D J Taylor
Bridge Passage
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall
By Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber & Faber 221pp £14.99
You sometimes feel that a guitar must be as vital a part of the hand luggage of the senior British novelist as a laptop. Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) fairly groaned under the weight of recherché fretboard detail that its author had pillaged from specialist magazines like Blues Guitarist; Graham Swift’s recent collection Making an Elephant has a piece about buying a guitar with ‘Ish’; and now comes Ish himself with a quintet of short stories, the first offering of which features an Eastern European migrant chosen to accompany a veteran American singer as he serenades his wife from the prow of a Venetian gondola.
Tony Gardner, the sub-Sinatra balladeer of ‘Crooner’, turns out to be celebrating his twenty-seventh wedding anniversary. This being showbiz, on the other hand, the end in view is not the rapt continuation of this relationship but its opportunistic overthrow: Tony’s career is on the slide, a rethink is
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘The Second World War was won in Oxford. Discuss.’
@RankinNick gives the question his best shot.
Nicholas Rankin - We Shall Fight in the Buttery
Nicholas Rankin: We Shall Fight in the Buttery - Oxford’s War 1939–1945 by Ashley Jackson
literaryreview.co.uk
For the first time, all of Sylvia Plath’s surviving prose, a massive body of stories, articles, reviews and letters, has been gathered together in a single volume.
@FionaRSampson sifts it for evidence of how the young Sylvia became Sylvia Plath.
Fiona Sampson - Changed in a Minute
Fiona Sampson: Changed in a Minute - The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath by Peter K Steinberg (ed)
literaryreview.co.uk
The ruling class has lost its sprezzatura.
On porky rolodexes and the persistence of elite reproduction, for the @Lit_Review: