When We Were Orphans - Couverture souple

Ishiguro, Kazuo

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 067697306X ISBN 13 : 9780676973068

Editeur : Vintage Canada, 2001

Synopsis

When We Were Orphans During the Sino-Japanese War, a young man returns to Shanghai to solve the mystery of his parents' disappearance some 20 years earlier. From the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of "The Remains of the Day" comes this work of soaring imagination, a "New York Times" Notable Book. Full description

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Chapter One

It was the summer of 1923, the summer I came down from Cambridge, when despite my aunt's wishes that I return to Shropshire, I decided my future lay in the capital and took up a small flat at Number 14b Bedford Gardens in Kensington. I remember it now as the most wonderful of summers. After years of being surrounded by fellows, both at school and at Cambridge, I took great pleasure in my own company. I enjoyed the London parks, the quiet of the Reading Room at the British Museum; I indulged entire afternoons strolling the streets of Kensington, outlining to myself plans for my future, pausing once in a while to admire how here in England, even in the midst of such a great city, creepers and ivy are to be found clinging to the fronts of fine houses.

It was on one such leisurely walk that I encountered quite by chance an old schoolfriend, James Osbourne, and discovering him to be a neighbour, suggested he call on me when he was next passing. Although at that point I had yet to receive a single visitor in my rooms, I issued my invitation with confidence, having chosen the premises with some care. The rent was not high, but my landlady had furnished the place in a tasteful manner that evoked an unhurried Victorian past; the drawing room, which received plenty of sun throughout the first half of the day, contained an ageing sofa as well as two snug armchairs, an antique sideboard and an oak bookcase filled with crumbling encyclopaedias — all of which I was convinced would win the approval of any visitor. Moreover, almost immediately upon taking the rooms, I had walked over to Knightsbridge and acquired there a Queen Anne tea service, several packets of fine teas, and a large tin of biscuits. So when Osbourne did happen along one morning a few days later, I was able to serve out the refreshments with an assurance that never once permitted him to suppose he was my first guest.

For the first fifteen minutes or so, Osbourne moved restlessly around my drawing room, complimenting me on the premises, examining this and that, looking regularly out of the windows to exclaim at whatever was going on below. Eventually he flopped down into the sofa, and we were able to exchange news — our own and that of old schoolfriends. I remember we spent a little time discussing the activities of the workers' unions, before embarking on a long and enjoyable debate on German philosophy, which enabled us to display to one another the intellectual prowess we each had gained at our respective universities. Then Osbourne rose and began his pacing again, pronouncing as he did so upon his various plans for the future.

"I've a mind to go into publishing, you know. Newspapers, magazines, that sort of thing. In fact, I fancy writing a column myself. About politics, social issues. That is, as I say, if I decide not to go into politics myself. I say, Banks, do you really have no idea what you want to do? Look, it's all out there for us" — he indicated the window — "Surely you have some plans."

"I suppose so," I said, smiling. "I have one or two things in mind. I'll let you know in good time."

"What have you got up your sleeve? Come on, out with it! I'll get it out of you yet!"

But I revealed nothing to him, and before long got him arguing again about philosophy or poetry or some such thing. Then around noon, Osbourne suddenly remembered a lunch appointment in Piccadilly and began to gather up his belongings. It was as he was leaving, he turned at the door, saying:

"Look, old chap, I meant to say to you. I'm going along tonight to a bash. It's in honour of Leonard Evershott. The tycoon, you know. An uncle of mine's giving it. Rather short notice, but I wondered if you'd care to come along. I'm quite serious. I'd been meaning to pop over to you long ago, just never got round to it. It'll be at the Charingworth."

When I did not reply immediately, he took a step towards me and said:

"I thought of you because I was remembering. I was remembering how you always used to quiz me about my being 'well connected.' Oh, come on! Don't pretend you've forgotten! You used to interrogate me mercilessly. 'Well connected? Just what does that mean, well connected?' Well, I thought, here's a chance for old Banks to see 'well connected' for himself." Then he shook his head, as though at a memory, saying: "My goodness, you were such an odd bird at school."

I believe it was at this point I finally assented to his suggestion for the evening — an evening which, as I shall explain, was to prove far more significant than I could then have imagined — and showed him out without betraying in any part the resentment I was feeling at these last words of his.

