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Never Let Me Go
From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love.
As a child, Kathy-now thirty-one years old-lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.
And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed-even comforted-by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham s nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood-and about their lives now.
A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance-and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro s finest work.
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First published April 12, 2005
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About the author
Kazuo Ishiguro
77 books41.2k followersSir Kazuo Ishiguro (カズオ・イシグロ or 石黒 一雄), OBE, FRSA, FRSL is a British novelist of Japanese origin and Nobel Laureate in Literature (2017). His family moved to England in 1960. Ishiguro obtained his Bachelor's degree from the University of Kent in 1978 and his Master's from the University of East Anglia's creative writing course in 1980. He became a British citizen in 1982. He now lives in London.
His first novel, A Pale View of Hills, won the 1982 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. His second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, won the 1986 Whitbread Prize. Ishiguro received the 1989 Man Booker prize for his third novel The Remains of the Day. His fourth novel, The Unconsoled, won the 1995 Cheltenham Prize. His latest novel is The Buried Giant, a New York Times bestseller. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2017.
His novels An Artist of the Floating World (1986), When We Were Orphans (2000), and Never Let Me Go (2005) were all shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
In 2008, The Times ranked Ishiguro 32nd on their list of "The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945". In 2017, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, describing him in its citation as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".
His first novel, A Pale View of Hills, won the 1982 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. His second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, won the 1986 Whitbread Prize. Ishiguro received the 1989 Man Booker prize for his third novel The Remains of the Day. His fourth novel, The Unconsoled, won the 1995 Cheltenham Prize. His latest novel is The Buried Giant, a New York Times bestseller. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 2017.
His novels An Artist of the Floating World (1986), When We Were Orphans (2000), and Never Let Me Go (2005) were all shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
In 2008, The Times ranked Ishiguro 32nd on their list of "The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945". In 2017, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, describing him in its citation as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world".
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September 27, 2024
This is a great book to read if you want to feel really fucked up about some things.
Never Let Me Go is a book that itches beneath the skin. It left me uneasy, and on a less acknowledged level, deathly afraid. I didn’t so much finish reading it as emerge from it, gasping like I was breaking the surface of a deep sea. I've been going back and forth about what to say about this story, and I think that to divulge more than a handful of details would be a disservice to the reader. Therefore, this review gestures to some of the themes and plot beats, but seeks to avoid spoilers as much as possible.
Standing years from the page, our narrator Kathy, who is now thirty-one, returns to the scene of her childhood, back to Hailsham School, where she grew up, and where the inconclusive tides of memory, which would not stop, were always going to carry her.
Never Let Me Go’s form mirrors the difficult process of remembering. Kathy is determined to tie the loose cords in her mind, to weave something coherent out of the lost and recovered spaces of her childhood. In the story, the past is closely, obsessively observed; its pieces arranged and rearranged. Kathy is methodical, and she seems to cultivate a certain studied ambivalence and a strong sense of remove. She is careful not to let the past overtake her, to remain always in control. Yet, at points in the narrative, an errant memory might flood her, interrupt her; at which point Kathy’s story abandons its linear progression, becoming vulnerable to detours, digressions, and displacements. Kathy goes back over events to try to make sense of them again, re-examines her own claims, tries to find a clearer angle of approach, to engage every contradictory and countervailing perspective. The resulting narrative is porous and self-conscious, pointing to a sense of glassy fragility. From time to time, the private correspondence of an unspecified second-person “you” also crops up, adding a disconcerting level of intimacy. Exactly who is the “you” being summoned and addressed here? The answer is unclear. One rather feels slightly disarranged by the whole thing, scoured from these intimations of vulnerability. Like watching a solitary ghost host a vigil for forgotten things.
Memory is thus a central theme in the novel. Never Let Me Go offers a searing look at the vexed relationship between the past and the present, and the difficulty of recovering innocent lives from the annihilating forces of stigma and oppression. There are so many silences in this book. Some things are never referred to, never recalled for the reader. How did everything become so apocalyptically wrong? How is no one trying to stop it? How is any of this allowed? The enormity of the answers exists in its own absence of expression.
