Nocturnes

Macaron. Not mine.

Had to go through a couple of Kazuo Ishiguro's novels for school and examinable subjects, and avoided his other fiction works till now. It's kinda like a reflex thing. I stay far far away from whatever I read at school and eagerly embraced fantasy. :)

Kazuo Ishiguro's stories aren't difficult reads. Most are interesting. But I'm not terribly fond of the genre (think 'The Remains of the Day') although his stories had great plots and twists (think 'Never Let Me Go', and screenplay 'The White Countess'). 'Nocturnes' comprises of 'Five Stories and Music and Nightfall'. The 2009 publication is his first collection of short stories, after all his novels. It got my attention. (Read reviews here, here and here.)

Ideals and reality criss-cross in all the stories, often spilling into one another like a painful tumble of concrete bricks. Aptly titled, these stories, seemingly of the night explores the human presentation of self to the world, and other inhabitants, the coming out from the dark into the light, and how one balances the delicate process without crumbling in defeat.

The five stories are not interlinked. But the fourth story 'Nocturne' contains the character of fading star Lindy Gardner who's the ex-wife a singer-star character from the first story 'Crooner'.  In 'Nocturne', fading star Lindy meets Steve, a saxophonist. Both are totally into plastic-surgery. Well, they live in Beverly Hills. Lindy is checked in at this hotel, recovering from a recent job, and Steve is staying in the same hotel, keeping whatever left of his looks with the help of aesthetic surgeons. At the hotel, they met, and wandered around to steal an award statuette, and hilariously stuffed it up the rear end of the turkey. It was a sad little story of how humans fight to preserve that bit of superficiality, and in there, bits of their dreams.

'Look, sweetie, listen. I hope your wife comes back. I really do. But if she doesn't, well, you've just got to start getting some perspective. She might just be a great person, but life's so much bigger than just loving someone. You got to get out there, Steve. Someone like you, you don't belong with the public. Look at me. When these bandages come off, am I really going to look the way I did twenty years ago? I don't know. And it's a long time since I was last between husbands. But I'm going to go out there anyway and give it a go.' She came over to me and shoved me on the shoulder. 'Hey. You're just tired. You'll feel a lot better after some sleep. Listen. Boris is the best. He'll have fixed it, for the both of us. You just see.'

The fifth and last story of the book is 'Cellists'. Not that the order of the stories matters. They're all thought-provoking. However, many have saved the positive words for 'Cellists', a story set somewhere in Italy, about an American woman who thinks she is a world-class cellist, and agrees to tutor a young Hungarian, Tibor who already plays well. Miss Eloise McCormack is really, someone who can't play the cello at all, and simply believes she can. Mind-boggling, this one.

'There aren't many like us, Tibor, and we recognise each other. The fact that I've not yet learned to play the cello doesn't really change anything. You have to understand, I am a virtuoso. But I'm one who's yet to be unwrapped...'