Come and chat to KAZUO ISHIGURO about his extraordinary writing career on Thurs 9 April, 9-10pm

[TillyBookClub]

Kazuo Ishiguro OBE is a multiple nominee and winner of the Booker Prize and dozens of other international awards. Throughout his hugely successful and varied career, from the exquisitely poignant REMAINS OF THE DAY to the dystopian NEVER LET ME GO, he has often explored the idea of memory: how it shapes us, its fickle nature, how it distorts the choices we make.

Ishiguro’s new novel, THE BURIED GIANT, is an adventure fantasy, set in a Dark Ages Britain populated with knights, giants, monks and dragons. All the inhabitants appear to have suffered a loss of memory. The central characters, Axl and Beatrice, are an elderly married couple on a journey to find their son. As with all fantastical quests, they encounter mysterious strangers and dangerous escapades. Throughout the novel, an overriding question hangs in the air: is it worth suffering painful memories, or better to live in ignorance?

For more details, go to our book of the month page. You might also like Mark Lawson's interview with the author on BBC iplayer.

Faber have very generously offered 50 hardbacks of The Buried Giant to give to Mumsnetters. To claim yours, please fill in your details on the book of the month page. We’ll post on this thread when the copies have gone. If you’re not lucky enough to bag one of those, you can always get a copy here.

We have the very rare and special opportunity to talk to Kazuo Ishiguro when he joins us on Thursday April 9th, 9-10pm for a live web chat. The discussion will range from his latest book to his previous bestsellers and future projects. So whether you have read THE BURIED GIANT, or are a lifelong fan of REMAINS OF THE DAY, or would like a few tips from one of the UK’s most experienced and acclaimed writers, please come along and say hello. Look forward to seeing you on Thurs 9th…

This book is quite different from the type of book I usually read, but I enjoyed it so much, the writing really is beautiful and it makes it very easy to read and hard to put down.

I loved the connection between Axl and Beatrice and wondered if you based them (or at least their relationship) on anyone you know.

I also wanted to ask you (hope you don’t mind this question) about the first draft of the book. I have read that your wife didn’t like it and you basically started again. That must be a hard thing to do. Were you tempted to give up with it and try something completely different (I’m glad you persevered)?

After having recently read “Elizabeth is Missing”, I was amused to find “The Buried Giant” - also had characters with poor memory! Does this make the writing easier (you don’t have to have to detail too much background history of the characters), or harder (because you have to plan their history, so you know which bits they are going to forget)? - I hope that makes sense!

Hello Kazuo Ishiguro, I remember reading "Never Let me go" and loathing it and yet finding it compelling in equal measure. I couldn't put my finger on why I disliked it, perhaps because of the passiveness of the main characters, and yet I can remember it quite clearly because it also really moved me. I will never forget it. It was a "different" book for it's time, on the cusp of the explosion of dystopian fiction frenzy. The characters didn't follow standard fiction rules.

Did you encounter that much about this book at the time? The "I really found it hard to like, but I did" thing? Do you find people are more receptive to the book now that dystopian fiction is more mainstream?

I just finished the book this afternoon so haven't really had time to process it fully yet but I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your beautiful writing. I liked the 'fantasy' element, mainly as the background to the relationship between Axl and Beatrice. I've already ordered Never Let Me Go to read next!

I'll be following the webchat later on.

The Remains of the Day has to be the most beautifully written book I have ever read. I'm a huge Kazuo Ishiguro fan and look forward to the webchat.

Hi Kazuo,
Thank you so much for coming on to Mumsnet, I am posting my thoughts/ questions early as I am desperate to have them answered as I have been a long time admirer of your work.
I have literally just finished The Buried Giant, a beautiful book, beautifully written. Even the cover is amazing and so lovely to look at on my bookshelf.

However, I wanted to ask you about Never Let Me go which is my desert Island book. I found this almost unbearably sad and I have read it several times now. To me it is a perfect book club choice as there is so much left unsaid, and open to personal interpretation, and also raises so many questions on ethics.