In Never Let Me Go, silence is the refusal of violence as violence. Kathy’s story, in other words, exists within and against the overwhelming superstructures that demand she unsees the violence that has become normative. In the repeated staging of Kathy’s encounters with the past, one senses a mind too numbed by terror, to accustomed to rupture. Kathy’s voice brings to the surface a conspiracy of silence that is already there, that has travelled with her into the present. At Hailsham, Kathy learned that there are things better left untouched by words: she was “told and not told,” but she knew, nonetheless, that to speak the unspeakable is to stray across a line that is invisible but inviolate. With time and effort, she learned too to move through the silence until it became native to her, a language on its own. It is the method everyone at Hailsham, one way or another, eventually evolves for their survival.
This is not to say that Kathy’s childhood world was entirely circumscribed by silence and its violences. In the midst of so much unfreedom, in this place where hope is so tenuous you want to dig your nails into it just to hold it tighter, Never Let Me Go imagines love and friendship as a fledgling and fugitive enterprise. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy made a collectivity out of their motley crew. Joined together in a kinship of fear and uncertainty, they helped each other endure. But our attachments to each other are never uncomplicated in times of great rupture. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are shaped then ruined by dispossession, by their banishment from the category of “human,” and later, by their belief in belonging to a world where their destinies are always already circumscribed by predetermined social scripts. It is brutally hard to see them repeatedly reach out to one another across space and time and an abundance of history and such a weight of responsibility and perpetual loss—and never quite grasp one another. Only a gorge remains, stretching on and on between them, gaping open like a slash in fabric.
What I’m saying is—Don’t expect this book to light up your insides with hope. Never Let Me Go does not end with lightness, resistance, or even the spectral possibility of healing. By the end, Kathy’s access to a story of resilience and agency is irretrievable. This is not the story of the heroic individual or individuals on a mission against the perverse, rotten world, of justice prevailing in a saga of survival. Instead, at the close of the novel, Kathy simply “drive[s] off to wherever it was [she] was supposed to be.” The finality, the absoluteness of this last line—“supposed to be”—is haunting.
The silences, gaps, and absences—the sheer irresolution of the narrative—make Never Let Me Go a difficult novel, and a demanding one. What it demands of the reader is that we think: about our positions of distance, of non-implication, vis-à-vis the senseless and seemingly unstoppable atrocities in the world, and about the power of silence itself. The moral contrast between the horror of what it is being done to Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy and the absence of urgency to prevent it does a great deal of work in this book. Ishiguro raises a host of questions about how complicity gestates and develops, how unexamined fear leads to non-recognition, and worse, to hatred of the other, and how habit and memory can keep our bodies moving in the right directions, playing pretend, desperate to slip back into some version of normality. In that sense, Never Let Me Go is a powerful, cognitive mapping of our time. It holds a mirror to the face of our own society, and demands we let ourselves be upended by the inhumanity and rottenness of our social systems, by the institutionalized dystopia of the everyday, where survival is never valiant, only crude and hideous, and where hope too often dies without a whimper. I can’t imagine anyone reading the news and reading this book and not feeling deeply, horrifically implicated.
But I suspect that is the point. Never Let Me Go demands we let ourselves be hit by the violence and sadism of inaction, so it might dare us to hope, to manifest the otherwise worlds the novel's ultimately bleak ending could not imagine.
Never Let Me Go is a book that itches beneath the skin. It left me uneasy, and on a less acknowledged level, deathly afraid. I didn’t so much finish reading it as emerge from it, gasping like I was breaking the surface of a deep sea. I've been going back and forth about what to say about this story, and I think that to divulge more than a handful of details would be a disservice to the reader. Therefore, this review gestures to some of the themes and plot beats, but seeks to avoid spoilers as much as possible.
Standing years from the page, our narrator Kathy, who is now thirty-one, returns to the scene of her childhood, back to Hailsham School, where she grew up, and where the inconclusive tides of memory, which would not stop, were always going to carry her.
