—or the often uneasy combination of the two—determines the place of music in each of these lives. And, in one way or another, music delivers each of them to a moment of reckoning: sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes just eluding their grasp.

An exploration of love, need, and the ineluctable force of the past, Nocturnes reveals these individuals to us with extraordinary precision and subtlety, and with the arresting psychological and emotional detail that has marked all of Kazuo Ishiguro’s acclaimed works of fiction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6675 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-22
• Released on: 2009-09-22
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307271020
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
This suite of five stories hits all of Ishiguro's signature notes, but the shorter form mutes their impact. In Crooner, Tony Gardner, a washed-up American singer, goes sloshing through the canals of Venice to serenade his trophy wife, Lindy. The narrator, Jan, is a hired guitar player whose mother was a huge fan of Tony, but Jan's experience playing for Tony fractures his romantic ideals. Lindy returns in the title story, which finds her in a luxury hotel reserved for celebrity patients recovering from cosmetic surgery. The narrator this time is Steve, a saxophonist who could never get a break because of his loser ugly looks. Lindy idly strikes up a friendship with Steve as they wait for their bandages to come off and their new lives to begin. In the final story, Cellists, an unnamed saxophonist narrator who, like Jan, plays in Venice's San Marco square, observes the evolving relationship of a Hungarian cello prodigy after he meets an American woman. The stories are superbly crafted, though they lack the gravity of Ishiguro's longer works (Never Let Me Go; Remains of the Day), which may leave readers anticipating a crescendo that never hits. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Ishiguro blends musical concepts with their literary counterparts in his latest work, and Nocturnes has the ephemeral quality of a song cycle with recurring themes and motifs developed in different prose keys. Though critics admired Ishiguro's lovely writing, "unassuming to the point of near-invisibility, like a lake whose still surface belies the turbulent currents beneath" (Los Angeles Times), they took issue with his characters—insubstantial and unconvincing when compared to the haunting creations found in his novels—and his implausible plot developments. Perhaps Entertainment Weekly summed it up best by stating that Nocturnes, by any other writer, would be praiseworthy; by a celebrated author like Ishiguro, it can best be likened to a minor work from a master composer.

Review
Reviews from the UK:

“A brilliant new book . . . Art, its dangers, its pains and its gaiety [are] all topics seriously considered in this accomplished book.”
–Frank Kermode, London Review of Books

“Spellbinding . . . Each of these stories is heartbreaking in its own way, but some have moments of great comedy, and they all require a level of attention that, typically, Ishiguro’s writing rewards . . . The final story [is] exquisite.”
–Observer

“By now it is clear that this exquisite stylist is serious in his pursuit of a minimal–perhaps even universal–mode of expression for the emotional experiences that define our lives as human. Nocturnes is a set of poised and playful reflections on the falling away of sentiment . . . These stories recall Ishiguro’s best known novel, The Remains of the Day. In their surreal touches they resonate with The Unconsoled. And in their deceptively simple exploration of love and loss, they build on the achievement of Never Let Me Go.”
–The Times

“It is hardly surprising that a writer as resonant, and as emotionally pitch-perfect, as Kazuo Ishiguro should be so keen on music . . . [The title story’s] set-up is so beautifully engineered that it left me simultaneously gasping in admiration and shaking with laughter.”
–Sunday Telegraph

“These stories come up on you quietly, in Ishiguro’s strangely weightless style [and] haunt you for days . . . A nocturne is a piece of music inspired by, or evocative of, the night . . . These little pieces could only be the work of a great composer.”
–Evening Standard

“Chopin is the composer most associated with the form [of the nocturne], bringing to it grace and beauty, fragility and poise, qualities conspicuous in this diverting collection of five stories by Kazuo Ishiguro . . . Serious as Ishiguro’s intentions surely are, in these well-tempered, witty and droll stories he is more playful than he has ever been.”
–Glasgow Herald

“Ishiguro’s volume has the quality of a song cycle, with recurring themes developed in different guises . . . They resonate long after the book is set aside.”
–Daily Telegraph

“It’s hardly surprising that the arrival of a new Ishiguro book makes a reader eager to pounce on it . . . The quintet consists of first person narratives and each one is likeable, original and succeed in sustaining the reader to the final word . . . There are echoes of Somerset Maugham. But Ishiguro, the most literary of writers, is seldom derivative. [He is] a canny writer who is cool, poised and well capable of shifting directions and shaping surprises . . . Somehow he manages to say a great deal about the business of being alive.”
–The Irish Times

Customer Reviews

Ishiguro back to basics
Kazuo Ishiguro is back to his bittersweet, witty but sensitive original style. The five brief novellas of Nocturnes are intense and beautiful; they are packed with detail, never waste the readers' attention, and are entirely engrossing. In the first: Crooner, a Polish café musician comes to the assistance of a vynil-era singer who was once his mother's idol. Another story pits a greying ex-hippie against his brash and shallow university friends in a comedy of missed meanings. The third peels the multiple layers of an unexpected encounter in the Malvern hills.

