Kazuo Ishiguro.

ISHIGURO, Kazuo, 1954-; BRENNAN, Timothy

Presents literary criticism which informs that the professional restrictions besetting cosmopolitan writers, the critic Timothy Brennan suggests that they are unable to enter the scene of letters as innovations in the way, for example, that a talented North American novelist without ethnic baggage might be packaged as the rude boy or girl of a new generation. This is a simple fact of life for some artists, and it has certainly been a constant in the authorial reception of the Anglo-Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro. In his early works he fends off straitjacket culturalist assumptions even as he wrestles with compelling questions of identity. He writes from the exigencies of his location within and between two cultures, but he also refuses to make a fetish of difference, to pander to demands for exotica and titillation. Ishiguro deploys psychological realism only to undermine it in the denouement. Another key attribute is his scrutiny of the tropes we use to describe ourselves and others. INSET: A Kazuo Ishiguro Checlist.