What was your motivation to write this book? What message did you want your reader to take from it? Is it just an unbearably sad love story or did you want the reader to view it as a "warning" as to what could happen if genetic testing/cloning was taken too far?

Also Miss Emily believed that hiding the truth from the "children" was the best thing to do whilst Miss Lucy thought they should know what their purpose was from the outset. I wonder is this the same as a normal parent trying to shield their child from the inevitable reality of their eventual death?

For what its worth I hated the film adaptation. In my opinion it "dumbed down" the central themes of the book, and to be quite frank was boring. How much control did you have over the production? And was it easy to relinquish your "control" over Kathy?

Apologies for all the Questions, and totally understand if you dont answer them all.
Good luck with your future books and please can we have a happy ever after ending next time!!!

How fantastic to have the chance to ask such a great writer a question.

I've read that you take a long time to write a novel. I hope that you're now in a financial position where this is possible. If it wasn't, though (eg if you were at the start of your writing career now) could you see yourself writing something quickly was popular but which you felt didn't showcase your talents just so that you had money to live on, or would you rather get a job and take your time with your writing, even though it might take years and years to finish the book?

So, making a living out of writing cowboy novels (!) or working in a non-writing job and writing all night?

I've got a stack of questions but don't want to pile them all on straight away - must share nicely! So just one for now, about The Buried Giant (which I really enjoyed, by the way, for context) - I'd love to know which came first - the basic themes (memory, loss, love) and the key characters, or the idea of writing a dragon-knight-ogre sort of book? I'm sort of asking this because I loved Axl and Beatrice so much, and might have loved them even more without the ogres.

How did you know/when you had writing potential? Had people /parents/friends/teachers and so on mentioned your writing talents from early on?

What inspired you to sit and write your very first novel.

Hi Kazuo,

Thank you for answering questions on here - it's great to have the opportunity to find out what makes a writer tick! This is the first book of yours that I've read, and I found the gentle pace and subtle exploration of Axl & Beatrice's relationship really drew me in. I also found the ending very moving. What I'd like to ask is your reason for choosing this historical period as the setting? I think I read somewhere that you had considered other possible times or conflicts for the story, so what was it about the Anglo-Saxon period that resonated with you?

And one more question: to what extent do you see the book as an allegory for modern times, recent conflicts and contemporary issues such as dementia?

Evening everyone

Firstly, thank you to all those who have posted their reviews and thoughts so far (and I hope Neeta06 has found the right thread…)

I’m immensely excited, thrilled and honoured to welcome Kazuo Ishiguro, OBE and winner of an extraordinary amount of awards, to Bookclub this evening. Kazuo’s novels share a tenderness and an ability to conjure worlds that seem real and unreal at the same time. Each book is highly distinctive with a particularly clear voice. I am delighted that we have the opportunity to talk about them all with Kazuo over the next hour.

Kazuo, thank you very, very much indeed for giving us your time tonight (particularly as I know you are on a punishing global publicity tour).

We've already got a fair few questions to get through so I'll just add the standard Mumsnet ones that we like to ask all our authors...

What childhood book most inspired you?

What would be the first piece of advice you would give to anyone attempting to write fiction?

What is the best book you’ve given someone recently?

And the best you’ve received?

Over to you...

Many thanks to Mumsnet / Faber for a copy of 'The Buried Giant' by Kazuo Ishiguro. I haven't yet completed reading the book, but I must admit, I first opened it with real anticipation. But how does one top 'The Remains Of The Day', I asked myself? I immediately sought to quell any unfair expectation I may have held. What I've found is a spellbinding fable, a subtle and melancholy reflection on memory and forgetfulness. The prose is rich and exacting, and the writing incredibly imaginative, as expected. The themes presented are brought to life with meticulously detailed descriptive language.

I'd like to ask Kazuo a general question to begin with, if I may ......

QUESTION:- Which gave you the greater satisfaction - receiving the OBE, or the Booker Prize (or any of your other book awards) ?