My annoyance only grew once I had sat down again. I had, as it happened, guessed immediately what Osbourne had been referring to. The fact was, throughout school, I had heard it said repeatedly of Osbourne that he was "well connected." It was a phrase that came up unfailingly when people talked of him, and I believe I too used it about him whenever it seemed called for. It was indeed a concept that fascinated me, this notion that he was in some mysterious way connected to various of the higher walks of life, even though he looked and behaved no differently from the rest of us. However, I cannot imagine I "mercilessly interrogated" him as he had claimed. It is true the subject was something I thought about a lot when I was fourteen or fifteen, but Osbourne and I had not been especially close at school and, as far as I remember, I only once brought it up with him personally.
It was on a foggy autumn morning, and the two of us had been sitting on a low wall outside a country inn. My guess is that we would have been in the Fifth by then. We had been appointed as markers for a cross-country run, and were waiting for the runners to emerge from the fog across a nearby field so that we could point them in the correct direction down a muddy lane. We were not expecting the runners for some time yet, and so had been idly chatting. It was on this occasion, I am sure, that I asked Osbourne about his "well connectedness." Osbourne, who for all his exuberance, had a modest nature, tried to change the subject. But I persisted until he said eventually:

"Oh, do knock it off, Banks. It's all just nonsense, there's nothing to analyse. One simply knows people. One has parents, uncles, family friends. I don't know what there is to be so puzzled about." Then quickly realising what he had said, he had turned and touched my arm. "Dreadfully sorry, old fellow. That was awfully tactless of me."

This faux pas seemed to cause Osbourne much more anguish than it had me. Indeed, it is not impossible it had remained on his conscience for all those years, so that in asking me to accompany him to the Charingworth Club that evening, he was in some way trying to make amends. In any case, as I say, I had not been at all upset that foggy morning by his admittedly careless remark. In fact, it had become a matter of some irritation to me that my schoolfriends, for all their readiness to fall into banter concerning virtually any other of one's misfortunes, would observe a great solemnness at the first mention of my parents' absence. Actually, odd as it may sound, my lack of parents — indeed, of any close kin in England except my aunt in Shropshire — had by then long ceased to be of any great inconvenience to me. As I would often point out to my companions, at a boarding school like ours, we had all learned to get on without parents, and my position was not as unique as all that. Nevertheless, now I look back on it, it seems probable that at least some of my fascination with Osbourne's "well connectedness" had to do with what I then perceived to be my complete lack of connection with the world beyond St. Dunstan's. That I would, when the time came, forge such connections for myself and make my way, I had no doubts. But it is possible I believed I would learn from Osbourne something crucial, something of the way such things worked.

But when I said before that Osbourne's words as he left my flat had somewhat offended me, I was not referring to his raising the matter of my "interrogating" him all those years before. Rather, what I had taken exception to was his casual judgement that I had been "such an odd bird at school."

In fact, it has always been a puzzle to me that Osbourne should have said such a thing of me that morning, since my own memory is that I blended perfectly into English school life. During even my earliest weeks at St. Dunstan's, I do not believe I did anything to cause myself embarrassment. On my very first day, for instance, I recall observing a mannerism many of the boys adopted when standing and talking — of tucking the right hand into a waistcoat pocket and moving the left shoulder up and down in a kind of shrug to underline certain of their remarks. I distinctly remember reproducing this mannerism on that same first day with sufficient expertise that not a single of my fellows noticed anything odd or thought to make fun.

In much the same bold spirit, I rapidly absorbed the other gestures, turns of phrase and exclamations popular among my peers, as well as grasping the deeper mores and etiquettes prevailing in my new surroundings. I certainly realised quickly enough that it would not do for me to indulge openly — as I had been doing routinely in Shanghai — my ideas on crime and its detection. So much so that even when during my third year there was a series of thefts, and the entire school was enjoying playing at detectives, I carefully refrained from joining in in all but a nominal way. And it was, no doubt, some remnant of this same policy that caused me to reveal so little of my "plans" to Osbourne that morning he called on me.

However, for all my caution, I can bring to mind at least two instances from sc...

Biographie de l'auteur :

Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954. His father, an oceanographer, was hired by the British government in 1960, and the family moved to Surrey, England, never expecting to stay long. His grandfather, to whom he was close, sent him packages of Japan’s most popular children’s magazine, so he wouldn’t feel out of touch when he returned. But they remained in England, and Ishiguro (known to friends as “Ish”) “never properly said goodbye to Japan” or his grandparents. When his grandfather died in their old house in Nagasaki, they had not visited Japan in ten years. Even now, he has only returned once, on an author tour, though he has travelled throughout Europe and North America. While in some ways it might seem as though he has lost his “Japanese-ness”, he has avoided going back mainly because “in my head...the world of my childhood is still intact.” Perhaps that vision contributed to the beautifully conjured lost paradise of Banks’ youth in the novel, and for the metaphor of the orphan, torn from the sheltered haven of childhood. It may also account for Ishiguro’s persistent fascination with memory.

After his first year at Kent University, where he read English and Philosophy, he took a sabbatical to work on a housing estate outside Glasgow; after finishing his degree, he volunteered in London for an organization that looked after the homeless. He read little as a teenager, and wanted to be a singer-songwriter until around age twenty-four. But, he ventures, “you bang on a door and it doesn’t open, and another one happens to open, so you go through it.” Thus, he enrolled in the top-notch creative writing program at the University of East Anglia, where his tutors were Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. His first short stories were included in a prominent volume of promising young writers, and his first novel was published soon after. Now he writes full-time, working very regular hours of 9:00 a.m. — 5:30 p.m., at home in Golders Green, a leafy and now multicultural suburb of north London, which allows him to spend a lot of time with his wife and partner of twenty years and their young daughter. In his spare time, he plays jazz, folk and blues on his collection of guitars.

