temporaneità

In the last few months, I have been looking for a novel written by a contemporary English writer whose prose would be both easy and refined: then some days ago a British friend suggested reading “An Artist of the Floating World” written by Kazuo Ishiguro. He was born in Japan in 1954 and he left it around the age of six to move to the United Kingdom so he can undoubtedly be referred to as a British novelist.

It seems that “The Sunday Times” has described this book as “A work of spare elegance” so, even before starting it, I was sure that it would have been quite close to what I was searching for. Reading it, I’ve increasingly understood that it is a masterpiece, though my opinion is irrilevant.

I do not want to summarize here the story that it tells: I just want to say that what remains at the end of it is the importance of trying to elevate from the mediocrity in which a life can fall and to limit the arrogance that prevents us from recognising our faults. I would like to write more about two parts of it but I don’t want to block my readers from the delight of their own reading so I’ll just close this post quoting a sentence that Ishiguro has written to describe the landscape of Nagasaki, still wasted during the first few years after the end of the Second World War:

(…) you may see the line of old telegraph poles - still without wires to connect them - disappearing into the gloom down the route you have just come, and you may be able to make out the dark clusters of birds perched uncomfortably on the tops of the poles, as though awaiting the wires along which they once lined the sky.