Never Let Me Go’s form mirrors the difficult process of remembering. Kathy is determined to tie the loose cords in her mind, to weave something coherent out of the lost and recovered spaces of her childhood. In the story, the past is closely, obsessively observed; its pieces arranged and rearranged. Kathy is methodical, and she seems to cultivate a certain studied ambivalence and a strong sense of remove. She is careful not to let the past overtake her, to remain always in control. Yet, at points in the narrative, an errant memory might flood her, interrupt her; at which point Kathy’s story abandons its linear progression, becoming vulnerable to detours, digressions, and displacements. Kathy goes back over events to try to make sense of them again, re-examines her own claims, tries to find a clearer angle of approach, to engage every contradictory and countervailing perspective. The resulting narrative is porous and self-conscious, pointing to a sense of glassy fragility. From time to time, the private correspondence of an unspecified second-person “you” also crops up, adding a disconcerting level of intimacy. Exactly who is the “you” being summoned and addressed here? The answer is unclear. One rather feels slightly disarranged by the whole thing, scoured from these intimations of vulnerability. Like watching a solitary ghost host a vigil for forgotten things.
Memory is thus a central theme in the novel. Never Let Me Go offers a searing look at the vexed relationship between the past and the present, and the difficulty of recovering innocent lives from the annihilating forces of stigma and oppression. There are so many silences in this book. Some things are never referred to, never recalled for the reader. How did everything become so apocalyptically wrong? How is no one trying to stop it? How is any of this allowed? The enormity of the answers exists in its own absence of expression.
In Never Let Me Go, silence is the refusal of violence as violence. Kathy’s story, in other words, exists within and against the overwhelming superstructures that demand she unsees the violence that has become normative. In the repeated staging of Kathy’s encounters with the past, one senses a mind too numbed by terror, to accustomed to rupture. Kathy’s voice brings to the surface a conspiracy of silence that is already there, that has travelled with her into the present. At Hailsham, Kathy learned that there are things better left untouched by words: she was “told and not told,” but she knew, nonetheless, that to speak the unspeakable is to stray across a line that is invisible but inviolate. With time and effort, she learned too to move through the silence until it became native to her, a language on its own. It is the method everyone at Hailsham, one way or another, eventually evolves for their survival.
This is not to say that Kathy’s childhood world was entirely circumscribed by silence and its violences. In the midst of so much unfreedom, in this place where hope is so tenuous you want to dig your nails into it just to hold it tighter, Never Let Me Go imagines love and friendship as a fledgling and fugitive enterprise. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy made a collectivity out of their motley crew. Joined together in a kinship of fear and uncertainty, they helped each other endure. But our attachments to each other are never uncomplicated in times of great rupture. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy are shaped then ruined by dispossession, by their banishment from the category of “human,” and later, by their belief in belonging to a world where their destinies are always already circumscribed by predetermined social scripts. It is brutally hard to see them repeatedly reach out to one another across space and time and an abundance of history and such a weight of responsibility and perpetual loss—and never quite grasp one another. Only a gorge remains, stretching on and on between them, gaping open like a slash in fabric.
What I’m saying is—Don’t expect this book to light up your insides with hope. Never Let Me Go does not end with lightness, resistance, or even the spectral possibility of healing. By the end, Kathy’s access to a story of resilience and agency is irretrievable. This is not the story of the heroic individual or individuals on a mission against the perverse, rotten world, of justice prevailing in a saga of survival. Instead, at the close of the novel, Kathy simply “drive[s] off to wherever it was [she] was supposed to be.” The finality, the absoluteness of this last line—“supposed to be”—is haunting.
