Lorna was concerned I had another three weeks of this to go, but I explained I was very well, and that the first week had been a success. On my first Sunday off I ventured outdoors, on to Sydenham high street, and persistently giggled – so Lorna told me – at the fact that the street was built on a slope, so that people coming down it were stumbling over themselves, while those going up were panting and staggering effortfully. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere – I let them remain and ploughed on.īy the third day, Lorna observed during my evening break that I was behaving oddly. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Throughout the Crash, I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. This, fundamentally, was how The Remains of the Day was written. I stuck up charts and notes all over the peeling walls and got down to writing. (I’d written my first two novels at the dining table.) It was actually a kind of large cupboard on the half-landing and lacked a door, but I was thrilled to have a space where I could spread my papers around as I wished and not have to clear them away at the end of each day. I was then 32 years old, and we’d recently moved into a house in Sydenham, south London, where for the first time in my life I had a dedicated study. Striking a chord … Kazuo Ishiguro took inspiration from a Tom Waits song when putting the finishing touches to The Remains of the Day.
0 kommentar(er)
