Culture September 24, 2009

In “Cellists”, the final, exquisite story in Kazuo Ishiguro’s new collection, an American woman pretends to be a world-famous cellist and agrees to tutor a promising young Hungarian in her hotel room in an unnamed Italian city. It soon emerges that she cannot play the cello at all: she merely believes she has the potential to be a great cellist. “You have to understand, I am a virtuoso,” she tells him. “But I’m one who’s yet to be unwrapped.” For her, and for many other characters in the book, music represents an ideal self that has little to do with