"The book was at a reasonably high position on the New York Times... before I was in the country. I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if my presence here would push it up or down"
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Ishiguro turns what could be a victory lap into a controlled demolition of literary prestige. The New York Times list is presented as a weather report: the book was already “at a reasonably high position” before he even arrived. That calm, almost bureaucratic phrasing is doing work. It refuses the breathless mythology that authors “make” books through charisma and publicity tours, and it also punctures the industry’s favorite superstition: that visibility equals value.
Calling it an “interesting experiment” is the tell. Ishiguro frames his own promotional presence like a variable in a lab, not a spark of genius. The joke is dry but pointed: the author, supposedly the sovereign source of the work’s aura, might just as plausibly lower the temperature as raise it. It’s self-deprecation with an edge, because it exposes how arbitrary the marketplace can be while acknowledging that he’s still forced to participate in its rituals.
The line also carries a quiet anxiety about authorship in a media-saturated culture. “My presence here” sounds less like a literary event than a celebrity appearance, an imported body expected to perform. Ishiguro, whose fiction often circles identity, displacement, and the gap between public narrative and private reality, is effectively staging that gap in real time. The subtext: the book is one thing; the author-tour is another product entirely, and nobody is fully sure which one readers are buying.
Calling it an “interesting experiment” is the tell. Ishiguro frames his own promotional presence like a variable in a lab, not a spark of genius. The joke is dry but pointed: the author, supposedly the sovereign source of the work’s aura, might just as plausibly lower the temperature as raise it. It’s self-deprecation with an edge, because it exposes how arbitrary the marketplace can be while acknowledging that he’s still forced to participate in its rituals.
The line also carries a quiet anxiety about authorship in a media-saturated culture. “My presence here” sounds less like a literary event than a celebrity appearance, an imported body expected to perform. Ishiguro, whose fiction often circles identity, displacement, and the gap between public narrative and private reality, is effectively staging that gap in real time. The subtext: the book is one thing; the author-tour is another product entirely, and nobody is fully sure which one readers are buying.
Quote Details
| Topic | Book |
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