Thoughts on "Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall"

This is a compilation of five stories which share similar themes (see title). My copy is currently acting as a laptop rest. Running linux has its downs too, including the fact that the hardware is not able to operate at optimum levels and heats up more quickly - my power consumption is also a lot higher than if I were running Windows OS.

Back to Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes. I haven't actually read all five yet. I've gotten through three. Music and Nightfall?

Crooner - Czech busker meets Tony Gardner. Tony Gardner wants one night of romance with soon-to-be-leaving wife who has found a younger, more successful man. Gardner is something of a bygone, belonging to the generation whose voices were waxed on vinyl and sang in a style which I have never really enjoyed.

I like to think that if I ever spoke with Ishiguro about music, we would hate each other... That Gardner's efforts are more less rejected by his wife is saddening (she doesn't even come out to the balcony). For the first person narrator, Janek, I suppose it was a special encounter but there is such a large difference between a person in his youth (at the height of his career) and when that person is aged and on the verge of being abandoned.

"But I never saw him again. I heard a few months later, in the autumn, that Mr and Mrs Gardner got their divorce - one of the waiters at the Florian read it somewhere and told me. It all came back to me then about that evening. Because Mr Gardner had seemed a pretty decent guy, and whichever way you look at it, great comeback or no comeback, he'll always be on of the greats."

This story was written in a rather colloquial tone. Janek seemed quite nonchalant, perhaps a little uncomfortable that he was an immigrant and that he played the Spanish guitar and not a more "classical" instrument. That last paragraph left me with the impression that he'd almost forgotten all about his night-time serenade to Gardner's love songs until the papers reported that there had been a split-up between a once-high-profile couple. Most likely 1 to 1.5 inches at most. Music failed to move Mrs Gardner.

Come Rain or Come Shine and Malvern Hills are a little more easy to relate to. Music is what

more to come...

Edit - "Nocturnes" is now my eternal laptop stand. It was so tepid.