Unreliable Narrators Poem by gershon hepner

In novels most narrators are reliable,
the version of their stories undeniable.
In life, however, stories we relate may vary
from the facts considerably, for truth is scary.
We try to give a happy ending to our versions
of our own narratives, and go on long excursions
from wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, and hope
our readers buy into our operatic soap,
in which we play a role both plausible and viable,
unlike the facts that are not certifiable,
but, though recorded to be in no manner humbling,
can cause some major problems once they’ve started crumbling.

Inspired by Michiko Kakutani’s review of Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro, the author of Remains of the Day. She reviewed it together with Philip Roth’s latest novel, “The Humbling”:
Like so many of Mr. Ishiguro’s unreliable narrators, Steve, the hero of “Nocturne, ” is practiced in the art of self-deception. In this case Steve allows his estranged wife’s new boyfriend to pay for his plastic surgery — partly, we’re told, because he thinks a new face might somehow win his wife back, and partly because he thinks his agent might be right, and a pretty face might get him more work. That a serious jazz musician would submit to such a ploy seems ludicrous to begin with, and to make matters worse, Mr. Ishiguro then has Steve and Lindy — both with heavily bandaged faces — go on a nighttime prowl of their hotel, where they become involved in stealing an award statuette that eventually gets stuck inside a roast turkey. Perhaps this is all meant to be some sort of weird dream sequences — detailing Steve’s subconscious fears about being a loser — but it’s done so maladroitly that it reads like a farcical send-up of the Kafkaesque passages in the author’s ambitious, if awkward,1995 novel “The Unconsoled.”


10/23/09