The silences, gaps, and absences—the sheer irresolution of the narrative—make Never Let Me Go a difficult novel, and a demanding one. What it demands of the reader is that we think: about our positions of distance, of non-implication, vis-à-vis the senseless and seemingly unstoppable atrocities in the world, and about the power of silence itself. The moral contrast between the horror of what it is being done to Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy and the absence of urgency to prevent it does a great deal of work in this book. Ishiguro raises a host of questions about how complicity gestates and develops, how unexamined fear leads to non-recognition, and worse, to hatred of the other, and how habit and memory can keep our bodies moving in the right directions, playing pretend, desperate to slip back into some version of normality. In that sense, Never Let Me Go is a powerful, cognitive mapping of our time. It holds a mirror to the face of our own society, and demands we let ourselves be upended by the inhumanity and rottenness of our social systems, by the institutionalized dystopia of the everyday, where survival is never valiant, only crude and hideous, and where hope too often dies without a whimper. I can’t imagine anyone reading the news and reading this book and not feeling deeply, horrifically implicated.
But I suspect that is the point. Never Let Me Go demands we let ourselves be hit by the violence and sadism of inaction, so it might dare us to hope, to manifest the otherwise worlds the novel's ultimately bleak ending could not imagine.
August 16, 2010
Let me start by saying that my review might contain some plot spoilers. However I personally don't think that knowing the plot in advance will in any way diminish the enjoyment of this story. The beauty of this book is not in the plot, but in its execution.
Another friendly warning: Never Let Me Go is for some reason often classified as science fiction. This is why so many readers end up disappointed I think. This novel is literary fiction at its finest. So if you look down on literary fiction and consider books written by authors like Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, and Jose Saramago pretentious, this is not a story for you.
Now to the novel itself. Kathy, now 31, is a former student of an English boarding school Hailsham. Hailsham is a school for kids with special purpose. All education in this school is geared towards conditioning its student to accept their "special" destiny as a given. As Kathy is getting ready to make her first donation while being a carer for other donors, she recounts her life in Hailsham and on her own, mostly in a form of anecdotes about herself and her best friends Ruth and Tommy, their rivalries, jealousies, and affection for each other. There is nothing particularly shocking, gruesome, or intense about Kathy's story, and yet it leaves you with a sense of being a part of a nightmare.
After reading quite a few reviews of the book, I can say that I loved the aspects of it that many abhorred. What other readers say about Kathy - her detachment, her lack of fire and rebellion, about broke my heart. What can be more heartbreaking than witnessing human lives wasted? Let me tell you - witnessing lives taken away from people who do not even realize what is being taken away from them, people who do not understand the value of their existence, people who do not know they have a right for more.
There is of course, much more to the story. The novel explores the futility of human life, its un-bargainable eventual "completion" and how we all choose to deal with the inevitable end. But for me personally the pain of Kathy's quiet resignation to her fate was what stood out and touched me the most.
In many ways Never Let Me Go reminded me of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Only Kathy is a step further from Offred. If Offred knows what horrors she is subjected to, but has no strength or will to change her circumstances, Kathy doesn't even know that her life "purpose," her destiny is inhumane. This work is also, to me, very reminiscent of Ian McEwan's Atonement. McEwan is a master of subtle build-up to an almost unbearable, life-shattering moment, but Ishiguro is a master of subtle telling without telling, foreshadowing, and emphasizing the gravity of the unsaid.
What else can I say about this novel? Never Let Me Go is a masterfully written work of fiction which raises questions of what it is to be human, what you choose to do in the face of an impending death and what happens when science is not accompanied by ethics. Subtle, eerie, chilling, and poignant. One of the best books I have read this year.
Another friendly warning: Never Let Me Go is for some reason often classified as science fiction. This is why so many readers end up disappointed I think. This novel is literary fiction at its finest. So if you look down on literary fiction and consider books written by authors like Ian McEwan, Margaret Atwood, and Jose Saramago pretentious, this is not a story for you.
Now to the novel itself. Kathy, now 31, is a former student of an English boarding school Hailsham. Hailsham is a school for kids with special purpose. All education in this school is geared towards conditioning its student to accept their "special" destiny as a given. As Kathy is getting ready to make her first donation while being a carer for other donors, she recounts her life in Hailsham and on her own, mostly in a form of anecdotes about herself and her best friends Ruth and Tommy, their rivalries, jealousies, and affection for each other. There is nothing particularly shocking, gruesome, or intense about Kathy's story, and yet it leaves you with a sense of being a part of a nightmare.