I've always wondered how writers feel if someone writes to them about a book. Do you welcome letters of this kind, answer them or just wish people would buy the book and leave you alone?

@TillyMumsnetBookClub

Evening everyone

Firstly, thank you to all those who have posted their reviews and thoughts so far (and I hope Neeta06 has found the right thread?)

I?m immensely excited, thrilled and honoured to welcome Kazuo Ishiguro, OBE and winner of an extraordinary amount of awards, to Bookclub this evening. Kazuo?s novels share a tenderness and an ability to conjure worlds that seem real and unreal at the same time. Each book is highly distinctive with a particularly clear voice. I am delighted that we have the opportunity to talk about them all with Kazuo over the next hour.

Kazuo, thank you very, very much indeed for giving us your time tonight (particularly as I know you are on a punishing global publicity tour).

We've already got a fair few questions to get through so I'll just add the standard Mumsnet ones that we like to ask all our authors...

What childhood book most inspired you?

What would be the first piece of advice you would give to anyone attempting to write fiction?

What would be the first piece of advice you would give to anyone attempting to write fiction?
?

And the best you?ve received?

Over to you...

Hello! First off, everyone, please excuse all my grammatical/typing/stylistic crimes that you're about to witness. Either I do this in ultra-polished way and spend the hour answering two questions, or I write stream-of-consciousness warts and all replies, to get through as much as possible. I'm opting for latter.

Your Mumsnet standard questions, in order:

What childhood book most inspired you?

When I was 9 or 10 I read all the Sherlock Holmes stories, every single one. Which was odd, because like a lot of boys, I was a useless reader - hardly read anything else. I think the appeal of Sherlock H wasn't so much the detective stuff, though that was exciting enough, but the cosiness of the Holmes-Watson relationship. For a young person, that's a kind of dream friendship. A meeting of the near-infallible, superman with the definitively dependable , very decent friend. But did it inspire my later writing? Don't think so. I think the great singer-songwriters of my teenage years - Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen - had more direct influence on my writing.

It's curious, but I find that a lot of my favourite authors haven't particularly influenced my own writing, whereas authors I don't particularly enjoy - like Marcel Proust, who can be a crashing bore - have had an enormous influence. Charlotte Bronte's two great novels, Jane Eyre and Villette, had a huge influence on my writing, but I'd more or less grown up by then.

What would be the first piece of advice you would give to anyone attempting to write fiction?
/
I would ask yourself this: Do I want to be a writer? Do I want to write? These two questions are crucially different. It sometimes takes people a long time to understand, deeply, what the difference is. It's not enough to be able to answer yes to the first. You have to be sure you want actually to write. So many people want the status, the life-style, the identity of 'writer', but discover - sometimes after a long and painful process - that they don't really want to write. This is the basic thing to establish.

/
Best book I've given recently?

Must be something wrong with me, but I can't remember giving a book to anyone. But books I've recently recommended to friends: Rachel Cusk's Outline is quietly weird and wonderful, and deadpan funny too. David Mitchell's Bone Clocks is full of brilliant stuff. A book you may not have come across, which I thought was very good recently: Prayers for the Stolen by Jennifer Clement. It's a troubling, beautifully written novel narrated by a teenager girl growing up in a Mexican border town completely under the sway of today's drug cartels. Moving and disturbing.
/
Best book I've been given?

My wife has given me The Girl In The Red Coat by Kate Hamer and has been going on and on about it, saying it's the best thriller with 'Girl' in the title for years. I haven't read it yet, but she won't rest until I do, so I'd better get started. I watched her as she was reading it, and she kept saying she was dying to stop, because it was freaking her out so much, but she couldn't stop because, well, she just couldn't stop.

I often wonder how writers, who must generally lead a solitary working life, feel about the publicity tours. Do you enjoy the chance to talk about your books or would you rather just publish it and retreat? Following on from that, do you find that a book is received differently in different countries?

