Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall

by Kazuo Ishiguro
The common theme in Ishiguro's collection of short stories is music and love -- how love and music can inspire or stifle each other, how musicians' love of music can surpass or extinguish love, how sometimes one is not enough without the other. The stories are very lyrical, unpretentious and smooth. The reader floats from one story to the other, as if in a dream and in this respect,as well as for the melancholy tone, the title is very appropriate. However, towards the end, I felt that the stories are beginning to repeat themselves. When you add Ishiguro's recurring penchant for unreliable narrators, the collection felt a bit like you are in the same slightly uncomfortable dream over and over again.

Khanh Vu