I was never really a discerning reader. As a child, I got as much enjoyment from reading old issues of Readers’ Digest magazines, as I did from Jules Verne, Victor Hugo, the odd Alistair MacLean novels, and the rare pulp paperback that made its way into our home despite my father’s careful scrutiny. I read extensively, often at the expense of sleep and conversation and essential social skills. Over the years, I read less, but I read deeply, and with rare and rewarding effort.
Let the waves crash
Then, in a dusty bookshelf in a cavernous North Delhi home, I found a book called Never Let Me Go , about children in a boarding school unlike any other children you and I know, and how they dealt with the anxiety of secrets deliberately withheld. And as my life became a little more murky, a little more confused, so did the stuff of my story books.
By my early 20s I was almost only reading the works of Kazuo Ishiguro — anxiously devouring his plots — which always seemed just a little out of grasp, helplessly caught in the tension of his storylines, just a little out of reach. In Remains of the Day I was frustrated at the butler’s swirl of emotions cruelly contained within an exterior of intractable propriety.
I grit my teeth when Ishiguro just refused to let the wave crash and spill over and delicately let it build until I realised I had returned, inexplicably, to where I had started.
I scoured the Internet for news of his next book release. I felt helpless anger after reading over 500 pages in The Unconsoled about a musician’s dream-reality perambulation in a city which may or may not exist. I felt loss when the Tolkienesque title of The Buried Giant did not deliver according to the image it elicited.
But as I read that book, I felt and felt again all the futility of holding on to relationships that are doomed to fail and the odd complacency of carrying on despite some goals never really materialising and closure never really being achieved. Things are not what they seem, said every book of his I read, and the message was delivered sinuously, over several pages, and often not at all. Ishiguro has been somewhat unconcerned with linear prose.
In Sociology classes at university, we fought with the idea of language and of narrativisation. All our literature seemed to argue that events in reality are not necessarily linear, origins cannot always be traced with certainty, and neither can endings be resolutely achieved.
Deferred closure
But in the framing of books, in the writing of sentences, and in the positioning of arguments, writers who questioned linear logic, also simultaneously succumbed to it. If writing is a manipulation of language, Ishiguro is perhaps the only one who has been able to practise what we sought in our textbooks.
There was comfort in this sense of restless incompletion that every one of his books and short stories recalled. The human journey, he seemed to tell me again and again, was not so much about an accumulation of experience coming to solid fruition.
The end of the road was not a sum that cohered. Everything new consisted mostly of remembering an imperfectly forgotten past.
It was bittersweet, this sense of deferred closure and pessimism that his books delivered. His books were rich with it and I glutted myself on it. The last book of his I read was The Buried Giant , a little less than a year ago, sporadically and in pieces on long metro rides to and from the university where I work. I read it in half-distraction — the travel smells and noises around me, my sense of doom increasing with each subsequent page.
On late winter evenings, the fog Ishiguro describes in the book seemed to seep out of the pages and penetrate the air in the Delhi suburb where I lived. I remembered him again the day I heard the news of the Nobel in literature going to him. His and ours is a universe always unravelling but held precariously in place — a gentle mockery of the cycle of life and the constancy of incomplete endings.
The writer is a legal anthropology researcher at Centre for Comparative Law in NLU, Delhi. Her research interests include literature and the sociology of law, medicine, and language.