@BsshBosh

Who are your favourite authors and why?

Does Japan still exert an influence on your writing (style, subject matter, writers)?

Ah yes, BsshBosh, Japan. Japan had a lot to do with my becoming a writer in the first place. My first two books were, with hindsight, attempts to preserve my fading childhood memories of Japan (I left the country aged 5), and precious private vision of that world, inside a novel, so that it would stay safe for ever. Japanese culture and literature exert less of a direct influence on my writing these days, but Japanese cinema of the '50s and early 60s remains a strong element in my work, I think. If you've read The Buried G, and you see one of Kurosawa's samurai movies, you might see an echo there. Also, completely at the other end of the spectrum of Japanese cinema, Ozu's sublime Tokyo Story (regularly featured in critics' polls of greatest films of all time) has something to do with the portrait of the ageing married couple at the centre of The BG.

Favourite authors? Dostoyevsky. Charlotte Bronte. Kafka. Chekhov. Marquez.

@atrociouscook

Am halfway through the book and it's enthralling. Didn't think I would like it as I'm not keen on ogres, etc but the writing is really beautiful. Hope to be in on the discussion.

yes, ogres. I do sympathize. I myself was often put off by books featuring ogres and such in them. But ever since I had to bring such creatures into my own story to make it work, along with pixies and other such folk, I've come to recognize my ogre aversion as sheer prejudice. That's to say, just because one comes across a book one didn't like with an ogre in it, one shouldn't then conclude ogres only inhabit bad books. Anyway, I'm glad you're enjoying BG so far, and hope you're steadily softening your stance on ogres.
I think there's an interesting change brewing just now in the larger book culture: a sense that the parameters of what constitutes 'serious' mainstream fiction are shifting; that the boundaries between 'popular' and 'literary' are breaking down; that the walls between genres are crumbling. And one of the key features of this shift seems to be the increasing tendency of science fiction and fantasy fiction tropes and motifs to come into the mainstream. I think this is a healthy trend, though not everyone agrees. Personally, I don't like any sort of 'imagination police' looking over my shoulder, whether I'm reading or writing. I've become very pro-ogre lately, even more so since realizing how much prejudice exists against them.

Another question ....

Many of your novels are written in a first-person narrative style. As the stories progress, the characters (narrators) often exhibit human failings, revealing their flaws implicitly during the narrative. Often, there's a sense these revelations are drawn from personal experiences, feelings and memories.

QUESTION:- How much do your personal experiences and/or relationships influence your characters' actions and personalities?

Your ogre answer properly made me laugh, there. I, too, will re-address my anti-ogre prejudice (I didn't like the pixies much, either).
I've been pushing myself as a reader this year to identify my own book snobbery and work through it - letting myself enjoy precisely what I enjoy, without worrying what genre it's in (in particular, trying to get over avoiding anything that can't be called "literary fiction" in case I become a less serious person). TBG still might be as close as I come to fantasy, though...

@BouncingJellyfish

Thanks for keeping me up til 2am finishing this brilliant and haunting book!

Was really looking forward to reading this as I enjoyed Remains of the Day. Stayed up reading as I had come to really care about Axl and Beatrice, and wanted to know what became of them. Did you do a lot of research into the legends and myths of this era for this book? Or is this an existing interest of yours?

I didn't really do much research into the legends and myths. I did do some historical research, and was pleased to discover this period - the story's set around 490 AD - is one about which no historian can make any confident pronouncement. But roughly speaking, this is the period just before the Anglo-Saxons, landing in every greater numbers as immigrants, take over Britain and go on, eventually, to create 'England'. I needed a setting that would echo not so much old legends and myths of the era as many of our contemporary conflict situations from recent years: Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, for instance. I wanted a setting where distinct groups had been co-existing in peace for a generation or two, but where some buried memory of past enmity rises up and an awful cycle of violence starts up again. The setting, in other words, is metaphorical - but I didn't intend any direct allegory of any particular place or conflict. I think this is a pattern that recurs throughout history, and nations have to always struggle with the question, how much of our darker memories should stay buried for the sake of peace and social cohesion? How much should be remembered for the sake of justice and healing? (In recent times, I think South Africa got this balance just about right after the horrors of the Apartheid years, with the formalized Truth and Reconciliation process.)

