Season 4 · Episode 125 · Craft
with Kazuo Ishiguro, Novelist, Nobel laureate
A two-voice studio conversation: Nora Ellis and Kazuo, with clickable questions below. Our interviews are written and voiced dramatisations, drawn from each author's publicly documented remarks on craft.
On the four week writing 'crash', building a narrator whose feelings are all in the silences, and why he drafts imagining a reader in translation.
Nora Ellis in conversation with Kazuo Ishiguro · click a timestamp to jump
Nora Ellis
Welcome to Behind the Book. I'm Nora Ellis. My guest today is Sir Kazuo Ishiguro: Nobel laureate, Booker Prize winner, the author of Never Let Me Go, Klara and the Sun, and the novel we are here for, The Remains of the Day. Kazuo, welcome.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Thank you, Nora. It is a nice change to be asked about the machinery rather than the message.
Nora Ellis
Tell a new listener what the book is.
Kazuo Ishiguro
It is a butler driving across England in nineteen fifty six, remembering a life of service in a great house. He cannot say what he feels, so the reader has to hear it underneath the sentences. It is a novel about dignity, and about the cost of giving your loyalty to the wrong man.
Nora Ellis
The drafting is famous. Four weeks.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Four weeks of what my wife and I called the crash. No letters, no telephone, nine in the morning until half past ten at night. But that only worked because I had spent two years failing slowly beforehand. The crash was not inspiration, it was permission to write badly at speed.
Nora Ellis
Where does the restraint come from?
Kazuo Ishiguro
From the character. Stevens would find plainness vulgar and feeling improper. Once you accept that, the prose writes its own rules. The technical problem is that the reader must feel what the narrator will not name, so every scene has to leak.
Nora Ellis
What did you want the book to achieve?
Kazuo Ishiguro
I wanted a reader to reach the pier at the end and grieve for a wasted life without ever being told to. And I hoped the reader would ask the question the book asks quietly: what did I give my working life to, and who chose it for me? That is not a British question, it is everybody's question.
Nora Ellis
Does it matter to you how widely it is read?
Kazuo Ishiguro
It matters more than writers usually admit. A novel is a letter that only exists when somebody opens it. I have been fortunate: film, translation, forty something languages. What I want now is the next generation of readers, the ones who find it because a teacher or a friend or an algorithm put it in front of them. I am not too proud for the algorithm.
Nora Ellis
Advice for a writer who is halfway through and hating it?
Kazuo Ishiguro
Finish the draft anyway. You cannot rewrite an idea. You can rewrite a bad chapter, and a bad chapter is a great deal closer to a book.
Nora Ellis
Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, thank you. After every recording we help our guests get the book in front of readers, so The Remains of the Day is on our promoted books page this month, in the newsletter and across our feeds. Subscribe wherever you listen, and if you have a writer in your life, send them this one. I'm Nora Ellis. This has been Behind the Book.
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