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55 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ishiguro back to basics, May 18, 2009
Kazuo Ishiguro is back to his bittersweet, witty but sensitive original style. The five brief novellas of Nocturnes are intense and beautiful; they are packed with detail, never waste the readers' attention, and are entirely engrossing. In the first: Crooner, a Polish café musician comes to the assistance of a vynil-era singer who was once his mother's idol. Another story pits a greying ex-hippie against his brash and shallow university friends in a comedy of missed meanings. The third peels the multiple layers of an unexpected encounter in the Malvern hills.
I hesitated to get Nocturnes. After the awkward plot of When We Were Orphans, the controversial The Unconsoled, the gothic / sci-fi Never Let Me Go, I thought: sure, this is interesting, but maybe this is an author running out of inspiration, maybe this is someone flailing for the next idea, and now all we're getting is a collection of stories. This is what I had in the back of my mind, especially when I saw the title, with the vaguely corny musical theme, the Chopin prop. But it isn't like that. This book is in the style of Ishiguro's first three novels, and it is new at the same time.
The musical theme is an excuse; it even works. These are all moving stories with an eye for verisimilitude - the infuriating fragmented mobile-phone conversation, customer rage at the sandwich bar - and humour. Two of them got me laughing to tears - I know reviewers say that, but literally. And Ishiguro can have you laughing to tears and two pages later falling respectfully silent. Some people say they don't like short stories because it is difficult to build characters within their brief span. But this author can pack a character in fifty pages where others would take 300. And the stories aren't entirely unconnected... but I won't spoil it for you. Don't miss this!
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Music of Loss, August 19, 2009
From any other author, the craft and ease of these five stories would merit four stars at least, but Ishiguro has set his own standards so high with books like NEVER LET ME GO that he may disappoint readers with this slim collection. Subtitled "Five stories of music and nightfall," the tales do have an impressive unity of theme. The protagonists are all musicians, generally putting higher ambitions on hold to play in cafe orchestras or pick-up groups; like the butler in THE REMAINS OF THE DAY they are people of great competence in their own small world, but adrift in the larger one. The nightfall element is less consistent, though each story contains an evening scene somewhere. Or maybe this is intended metaphorically, for a significant theme in most of the tales is that of a relationship coming to an end -- not violently, but with a poignant regret that is also implied by the title.
The trouble is that this consistency is also limiting. Ishiguro has rung many variations before on his theme of the competent loser, but he has relied on the context of a full-length novel to provide richness and detail, and his major books to date have all been completely different, each written in a different genre. But these five stories are too similar; their prevailing mood is comedy, veering towards farce in the second and fourth, but without significant change of tone, and the protagonists are too much alike. But the stories are charming and well-written, and share an atmosphere different from that of any other author.
The opening story, "Crooner," is set in Venice, where a once-famous crooner Tony Gardner hires a jobbing guitarist to help him serenade his wife Lindy; it is a poignant story that raises expectations for the other four. The protagonist in "Come Rain or Come Shine" is an aficionado rather than a performing musician; a small-time ESL teacher in Spain, he is invited to London by a more successful university friend, and finds himself involved in a situation that exploits his worst paranoias. The main character in "Malvern Hills" is another guitarist and also a composer; over a summer in the English countryside he becomes an unwitting catalyst in the lives of an older couple of Swiss musicians on holiday. Lindy Gardner, from the first story, reappears in the fourth, a grotesque farce set in Beverly Hills which quite fails to sustain its length. With the final story, "Cellists," we are back in Italy, but the major character is a young classical player who falls under the spell of a mysterious American woman. This is distinctly different from the other four and contains some fascinating ideas, but although its evanescent ending may be right, it leaves this reader curiously unsatisfied by the collection as a whole. [3.5 stars]
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Stories of self-pitying losers, November 11, 2009
This review is from: Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (Hardcover)
I was a huge fan of Ishiguro's first two books. Unfortunately, there has been a sense in his recent work of a craftsman losing his touch. Ishiguro retains the rare ability of capturing an entire character through the narrative voice he creates for him. His writing is always clear and evocative - but the message has become tired and world-weary rather than self-affirming.
The five stories that make up Nocturnes are loosely linked, like movements of a symphony. Music plays a major part in all five, and some characters show up in more than one story. They also each share what is supposed to be a wistful longing tone, but more often it comes across as tiresome whining.
In the first story, "Crooner," a café musician from Eastern Europe is hired by an aging American singer to accompany him while he serenades his much younger wife in Venice from a gondola. It turns out the crooner loves his wife but has decided to replace her with a younger model to revive his fading career. How marrying a younger woman would achieve this is never explained.
The second, "Come Rain or Come Shine," tells of a failed middle-aged foreign language teacher, Ray, who returns to England to spend a weekend with old college friends Charlie and Emily. We understand that Ray and Emily, who share a love of jazz standards, were in love but never admitted it to themselves. Now Charlie and Emily's marriage is in trouble, so Charlie hatches a plan for Ray to spend a weekend alone with Emily. He figures his wife will see him in a better light after spending 48 hours with a verified loser like Ray.
In "Malvern Hills," an aspiring musician working as a kitchen hand in an English country hotel runs into a Swiss couple. They admire his talent but infect him with their own sense of failure.
"Nocturne" brings back the spurned wife from the first story, who winds up in a swanky hotel recovering from radical cosmetic surgery. In the next room is a talented saxophonist who has agreed to the same plastic surgery because his agent and ex-wife feel he is too ugly to succeed on musical talent alone. The two characters meet, bond, and share a comical adventure but are unable to forge a lasting connection.
Finally, in "Cellists," a talented young musician meets a woman who presents herself as a virtuoso of the instrument. She begins to teach him, and he feels he is making enormous progress. But it turns out she has never actually learned the instrument, although she feels she was born to be a supremely gifted cellist. By refusing to play, she says, she has preserved the purity of her gift.
What links these five short tales, apart from the overwhelming sense of failure that surrounds each of them, is the belief that talent alone does not ensure success. Indeed, without youth and good looks and good fortune, talent alone can be a blessing rather than a curse. The final story seems to suggest that the mere act of creation is always accompanied by artistic compromise and disillusionment.
It's a supremely cynical view of the world, and one can't help thinking that the author may be expressing some deeply-held bitterness of his own. That would be a shame, because Ishiguro is talented - but talent linked to self-pity does not serve any author well.
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