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‘We’re THRILLED Kazuo Ishiguro has won the Nobel Prize’

British author Kazuo Ishiguro, best known for his novel 'The Remains of the Day', won the Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday, the Swedish Academy said.

Published: 5 October 2017 13:51 CEST
'We're THRILLED Kazuo Ishiguro has won the Nobel Prize'
Books of British writer Kazuo Ishiguro on display at the Swedish Academy. Photo: TT

The 62-year-old, “in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world,” the Academy wrote in its citation.

Ishiguro has written eight books as well as scripts for film and television. He won the Man Booker Prize in 1989 for “The Remains of the Day”.

AS IT HAPPENED:  The Local's live report from the Nobel Prize for Literature

Born in Nagasaki, he moved to Britain with his family when he was five years old, only returning to visit Japan as an adult.

Both his first novel “A Pale View of Hills” from 1982 and the subsequent one, “An Artist of the Floating World” from 1986, take place in Nagasaki a few years after World War II.

“The themes Ishiguro is most associated with are already present here: memory, time, and self-delusion,” the Academy said.

“This is particularly notable in his most renowned novel, 'The Remains of the Day',” which was turned into a film with Anthony Hopkins acting as the duty-obsessed butler Stevens.

“Ishiguro's writings are marked by a carefully restrained mode of expression, independent of whatever events are taking place,” it said.

In a 1989 interview with Bomb Magazine, Ishiguro said: “I tend to be attracted to pre-war and post-war settings because I'm interested in this business of values and ideals being tested, and people having to face up to the notion that their ideals weren't quite what they thought they were before the test came.”

Inspired by Dostoyevsky, Proust

His more recent fiction contains elements of fantasy.

With the critically-acclaimed dystopian work “Never Let Me Go” from 2005, Ishiguro introduced “a cold undercurrent” of science fiction into his work, the jury said.

Inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Marcel Proust, Ishiguro's characters often painfully come to terms with who they are without closure. His latest novel, “The Buried Giant” from 2015 explores “in a moving manner, how memory relates to oblivion, history to the present, and fantasy to reality.”

In the book, an elderly couple go on a road trip through an archaic English landscape, hoping to reunite with their adult son, whom they have not seen for years.

Ishiguro was not among those tipped as a favourite for this year's Nobel. His publisher Faber & Faber wrote on Twitter after the announcement, “We're THRILLED Kazuo Ishiguro has won the Nobel Prize!”

Last year, the 18 members of the Swedish Academy stunned the world by awarding the honour to American rock legend and counter-culture icon Bob Dylan. The Nobel comes with a prize sum of nine million kronor ($1.1 million, 945,000 euros).

Ishiguro will receive his prize at a formal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10th.

By Pia Ohlin

HISTORY

‘Lost’ manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

A book by one of France's most celebrated and controversial literary figures arrives in bookstores this week, 78 years after the manuscript disappeared

Published: 4 May 2022 11:42 CEST
'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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