... A journey to Ishland:
Kazuo Ishiguro's work reflects the world.
... his prose works without the fireworks of contemporaries such as Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie, and his stories are set not in some exact locality, but rather in Ishland, which has some similarities to real places, but always feels somehow separate. One of his new stories, for example, is set in Venice, but the place itself is hardly described. “I kind of assumed a lot of people know what Venice looks like. We live in an age when visual images are everywhere, and there was no need for me to have half a paragraph on the sun shining on the roof of the Salute. People watch these TV programmes about Venice. These are no longer exotic places, they are almost local, part of where we all live.”
... Twenty years after -
1989: when reality began to byte.
History doesn’t improve — people are as bad today as they were 20 years ago — art doesn’t get better with the passage of time and pop music gets much worse. Both the climate and politicians are, as we know, in steep decline. But, uniquely and consolingly, gizmos do get better, and the most devout Luddite would be hard-pressed to deny that, techwise, 1989 might as well be 1989BC.
(Hat tip to Dave Lull for both links.)
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