Skip to main content

Kazuo Ishiguro: Nobel Prize in Literature for 2017

At 1 p.m. today in Stockholm, the doors to the Swedish Academy opened and Sara Danius, a literary scholar who is permanent secretary of the Academy, announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2017 had been awarded to the English writer Kazuo Ishiguro.  Danius said Ishiguro “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world” in novels “of great emotional force.”

Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki, Japan in 1954 and moved to the United Kingdom as a child, is the author of eight novels. Previous prizes include the 1989 Man Booker Award for The Remains of the Day, in which the butler Stevens (played by Anthony Hopkins in the film of the same name) recalls his life of service to Lord Darlington, a Fascist, and friendship with Darlington’s housekeeper, Miss Kenton.
In a video filmed in 2015, Ishiguro said that the role of butler was a metaphor for the human experience. “I was suggesting that most of us are butlers. ...What I meant by this was most of us …do jobs, and we often don’t understand the context in which we make our best efforts. We kind of offer it up, almost blind sometimes, to a boss or a corporation, or a cause, or a nation, just hoping it’s going to be used in a good way. We are always, politically, ethically in this position. …We never quite know what we’re contributing to when the big picture gets seen."
Ishiguro’s style can seem unemotional, though that appearance masks deep feeling. As New Yorker critic James Wood wrote in a review of Ishiguro’s 2015 novel, The Buried Giant, “Ishiguro writes a prose of provoking equilibrium — sea-level flat, with unseen fathoms below. He avoids ornament or surplus, and seems to welcome cliché, platitude, episodes as bland as milk, an atmosphere of oddly vacated calm whose mild persistence comes to seem teasingly or menacingly unreal.” Louis Menand, writing about Ishiguro's sci-fi novel of genetic engineering, Never Let Me Go (2005),  said that his "novels, though filled with incidents of poignancy and disappointment and cruelty, are also, weirdly, funny.”
Expressing gratitude for the award from outside his home in London, Ishiguro told the press that “it comes at a time when the world is uncertain about its values, its leadership and its safety. I just hope that my receiving this huge honor will, even in a small way, encourage the forces for good.” Last year, the prize, worth slightly over US $1 million, went to Bob Dylan.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Meet Dean Susan E. Cahan: Temple Univerity: Tyler School of Art

Temple University President Richard M. Englert has announced the appointment of Susan E. Cahan as dean of the Tyler School of Art, effective July 1, concluding a national search. A respected arts education administrator, scholar and curator, Cahan currently serves as associate dean and dean for the arts at Yale College, Yale University’s undergraduate liberal arts college. She will succeed Hester Stinnett, who has been Tyler’s interim dean since September 2015. “Susan Cahan is a dynamic and charismatic leader with a unique combination of vision and broad-based experience,” President Englert said. “In the eight years since the Tyler School of Art moved to a new, state-of-the-art facility at Temple’s Main Campus, Tyler’s faculty have continued to elevate the school’s profile. Susan is the right person to lead them to the next level on the national stage.” As dean for the arts in Yale College, Cahan is responsible for the Yale undergraduate arts experience across all arts discipl...

The Camouflage House: Hiroshi Iguchi

Architect Hiroshi Iguchi doesn’t believe that greenhouses are only for plants. That’s why he created the Camouflage House, and although the structure provides shelter for people, the architect incorporated an interior garden planted with trees that poke through the ceiling.  The home resonates a minimalism expected of a Japanese home with an interior that offers a sleek combination of woods and paper screens that soften the aesthetic of the metal used to construct the greenhouse walls. Giving the home a slanted glass roof, Iguchi had to be creative and resourceful with the interior in order to avoid creating leftover, unused space. The home was split into two levels. The first level is occupied by the living spaces, including the kitchen and dining area — and even a recessed seating area surrounded by a rock garden of sorts. Stairs partially hidden by a screen of vertical slates lead up to the flat and open second level providing a perfect flexible space...

Sketch of the Day: 23 October 2017

Good Afternoon Architects! The sketch, presented here today, is a quick thumbnail recently created. The thumbnail sketch is essential to our design process. To be honest it should be a vital component of your personal design process as well! Thumbnail sketches are drawing quick, abbreviated drawings. Usually, they are done very rapidly and with no corrections - you can use any medium, though pen or pencil is the most common. Thumbnail sketches are usually very small, often only an inch or two high. THUMBNAILS ARE MEMORY AIDS AND PLANNING TOOLS Thumbnail sketches can serve as a memory aid to help you remember important features of a subject when making notes for a painting or drawing. They are also useful when visiting a gallery, to help you remember important pieces. Often artists use thumbnail sketches to plan pictures. You can quickly experiment with format and composition, placing just the major features - such as the horizon and any large objects, and indicating movement...