FICTION
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
by Kazuo Ishiguro, $25
There’s a preternatural hush in Kazuo Ishiguro’s writing. The sentences are murmured rather than declaimed, and there’s always more going on than the narrator will admit, because said narrator is often unreliable or misinformed.
“Nocturnes” is a collection of five stories, several of which are interrelated and take place in Venice, all of which involve musicians of varying levels of expertise and emotional honesty.
“Crooner” is a sad tale about Tony Gardner, a passe singer who hires a musician from the Piazza San Marco so he can serenade the wife he loves but whom he’s nevertheless divorcing so that he can goose his career by shacking up with a younger, more au courant woman.
“Malvern Hills” is about a young singer-songwriter who is moonlighting at his sister’s restaurant while doing as little work as possible.
He meets a couple of cruise-ship entertainers and finds himself drawn into their lives, at least as much as a man as narcissistic as he is can be drawn into anybody’s life but their own.
“Come Rain or Come Shine” is probably the least of the stories, about a notable underachiever who visits a couple of old school chums and walks right into a bad-marriage hailstorm.
Ishiguro saves his most ambitious stories for the end.
“Nocturne” concerns itself with a relatively unsuccessful sax player who undergoes plastic surgery to make himself more photogenic. While recuperating, he runs into the ex-wife of Tony Gardner, of “Crooner.” The story flirts with sex and does an end-around into farce, which is decidedly not Ishiguro’s forte — he lacks the necessary antic spirit — and ends with a sad dying fall.
“Cellists” is about another young Venice musician who’s being mentored by an attractive older woman with issues that involve more than cello technique.
In a very strange sort of way, Ishiguro’s virtues allow his faults to sail past unremarked. Viewed strictly in narrative terms, nothing happens in “Malvern Hills” and very little happens in “Cellists,” but the pages keep flipping by because Ishiguro’s subtle, ominous tone implies something momentous is about to happen.
A number of the stories turn on the gap between excellence in art and excellence as the world defines it, that is to say, money.
The narrators are on the outside looking in, wondering when it’s time for their 15 minutes.
Cumulatively, these stories are oddly reminiscent of Somerset Maugham — far-away places; personalities who are simultaneously vivid and emotionally complacent and who have a way of fatalistically settling for whatever fate has in store for them; bemused narrators who hesitate to get involved — all culminating in a mood of muted malevolence: literary noir.
All of Ishiguro’s characters get lost in their music, but they also get lost in their dreams of themselves. That’s where the trouble comes in.
NONFICTION
Bottled & Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession With Bottled Water
by Peter H. Gleick, $26.95
Peter H. Gleick misses water fountains, and so do I. In his insightful new book, “Bottled & Sold,” the scientist and freshwater expert chronicles how modern society has abandoned one of its greatest public heath achievements in favor of a environmentally costly alternative.
One of his book’s strengths is showing what a predicament we’ve placed ourselves in by creating a $100 billion bottled-water industry worldwide. For example, “The Sedona Springs Bottled Water Company … pumped enough groundwater to dramatically alter surface flows” in Maricopa County, Ariz., a depletion that caused the demise of local flora and fauna.
The book’s power lies in his obvious yet compelling argument: Rather than shore up the natural processes that have provided us with drinkable water for centuries, we have invented an elaborate business that causes more harm than good. And as he writes, this shift has transformed our daily lives without our even noticing:
“Think about where you are right now: there may be no water fountain nearby, but you can probably find someone selling a plastic bottle filled with water within a few hundred feet.”
