Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
by Kazuo Ishiguro
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kazuo IshiguroEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Deckle Edge
Published: 2009-09-22
ISBN: 0307271021
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Book Reviews of Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
Book Review: A Lyrical and Beautiful Short Story Collection
Summary: 5 Stars
Tibor, the hero of one of these lyrical, affectionate stories by Kazuo Ishiguro, is a young Hungarian cellist who lands in Venice one summer to participate in its Arts and Culture Festival. Although this venture is a potential source of income, the swaths of listeners who request maudlin oldies and trite hits disgruntle him because their ignorance undermines his musicianship. After giving a recital at the San Lorenzo church, he dismisses his attendance as a crowd of "tourists with nothing better to do."
Why is Tibor so frustrated? Well, his education was forged at London's Royal Academy of Music and further pursued under the aegis of a revered conductor in Vienna. Evidently, he's a gifted natural--the kind of artist who you'd expect to grace concert halls one day with the Concertgebouw or the Berlin Philharmonic. "After a rocky start with the old maestro, he's learnt to handle those legendary temper tantrums and had left Vienna full of confidence--and with a series of engagements in prestigious, if small, venues around Europe. But then concerts began to get cancelled due to low demand; he'd been forced to perform music he hated; accommodation had proved expensive or sordid." The festival in Venice just happens to be a workaday resort for finances and sustenance.
After this dispiriting recital, he meets a woman called Eloise McCormack, an alleged virtuoso who coddles his talent, owing to her nursing an obsessive conviction about his "potential." McCormack, a seemingly musical American who speaks in vague and abstract aphorisms, tells Tibor that she has "a sense of mission" to inspire "all cellists to play well. To play beautifully." She invites Tibor to her hotel suite to play the cello, responding accordingly to the sweeping undulations he draws from his instrument. Eloise entreats Tibor to render gems from the repertoire, proffering hints and interpretive advice to weave his music from melodious little black dots into a grand symphonic tapestry. She wills to have him "unwrapped," although Tibor later discovers that his gnomic guru isn't the virtuoso she made herself out to be. Their liaison does not falter though, and both, in an Ishiguro-esque stroke of cozy and expressive intimacy, eventually reaffirm their place as broken and flawed artists in a world where "it's difficult for people" like them.
A very similar sentiment resonates with Ishiguro's characters in these exquisite soiree pieces: dusk-colored stories about musicians precariously living through a careerist ennui tethered to talent, image, and luck; facing the daunting prospect of never employing the lifelong training they've painstakingly accrued in conservatories and music lessons; and wrestling tempestuously with the idea that the evanescent forces of the industry will prevent them from achieving the dreams they've fostered since youth.
In the story "Crooner," an aging singer popularized with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin must decide between resuscitating a career collecting dust and a romance on the rocks. Another musician, a guitarist tired of strumming platitudinous warhorses, accompanies this veteran in a quest to whet his waning marriage. The hero of "Come Rain or Come Shine" is a music connoisseur whose impeccable taste appears to fetch a higher price than his friendship. A friend who believes that he has been cuckolded asks him to intercede as an arbiter, prompting him to blitz his wife's apartment while role-playing as a dog. As we travel to "Malvern Hills," a saddlebag London songster consents to slogging in the kitchen of his sister's countryside bed-and-breakfast while he awaits his big break. Two traveling musicians wander into the inn and later discover that their server is actually an undiscovered talent. And as these tunes arpeggio softly into "Nocturnes," a brilliant saxophonist dawns on the understanding that professional recognition comes with the price of fixing a face that doesn't "look right."
Though many of these musicians stake their careers with different instruments in varying genres, they all echo a recapitulating motif of longing--longing for recognition, for appreciation, a beckoning for the public to understand the genius they've worked so hard to polish, only to find themselves welcomed into a gloomy existence marked by privations and concert-to-concert earnings. Mr. Ishiguro, himself a guitarist and a one-time chorister, most likely understands these struggles, and strives to capture these musicians' bluesy language in this latest collection of short stories.
Most of the heroes in Ishiguro's fiction visibly share a vision--they play because they "believe in the music." Whether they are toying with Elgar and Vaughan Williams, Martin and Sinatra, Leos Janá'cek, Django Reinhardt, Edith Piaf, or Astor Piazzolla, they all aspire to the greatness and the glamour of a life in music while dreading the hardships and the possibility that they will be forced into "playing `The Godfather' nine times in one afternoon.'" All of them, too, subscribe to the high standards of "serious" art, while despising the "shallow and inauthentic" attitude espoused by a philistine industry. But they also ruminate on the despondent truth that survival, while drudgingly self-effacing, overtakes their idealism on grounds of priority.
Indeed, within the overarching scope of Nocturnes, Mr. Ishiguro has composed a rather melancholy take on the musician's creed inserted with interludes of dry, yet refreshing Anglo humor. Think of some of these tableaus as possible adaptations for a Colin Firth and Emma Thompson romantic comedy--rife with awkward and strained relationships, yet injected with offhand doses of British humor to oil the plot. But these sappy moments can be jarring, and the various narrators who propel these stories can taxingly read like variations on a theme. That said, Ishiguro manages to rein these inconsistencies in while bringing his stories to a delicate, if somewhat dissonant, diminuendo.
Nocturnes happens to be the debut short story collection in Mr. Ishiguro's bibliography, characterized formerly by an impressive lineup of novels studded with Booker Prize winners and finalists. While his writing is best savored in notables like Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled, both which extensively reveal the author's ability to embellish elegant and bittersweet studies on the human condition; Nocturnes, as a quintet of movements strung by a recurrent motif of that sometimes regretful, sometimes nostalgic, and usually understated play on situations so reminiscent of this author, nonetheless conveys a tragically beautiful portrait of these seemingly disparate, yet inherently congruent musicians as they carve their place in an indifferent and tone-deaf world.
Summary of Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
One of the most celebrated writers of our time gives us his first cycle of short fiction: five brilliantly etched, interconnected stories in which music is a vivid and essential character.A once-popular singer, desperate to make a comeback, turning from the one certainty in his life . . . A man whose unerring taste in music is the only thing his closest friends value in him . . . A struggling singer-songwriter unwittingly involved in the failing marriage of a couple he?s only just met . . . A gifted, underappreciated jazz musician who lets himself believe that plastic surgery will help his career . . . A young cellist whose tutor promises to ?unwrap? his talent . . .
Passion or necessity?or the often uneasy combination of the two?determines the place of music in each of these lives. And, in one way or another, music delivers each of them to a moment of reckoning: sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes just eluding their grasp.
An exploration of love, need, and the ineluctable force of the past, Nocturnes reveals these individuals to us with extraordinary precision and subtlety, and with the arresting psychological and emotional detail that has marked all of Kazuo Ishiguro?s acclaimed works of fiction.
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