After reading quite a few reviews of the book, I can say that I loved the aspects of it that many abhorred. What other readers say about Kathy - her detachment, her lack of fire and rebellion, about broke my heart. What can be more heartbreaking than witnessing human lives wasted? Let me tell you - witnessing lives taken away from people who do not even realize what is being taken away from them, people who do not understand the value of their existence, people who do not know they have a right for more.
There is of course, much more to the story. The novel explores the futility of human life, its un-bargainable eventual "completion" and how we all choose to deal with the inevitable end. But for me personally the pain of Kathy's quiet resignation to her fate was what stood out and touched me the most.
In many ways Never Let Me Go reminded me of The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Only Kathy is a step further from Offred. If Offred knows what horrors she is subjected to, but has no strength or will to change her circumstances, Kathy doesn't even know that her life "purpose," her destiny is inhumane. This work is also, to me, very reminiscent of Ian McEwan's Atonement. McEwan is a master of subtle build-up to an almost unbearable, life-shattering moment, but Ishiguro is a master of subtle telling without telling, foreshadowing, and emphasizing the gravity of the unsaid.
What else can I say about this novel? Never Let Me Go is a masterfully written work of fiction which raises questions of what it is to be human, what you choose to do in the face of an impending death and what happens when science is not accompanied by ethics. Subtle, eerie, chilling, and poignant. One of the best books I have read this year.
May 3, 2025
It is a pity that people are told this is a science fiction book before they read it. I feel the least interesting thing about it is that it is science fiction. I mean this in much the same way that the least interesting thing one could say about 1984 is that it is science fiction. As a piece of literature I enjoyed it much more than Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and even more than Huxley's Brave New World.
The themes that make this book most interesting are to do with the social alienation of groups of people on the basis of inherited genetic characteristics. In fact, as a critique of racism this book is utterly brilliant. Those being racially alienated are genetically identical (they are in fact clones) to those attacking them.
Plato believed those 'in the know' should tell lies to those 'who do not know' so as to protect them from the all too horrible truths about life. I have always hated this aspect of Plato, always finding it grotesque and frightening in its implications. Those implications are drawn out in all their disturbing horror here.
This book has much to say about the nature of 'illness' and how those inflicted with an 'illness' use the scars of that illness as the badges of truly belonging to the group. So that those 'less advanced' in the ravages of the illness don't really know or really belong to the group. As a portrait of victims adopting to being victims it says much about us as humans - thoughtful readers may find it says far too much. I write this on World Aids Day.
Ishiguro writes the most nightmarish novels I've ever read. In others, such as The Unconsoled or When We Were Orphans the nightmare feeling is due to the dreamlike oddity of the interconnection of events in the story. One reads these books in much the same way that one wakes from a disturbing dream, with feelings of disorientation and anxiety. Even though this is the most literal 'nightmare book' of his I have read - the world he creates being literally a nightmare, and made all the worse by being set in the recent past - it is a book totally lacking in that strange dreamlike quality so characteristic of these other novels. In this sense it seemed less of a nightmare than these others. If you struggled with these, you will not struggle with this in quite the same way.
He also has fascinating and quite painful things to say about the nature of love and how love has a proper time, a time that may be lost or missed. As someone who has loved, lost and missed I found this particularly challenging. The relationship between sex and love and illness is perhaps something people may find simply too much - not because this is handled in any way that is too explicit, but because I do believe we like to think that sex, as a manifestation of love, has curative and redemptive powers. A book that questions this, questions something we hold very dear and some readers may find this too much to ask.
This is also a book about betrayal. The betrayals we commit against those we love the most and yet that we barely can understand or explain after we have committed them - these are constant throughout the book. He is a writer all too aware of the human condition. The scene which gives the book its title is a wonderful example of the near impossibility of our being understood by others and yet our endless desire for just such an understanding.
There is nothing easy about reading this book - although it is written in the simplest of prose. It has an honesty of feeling that brands one's soul.
I loved this book and have thought about it a lot since I finished reading it and will think about it more. There is much more I would like to say, but there is no space. May we all be good carers before we complete.