Oh I do so agree with you about prejudice in writing genres. I used to feel that reading thrillers was a bit infra dig but I now see that they are gaining mainstream approval which can only be a good thing. And as for ogres, I think they are cute and add so much to a story. Never thought I would think that, although as a very young girl I was much into books such as The Day of the Triffids -perhaps we just like certain themes at different stages of our lives?

@FernieB

When I get MN book emails, I apply for free copies of everything just in case I'm lucky enough to get one. This means I'm sometimes sent copies of books I would never normally have bought myself. This book is one of those. It's one I would have read the blurb on the back and then left on the shelf and I really would have missed out. It was a joy to read.

The bond between the older couple was beautifully portrayed and the various people they encountered were interesting and intrigued me enough to want to know more about them. There's a good blend of reality and fantasy worlds which reminded me a little of Tolkien. I had to read the last few chapters very quickly as I have my book club book which I need to read, but am looking forward to going back to this one later to savour it properly.

I read on another thread that some people have abandoned the book partway through. Don't give up on this book as a lot is revealed towards the end which helps make sense of previous details.

Glad you enjoyed The BG, and so glad you mention in particular the bond between the old couple. Of course, the question 'when is it better to remember, when best to leave things forgotten?' is asked in the novel not just about the troubled country they cross, but by this couple, about their own relationship, their long marriage. Shared memories, as many of you might agree, are very key to a relationship. Here, the memories have mysteriously got lost, and at first the old couple desperately want them back: they feel like they've lost their most precious possessions. They worry without their memories, their love would wither and fade. But as they go on, of course, the scary question occurs to them: will bad memories come back with the good ones? Will their love survive the resurrecting of the darker passages from their life together? Then again, if their love depends on keeping certain big things buried, is it a real love? But I don't want to spell out all this too much. You should feel it in the relationship of the old couple. You shouldn't need to articulate all this, in the way I just did!

Actually I can't hold off, must get my questions into the queue.

As a well-known Proper Great Writer, does it offend you when people read your novels without reverence? (I have two small children and have picked up The Buried Giant whenever I've had a chance, reading the whole thing in sessions of no more than 10 minutes, sometimes with a lot of background noise). I think if I was said Great Writer I'd still be delighted that people were reading my work, perhaps even more so if I knew they had to go to great lengths and really squeeze out the time for it, but I can see how you might go the opposite way and think that when you've worked so carefully on something, you want it to be taken seriously and read properly.
Also do you still get a thrill when someone says they love your work, or are you just too used to it by now?

Oh, that's good, as it's answered a question I had about TBG (though hadn't asked), which is whether it was an allegory of a specific set of events or just a general allegory for certain types of conflict between groups of people trying to co-exist.

@atrociouscook

Oh I do so agree with you about prejudice in writing genres. I used to feel that reading thrillers was a bit infra dig but I now see that they are gaining mainstream approval which can only be a good thing. And as for ogres, I think they are cute and add so much to a story. Never thought I would think that, although as a very young girl I was much into books such as The Day of the Triffids -perhaps we just like certain themes at different stages of our lives?

I think I'm still prejudiced against triffids. I wouldn't want any moving into a garden next to ours.

Just one more for now.

I read The Buried Giant in a slightly up-and-down way (see my question above) and since finishing it, questions have been popping into my head about things that seemed unresolved, or not turning out to be relevant. To pick a couple - what was the odd beast that attacked Edwin when he was caged (and what was all that piece in there for, actually? Just to prove Edwin's strength/warrior-ness?); and why did we need to know all about the monks' bird-cage self-torture device - I don't think the later revelation about their role protecting the dragon was meant to show why they might self-flagellate, or was it?