Down at the Atlantic, Nathaniel Rich touches on Kazuo Ishiguro, memory, and literature’s Borgesian debts:
The answer, as most readers will intuitively conclude, lies between two extremes. Forget everything and you lose your soul; remember everything and you lose the ability to forgive. Ishiguro’s characters, like all of us, are caught between the bliss of ignorance and the agony of Borges’s “Funes the Memorious,” tortured by the curse of total recall. Both our politics and our intimate relationships teeter on this axis. But for Ishiguro, our poet laureate of loss, the mercies of forgetfulness hold the greater fascination.
