That’s precisely what I remember discovering, and being mesmerized by, in my also long-ago reading of his first novel, A Pale View of Hills.
This year’s Nobel Prize winner in literature, Kazuo Ishiguro, writes with a weird, weight-bearing austerity which really captured and held me. I remember that thin novel more vividly than I remember most.
When you are young, things like your moral stance and your political position seem very important. I’d spend long nights with my friends sorting out moral and political positions that we thought would take us through adult life. And part of that would end up meaning we despised some people not for what they did, but for the opinions they professed to hold. But as I’ve got older I think I’ve realised that while it is important to have principles, you have far less control of what happens. These principles and positions only get you so far because what actually happens is that you don’t carefully chart your way through life.