In fact, having previously made firm plans to become a rock star by the time I was twenty, my literary ambitions had only recently made themselves known to me. (We were, I knew, a class of six, meeting once every two weeks.) At that point in my life I’d written little else of note in the way of prose fiction, having earned my place on the course with a radio play rejected by the BBC. It was in this room that I carefully examined the two short stories I’d written over the summer, wondering if they were good enough to submit to my new classmates. On the floor, instead of a bed, there was a large rectangular piece of industrial foam that would cause me to sweat in my sleep, even during the bitterly cold Norfolk nights. There was a small table, the surface of which my typewriter and a desk lamp took up almost entirely. The ceilings sloped claustrophobically – though if I stood on tip-toes I had a view, from my one window, of ploughed fields stretching away into the distance. In fact, my little room was not unlike the classic writer’s garret. In other words, after the frenetic life I’d been leading in London, here I was, faced with an unusual amount of quiet and solitude in which to transform myself into a writer. No doubt, for him, the house was filled with the ghosts of his wrecked dreams – or perhaps he just wanted to avoid me in any case, I didn’t set eyes on him for days on end. I’d rented a room in a small house owned by a man in his thirties whose wife had just left him. But this, I was soon to discover, was no great hardship: I was rarely required at the university more than twice a week. The university was ten miles away, in the cathedral town of Norwich, but I had no car and my only way of getting there was by means of a bus service that operated just once in the morning, once at lunch-time and once in the evening. I’d come to this place because I’d been accepted on a one-year postgraduate Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia.
#Linkedin best reads 2017 portable
That autumn I’d arrived with a rucksack, a guitar and a portable typewriter in Buxton, Norfolk – a small English village with an old water mill and flat farm fields all around it. Had you mentioned Japan, asked me about its culture, you might even have detected a trace of impatience enter my manner as I declared my ignorance on the grounds that I hadn’t set foot in that country – not even for a holiday – since leaving it at the age of five. If we’d got talking, we might have discussed the Total Footballers of Holland, or Bob Dylan‘s latest album, or perhaps the year I’d just spent working with homeless people in London. The only accent discernible in my speech was that of someone brought up in the southern counties of England, inflected at times by the languid, already dated vernacular of the Hippie era. My features would have looked Japanese, but unlike most Japanese men seen in Britain in those days, I had hair down to my shoulders, and a drooping bandit-style moustache. If you’d come across me in the autumn of 1979, you might have had some difficulty placing me, socially or even racially. Englishħ December, 2017 My Twentieth Century Evening – and Other Small Breakthroughs Kazuo Ishiguro delivered his Nobel Lecture on 7 December 2017 at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.
0 kommentar(er)
