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
When @djbduncan notices the text for a literary jigsaw puzzle had been written by a former colleague, his head spins. A wild surmise. Are jigsaws REF-able?
Dennis Duncan - The W Factor
Dennis Duncan: The W Factor
literaryreview.co.uk
In an effort to scold drinkers, Victorian temperance societies furiously marked every drinking establishment with a red X on city maps. It was a spectacular case of propaganda backfiring.
@foxtosser explores the history of drink maps
Edward Brooke-Hitching - From Beer Street to Gin Lane
Edward Brooke-Hitching: From Beer Street to Gin Lane - Drink Maps in Victorian Britain by Kris Butler
literaryreview.co.uk
How did a workers’ insurance agent who died of tuberculosis at the age of forty become a global literary icon?
@MortenHoiJensen on Kafka's metamorphosis
Morten Høi Jensen - Paranoid Humanoid
Morten Høi Jensen: Paranoid Humanoid - Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka by Karolina Watroba; Kafka: Making o...
literaryreview.co.uk