Nocturnes
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber, $35
Reviewed by Nicky Pellegrino

I’d expected a lot from Kazuo Ishiguro’s first short story collection - wit, elegant writing, depth of character – what I wasn’t expecting were belly laughs. But they were there to be had in the midst of the title story, Nocturne, a very contemporary vignette about an ugly jazz musician, dumped by his wife and desperate to break into the big league, who gets his features rearranged by a top plastic surgeon and finds himself rooming next door to a celebrity as they both recover from their facelifts. Ishiguro recounts the growing but unequal friendship between the bored and bandaged pair; building the story to a crescendo of slapstick as they go on the lam around a hotel in the middle of the night getting into an improbable amount of trouble with a trophy and a turkey.
From a writer whose stories tend to resonate with a measured melancholy, this unashamed clowning around comes as a surprise. But look closely and there’s a playfulness to all these pieces as if Ishiguro is having fun with his characters as they struggle with their missed opportunities, wrong turns, disappointments and confusions.

Subtitled Five Stories of Music & Nightfall, this collection is linked by character and theme. It opens in Venice with a story called Crooner in which a café musician recognises a famous American singer amongst the tourists at the tables. He ends up being helping to serenade the crooner’s wife from a gondola floating in the canal beneath her window. Into this one story Ishiguro infuses the petty jealousies of Venetian street workers, the harshness of an East European childhood, he shows what happens to love when it becomes tangled up with ambition and finally he gives the tale a masterful twist.
Often he is hard on his characters, forcing them to show their failings and vanities. But Ishiguro understands that to show dark there must also be light. So when, in Come Rain or Come Shine, he takes us inside a fracturing marriage, he also paints a very comic word picture of a man trying to make a house look like it’s been trashed by a dog.
These are satisfyingly proper short stories, with beginnings, middles and ends, written in a spare, conversational style but also beautifully nuanced just as you’d expect from a writer like Ishiguro.

Footnote:
Nicky Pellegrino is the books editor at the Herald on Sunday where this review was first published (7 June, , 2009). She is also a most successful NZ-based novelist whose latest title, The Italian Wedding, (Orion), was recently published in NZ, Australia and the UK .



Booklover
Renee Liang is a writer, poet, doctor and playwright.

Her play Lantern is on at The Basement as part of STAMP at THE EDGE from June 8-13.


The book I love most is… Playing God by Glenn Colquhoun (pic below left) - it's funny, insightful poetry that breaks new literary ground while staying real. There’s a deep thread of human truth running through all Glenn’s work, but this is still my favourite book of his. As a fellow doctor, what he says about medics and their relationships with patients is so true. It should be required reading for anyone who works in healthcare. And anyone who can get a poetry book onto the bestseller lists in this country has my undying respect! I do think poetry is gaining a following, though - 350 hot and sweaty bodies at the recent Poetry Idol in Auckland (at which Glenn was guest judge) is proof of that.

The book I'm reading right now is… A Director Prepares by Anne Bogart. My friend Jane (who's a teacher and director) lent this to me. Even though I’m more interested in writing plays, not directing them, it’s still important to find out how my colleagues tick!

I’ve learnt so much about how to work with actors and directors with my current project, Lantern, which was heavily collaborative. And, wisely or no, I’ve decided to direct the play I’m currently writing – a NZ historical drama called The Bone Feeder. So at this stage (with panic setting in, and still working hard on the draft) any kind of handbook is worth reading!

The book I'd like to read next is… A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif. When I saw him at the recent Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, I was impressed by his down-to-earth humour and ability to use words as weaponry. I’m still talking to people about his exposee of our over-suspicious Immigration officers who treated him and his family like they might be terrorists. He highlights one of the important functions of writers – to draw attention to injustice and hypocrisy in people and systems. It’s only through knowing and thinking about these things that we can inspire change.

Booklover is a regular feature in the book review section of Detours magazine, published each week with the Herald on Sunday.