When Ray turns up to visit his old university friends Charlie and Emily, he's given a special task: to be so much his useless self that he makes Charlie look good by comparison.
But Ray has his own buried feelings to contend with. Decades earlier, he and Emily would listen to jazz when they were alone, and now, as Sarah Vaughan sings through the speakers, he struggles to control everything the sound brings with it.
In Kazuo Ishiguro's hands, a snapshot of domestic realism becomes a miniature masterpiece of memory and forgetting. Faber Stories, a landmark series of individual volumes, presents masters of the short story form at work in a range of genres and styles.
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Like me, Emily loved old American Broadway songs.
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(@FaberBooks, 3 January 2019, ebook, 43 pages, bought from @AmazonKindle)
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I'm a massive fan of the author but still have a lot of his back catalogue to read. I plan to read all of the books in the Faber Stories series at some point; they are designed to read in one setting. I thought this was a terrific short story. A lot goes on in the story and it felt much longer than a 43 pages. I loved the way this story explores friendship, growing up and success. Ray realises how changed his old friends are and is hurt when he accidentally reads what appears to be an entry in Emily's journal where he's described as 'King of the whiners' which leads to hilarious scenes in which he trashes the apartment as advised by Charlie to pretend a neighbour's dog broke in. At one point he's even on his knees biting magazines to make it more realistic. There are some sombre moments as well as Ray realises they're very different people than they were in college.
