Nocturnes -
Five Stories of Music and Nightfallby Kazuo Ishiguro
I like/love all three of Ishiguro's novels that I have read so far, and this collection of short stories is as beautifully written and evocative as you would expect. Plus, all of them are about music, and people "at some moment of reckoning", as the blurb on the back of the book informs me, so I thought there was no way that this could go wrong. And I absolutely loved the first story - three-dimensional characters you knew and cared about after only a page or two, and a beautiful and melancholic plot that suited the city of Venice where it was set. After that, the other stories were about different people in different parts of the world, but they all shared a quality of loss, of break-up, of melancholia, of unfulfilled dreams and ambitions, both musically and romantically, and of extremely uncertain futures, so that by the end of the book, I had read something quite beautiful, but I was utterly depressed. I probably should have spread the stories out over a longer period of time, but of course I didn't know that beforehand.
I'm reading Mark Kermode's
It's only a Movie now - that should help raise my spirits