Thaw set in for the Nobel prize after last year's controversial pick; that is what we can conclude in regards to this year's laureate, Kazuo Ishiguro, who has paved his way to the hearts of the people with his numerous novels - two of them, The Remains of The Day and Never Let Me Go have been translated into film and thereby managed to reach an ever wider audience. Those are novels which deal with emotions, love relationships in an impossible system, a system which demands absolute submission to higher goals (= classes). Or as the Swedish Academy explained: Ishiguro is an author "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".
The loyal butler Stevens in The Remains of The Day spends his life serving others, also those not worthy of his service and on the way surpresses his feelings towards his coworker and friend miss Keaton who for decades doubts her marriage. To Kathy, Tommy and Ruth from Never let me go, who are also made to serve others, love seems to be the only anchor – but, as it turns out, their lifes serve the loves of others, their meant to protect others from sadness.
In the context of this year's bets and anticipations Ishiguro is an interesting choice also because his Never let me go – in terms of genre - closely resembles The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Both novels are commonly designated as science fiction and thereby missunderstood completely: they are firstly a negative utopia or a dystopia, comparable to Orwell's or Huxley's work, which on one hand function as a reminder of times past and, on the other, bare a warning that these times might return in any given instance- in a technologically supreme and thereby more totalitarian variant.
Ishiguro speaks to many readers; his work is without a doubt more approachable and emotionally charged as the work of many other Nobel prize laureates.
