I was pleased to receive the news that British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro received the Nobel Prize for Literature last week.  His 1989 novel The Remains of the Day stands as one of my favorites books of the last few decades, and I also found his more recent novel Never Let Me Go to be highly compelling.  In both books, repressed narrators observe the world around them with a calm detachment that belies the churning emotional situations in which they live.  Remains, in particular, which was turned into an excellent movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, features the unforgettable British butler Mr. Stevens, who is "so burdened by propriety that he lets the love of his life slip through his fingers," as The Guardian's James Beech points out.  Stevens remains one of the best literary examples of an unreliable narrator I can recall.

Crictic James Wood, in The New Yorker, praises Ishiguro for being "calmly undeterred by literary fashion, the demands of the market, or the intermittent incomprehension of critics," which seems like a marvelously liberating place for a writer to be.  Ishiguro's background and biography are fascinating.  Born in Nagasaki, Japan, his parents moved to England when he was five and his sensibility is thoroughly British.  Nevertheless, his first two novels are set in Japan.  The latter of these, An Artist of the Floating World, earned him critical acclaim and charted his course for future success.  I was also interested to learn that he is an accomplished lyricist, having composed several jazz pieces for the British singer Stacey Kent.  He has said that his song lyrics are much more personal than his novels, which often feature characters and settings that are distant from his own experience.

Interestingly, Ishiguro is also a fan of last year's surprising Nobel Literature Prize winner--Bob Dylan.  Both artists recognize and explore the "idiot winds" that blow in this world and hope to provide insight into how we might find the independent spirit necessary to meet them head-on.