Surprisingly, Ishiguro admits that his novels are, to some extent, deliberately “going over the same ground,” often told in a pseudo-diary form by a single central narrator, with flashbacks as the narrator looks back from different points. “That’s the foundation of the structure for me – the state of mind of the narrator shifting slightly but ever so significantly.” With Banks, determined to fulfill his mission no matter how destructive or selfish it might seem, he was “tracing someone’s obsessions and how certain agendas...set emotionally, early in life, can continue to assert themselves throughout adulthood.... Peculiar things govern the big decisions that we make in our lives. Often it’s something rather irrational.” Ishiguro compares the book to an expressionist painting, where the world is distorted by the emotion of the artist’s perspective: it is “an attempt to paint a picture” of the world “according to someone's crazy logic.”

The taking-off point was the ‘30s English detective novel, such as those of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, which he read as a child. “What interested me...was that they often portrayed this idyllic view of English society...this community that would work really beautifully if there wasn’t this one thing that had gone wrong.” The villain is always found, and life is perfect again: pure escapism. But after World War I, people didn’t need reminding of the real nature of evil and suffering. “I had the image of such a detective let loose in the modern world, still with the idea that he can counter evil by these methods. And how absurd it would look going round with a magnifying glass trying to stop the Second World War.” In a sense, Banks represents the naïve, innocent, idealistic part of all of us. “It’s tempting to say that there was an evil man called Hitler who decided to kill the Jews,” but that is to deny the “chaos and blood-lust” of a century of history.

Of his tendency to write about World War II, he comments: “Part of me is very affected by the fact that I was born in Nagasaki nine years after the atomic bomb hit that city.” On August 9, 1945, thirty-nine thousand people were killed, and the surviving half of the city had to burn the bodies before disease set in; his mother was eighteen. When Ishiguro published his first short stories, she told him: “You are in the public realm now, you have some power.” A recent visit to Auschwitz made him particularly conscious of the fact that when the survivors are gone, there is a danger the memory will have no more relevance to future generations than the Napoleonic Wars. For the first time in a century, there is a generation who has never known military conflict, with leaders who did not experience a war directly. He feels “it is the duty of all my generation to keep memories alive, we who grew up in the shadow of war.”

However, he chooses the setting of each novel to bring out his themes and is not interested in historical reconstruction, which he says is for films, not books. “To make that projector come on inside a reader’s head, you...have to give just enough so that the reader brings all these other images that are floating around in his or her head.... To a certain extent you can muck about with stereotypes and stereotypical images and you can juxtapose them in unlikely ways.” Just as the England of The Remains of the Day was “highly mythological,” he uses the image of pre-war Shanghai as a city of international intrigue. He’s less and less interested in realism, and aims for what cannot be done in cinema and television. “One of the strengths of novels over camera-based storytelling is that you are able to get right inside people’s heads...to explore people's inner worlds much more thoroughly and with much more subtlety.”

Each of his understated, finely wrought novels has been published to international acclaim beyond most writers’ dreams. He was in both of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists anthologies, and won the Booker Prize at thirty-four. But The Unconsoled baffled many: “600 pages of plotless, circular, sustained hallucination,” said the Guardian, who wondered if When We Were Orphans was an attempt to get his point across better. Some dislike his style here, too. Neil Bissoondath in the National Post was not alone in commenting that the novel was “strangely flat.” The Observer said the protagonist’s diction was unsuited to his character; others complained of too subtle humour and instabilities of tone. While author Catherine Bush, in The Globe and Mail, agreed that reading When We Were Orphans was an “increasingly bewildering experience,” concluded: “Ishiguro’s novels require a reader to read aslant, to play detective, if you will, alive to clues, to what’s left out as much as what’s revealed.” The novel should provide plenty of debate.

Ishiguro says he’s a less controlled writer than he used to be – he actually threw out 110 pages, almost a year’s work, of a story-within-a-story showing the Golden Age sleuth at work. The Remains of the Day was his easiest book to write. He plans his novels less rigidly now, allowing room for surprises. (“Some of the most interesting writing can be stuff that is quite uncomfortable for the writer.”) He feels a sense of urgency about his writing, worrying that publicity — which he does so well, giving long and detailed interviews – takes so much time. He also feels that makes writers very self-conscious about their work, for better or worse, and aware of their international audience. “I think when people look back on this era, and when they look at the literature produced in this era, they’ll have to look at the tour to understand why writing has gone in a certain direction.”

Ishiguro’s work is often compared to that of Franz Kafka, and sometimes to the work of Dostoevsky, whom he names as one of his favourite writers. He also admires Chekhov’s short stories, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, James Ellroy, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, the Jeeves novels of P. G. Wodehouse, and the adventures of Sherlock Holmes stories.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Vintage Canada
• Date d'édition: 2001
• ISBN 10: 067697306X
• ISBN 13: 9780676973068
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 320