Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall in DC Public Library

Dec 01, 2020 Tony rated it it was ok

Shelves: audio, short-stories, read-for-bookclub

My bookclub loved Ishigiro's Never Let Me Go, so when this popped up on a list of possible reads, we enthusiastically went for it. Alas, this cycle of five short stories never came near to touching the mastery of that novel. I got the sense that Ishigurowas messing around with the idea of kind of composing a suite with overlapping themes and moods, rather than writing strong stories that stood on their own. In that sense, the characters felt a bit flat and the situations artificial. Despite mome My bookclub loved Ishigiro's Never Let Me Go, so when this popped up on a list of possible reads, we enthusiastically went for it. Alas, this cycle of five short stories never came near to touching the mastery of that novel. I got the sense that Ishigurowas messing around with the idea of kind of composing a suite with overlapping themes and moods, rather than writing strong stories that stood on their own. In that sense, the characters felt a bit flat and the situations artificial. Despite moments of slapstick (which I didn't think worked very well), the book felt rather cold and removed to me.

The first story is probably the strongest, featuring a Polish cafe guitarist in Venice, who happens to encounter the fading American crooner who was his mother's favorite musician. What starts as a nice connection takes a turn as the singer asks him to back him up as he serenades his wife from a canal. That wife comes back in the fourth story as one of the two main characters in a strange story about a saxophonist who gets plastic surgery in the hopes that curing his ugliness will kickstart his career. It's a strange mix of screwball and melodrama that is far too long and never really works.

The second story doesn't quite fit the mold, lacking a musician character -- the link here is a shared taste in jazz music of two old college friends. The premise is completely implausible and the resulting slapstick antics were a total misfire of farce to me. The third story features a young guitarist trying to make it in London and having to decamp to the English hill country to stay at his sister's cafe. He connects with an older Swiss couple on holiday, but the life lessons aren't as simple as they first seem. The final story is about a young Hungarian cellist, again in Venice, and his mentorship by a mysterious American woman. There's a twist to this story that most will see coming from a good distance away, and the entire effect is simply lacking.

Both individually, and as a collection, the stories just failed to move me in any way. I wouldn't say the stories are particularly bad, they're just flat and I suspect in three months I won't remember a thing about any of them. ...more

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Dec 11, 2009 Rachel rated it it was ok

I was really looking forward to this and have to say it was somewhat of a letdown. All the characters were so shallow-seeming. I've been drawn to short stories for my independent reading lately because of the amount of reading I have to do for school... I never know when I'm going to have time for it. But maybe what I really need is a good novel. ...more

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Sep 30, 2010 Kate rated it liked it

Shelves: short-stories, literary-fiction

I've loved the two Ishiguro novels that I've read (Never Let Me Go, The Remains of the Day), so I had high hopes for this collection of short stories. Unfortunately, this is not the author at his best. A few of the stories are narrated by Americans, and the voices seem stilted. The best story, "Come Rain or Come Shine", is about a man living abroad visiting old college friends in London who's marriage is on the rocks. This story is funny and sensitive and the contrast between the way the narrato ...more

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