Apr
18
Ishiguro & Cross-eyed Romance
Filed Under Fiction |
In the current Spring ‘08 issue of The Paris Review, Kaz Ishiguro is interviewed. My favorite Ishiguro novel, by the way, is The Unconsoled, but it might pale in comparison to the radio play he submitted to BBC right after he graduated from college (it was politely rejected). The play was called “Potatoes and Lovers,” and Ishiguro says that in the manuscript, he spelled potatoes as “potatos.” Ishiguro seems strangely proud of it, and mentions that he wouldn’t mind other people seeing it now -
It was about two young people who work in a fish-and-chips cafe. They are both severely cross-eyed, and they fall in love with each other, but they never acknowledge the fact that they’re cross-eyed. It’s the unspoken thing between them. At the end of the story, they decide not to marry, after the narrator has a strange dream where he sees a family coming toward him on the seaside pier. The parents are cross-eyed, the children are cross-eyed, the dog is cross-eyed, and he says, All right, we’re not going to marry.
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