I hesitated to get Nocturnes. After the awkward plot of When We Were Orphans, the controversial The Unconsoled, the gothic / sci-fi Never Let Me Go, I thought: sure, this is interesting, but maybe this is an author running out of inspiration, maybe this is someone flailing for the next idea, and now all we're getting is a collection of stories. This is what I had in the back of my mind, especially when I saw the title, with the vaguely corny musical theme, the Chopin prop. But it isn't like that. This book is in the style of Ishiguro's first three novels, and it is new at the same time.

The musical theme is an excuse; it even works. These are all moving stories with an eye for verisimilitude - the infuriating fragmented mobile-phone conversation, customer rage at the sandwich bar - and humour. Two of them got me laughing to tears - I know reviewers say that, but literally. And Ishiguro can have you laughing to tears and two pages later falling respectfully silent. Some people say they don't like short stories because it is difficult to build characters within their brief span. But this author can pack a character in fifty pages where others would take 300. And the stories aren't entirely unconnected... but I won't spoil it for you. Don't miss this!

Return to the Surreal
Kazuo Ishiguro is a great artist, possibly a genius. In these stories, he returns to the enigmatic territory explored in The Unconsoled. What is the nature of reality? Whose story is "true"? These are the questions posed by this collection, stories ranging from the apparently rational to the downright bizarre. Each involves music and the night. Most feature musicians who are trying to maintain, jump start, or revive a career. Episodes which hinge on a special favor asked of the protagonist lead to surreal complications. One story features the nighttime wanderings of a man and woman whose faces are entirely wrapped in bandages. Another a guitarist asked by a famous singer to accompany him as he serenades his wife on a night in Venice. In the last story, "Cellists", we discover a woman who appears as a virtuoso of the cello - but is she? The book is brief, and for anyone who has read Ishiguro it is essential. Ishiguro remains a puzzle. He touches on great themes, he confounds and continually surprises.

The Music of Loss
From any other author, the craft and ease of these five stories would merit four stars at least, but Ishiguro has set his own standards so high with books like NEVER LET ME GO that he may disappoint readers with this slim collection. Subtitled "Five stories of music and nightfall," the tales do have an impressive unity of theme. The protagonists are all musicians, generally putting higher ambitions on hold to play in cafe orchestras or pick-up groups; like the butler in THE REMAINS OF THE DAY they are people of great competence in their own small world, but adrift in the larger one. The nightfall element is less consistent, though each story contains an evening scene somewhere. Or maybe this is intended metaphorically, for a significant theme in most of the tales is that of a relationship coming to an end -- not violently, but with a poignant regret that is also implied by the title.

The trouble is that this consistency is also limiting. Ishiguro has rung many variations before on his theme of the competent loser, but he has relied on the context of a full-length novel to provide richness and detail, and his major books to date have all been completely different, each written in a different genre. But these five stories are too similar; their prevailing mood is comedy, veering towards farce in the second and fourth, but without significant change of tone, and the protagonists are too much alike. But the stories are charming and well-written, and share an atmosphere different from that of any other author.

The opening story, "Crooner," is set in Venice, where a once-famous crooner Tony Gardner hires a jobbing guitarist to help him serenade his wife Lindy; it is a poignant story that raises expectations for the other four. The protagonist in "Come Rain or Come Shine" is an aficionado rather than a performing musician; a small-time ESL teacher in Spain, he is invited to London by a more successful university friend, and finds himself involved in a situation that exploits his worst paranoias. The main character in "Malvern Hills" is another guitarist and also a composer; over a summer in the English countryside he becomes an unwitting catalyst in the lives of an older couple of Swiss musicians on holiday. Lindy Gardner, from the first story, reappears in the fourth, a grotesque farce set in Beverly Hills which quite fails to sustain its length. With the final story, "Cellists," we are back in Italy, but the major character is a young classical player who falls under the spell of a mysterious American woman. This is distinctly different from the other four and contains some fascinating ideas, but although its evanescent ending may be right, it leaves this reader curiously unsatisfied by the collection as a whole. [3.5 stars]