Nocturnes
Nocturnes
The best-loved of Whistler’s “moonlights,” as he called them, is the hauntingly lit “Nocturne” that gives us Battersea Bridge as a long London day fades to black. Critics seem to agree that Whistler’s main influence at that time was the Japanese woodblock master Hiroshige, whose marvelous work, along with other Japanese aesthetic achievements, was just then being made known to the West.
It’s also pre-eminently the moment, especially if moonrise chances to be involved, when life may seem rather stale without music. This is all well known to the cafe proprietors of Venice - the location of the first and last of these stories - who make sure to employ bands or orchestras that never cease to perform. Indeed, the narrator of “Crooner” tells us that as a freelance guitarist on the Piazza San Marco he can remember “once last summer, going from band to band and playing ‘The Godfather’ nine times in one afternoon.”
In “Malvern Hills,” another guitarist, believing himself underappreciated in the metropolis, seeks a more tranquil life in the west of England and plays a nasty practical joke that has unintended consequences. he only other story set in England, “Come Rain or Come Shine,” descends from farce almost into slapstick. The purpose of the invitation soon discloses itself: Ray is supposed to act as an emollient on the evidently fraying marriage of Charlie and Emily. The crucial thing Ray and Emily have in common is that, as the slightly unexciting opening sentence informs us: “Like me, Emily loved old American popular songs.” But he is sternly instructed by Charlie to discard this, his only ace, and indeed if Emily even mentions “that croony nostalgia music” to pretend that he knows nothing of the subject.
The “croony nostalgia” theme is back in the story “Nocturne,” where we meet again a character from the opening tale, “Crooner.” She is now a hysterical and fading star, recovering from plastic surgery in a private wing of a Beverly Hills hotel. Meeting a face-lifted saxophonist from an adjoining room, she forms an apparently spontaneous love-hate attachment and in the course of the “love” part incites him to help steal a music-award statuette that she abruptly decides should be rightfully his.
The story that most justifies its inclusion under the book’s title is “Cellists,” where it is only by means of a slowly developed series of “movements” and after a long sequence of late après-midis that we are led to appreciate the world of mania and deception that can underlie, as with the world of chess, the universe inhabited by the fanatically musical. It’s set at the end of the season as well, as if to emphasize the evanescence of everything, but it’s somehow a slight waste of Venice, and if Ishiguro’s narrator - all five stories are first person - had omitted to mention “the evening passeggiatta,” the setting could have been anywhere. Understatement is one thing, but in aiming for it Ishiguro generally achieves the merely ordinary. You could have the book, right here.
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