The themes that make this book most interesting are to do with the social alienation of groups of people on the basis of inherited genetic characteristics. In fact, as a critique of racism this book is utterly brilliant. Those being racially alienated are genetically identical (they are in fact clones) to those attacking them.
Plato believed those 'in the know' should tell lies to those 'who do not know' so as to protect them from the all too horrible truths about life. I have always hated this aspect of Plato, always finding it grotesque and frightening in its implications. Those implications are drawn out in all their disturbing horror here.
This book has much to say about the nature of 'illness' and how those inflicted with an 'illness' use the scars of that illness as the badges of truly belonging to the group. So that those 'less advanced' in the ravages of the illness don't really know or really belong to the group. As a portrait of victims adopting to being victims it says much about us as humans - thoughtful readers may find it says far too much. I write this on World Aids Day.
Ishiguro writes the most nightmarish novels I've ever read. In others, such as The Unconsoled or When We Were Orphans the nightmare feeling is due to the dreamlike oddity of the interconnection of events in the story. One reads these books in much the same way that one wakes from a disturbing dream, with feelings of disorientation and anxiety. Even though this is the most literal 'nightmare book' of his I have read - the world he creates being literally a nightmare, and made all the worse by being set in the recent past - it is a book totally lacking in that strange dreamlike quality so characteristic of these other novels. In this sense it seemed less of a nightmare than these others. If you struggled with these, you will not struggle with this in quite the same way.
He also has fascinating and quite painful things to say about the nature of love and how love has a proper time, a time that may be lost or missed. As someone who has loved, lost and missed I found this particularly challenging. The relationship between sex and love and illness is perhaps something people may find simply too much - not because this is handled in any way that is too explicit, but because I do believe we like to think that sex, as a manifestation of love, has curative and redemptive powers. A book that questions this, questions something we hold very dear and some readers may find this too much to ask.
This is also a book about betrayal. The betrayals we commit against those we love the most and yet that we barely can understand or explain after we have committed them - these are constant throughout the book. He is a writer all too aware of the human condition. The scene which gives the book its title is a wonderful example of the near impossibility of our being understood by others and yet our endless desire for just such an understanding.
There is nothing easy about reading this book - although it is written in the simplest of prose. It has an honesty of feeling that brands one's soul.
I loved this book and have thought about it a lot since I finished reading it and will think about it more. There is much more I would like to say, but there is no space. May we all be good carers before we complete.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 8, 2009
You know those random stock characters in sci-fi/action movies, the ones who never get names or any lines? They're always spending their precious few minutes of screen time getting shoved out of the way as the hero hurtles desperately down a hallway, or watching from a safe distance as a climactic fight goes on, or diving out of the way whenever a murderous cyborg smashes through their office window. Have you ever wondered what those people's lives were like? Have you ever thought to yourself, "Man, this movie's interesting and all, but I want to know more about that guy who owned the hotel where Sarah Conner hid from the Terminator. I bet he leads a fascinating life." (believe me, he doesn't.)
Imagine if someone decided to write a book about this kind of person. The result is Never Let Me Go.
(semi-spoilers ahoy, you've been warned) So the book is about a sort of alternate-universe England, where people are cloned and the resulting kids are raised in isolated boarding schools, spending all their time painting and playing sports and getting vague hints about how when they get older they'll have to make "donations." We learn (eventually and with no drama whatsoever) that these kids were created specifically as future organ donors, and that's all they're meant for. Ishiguro introduces us to Kathy, the narrator, and her friends who lived at one of these schools with her - Ruth and Tommy. As I said, we gradually and laboriously learn about the school's real purpose, but it seems almost like a subplot, because the majority of the book is just Kathy nattering on about her school and how she and Ruth got into a fight this one time and also she had a crush on Tommy but he and Ruth were dating so Kathy had sex with some other random guys and oh my god can we get back to the organ donor thing? Seriously the whole book is like that - we get the sense that there's some creepy futuristic stuff going on in the background, but our protagonists don't care because they're too busy telling us about that one time Kathy lost her favorite cassette tape and it was very upsetting.
Even when it seems like a plot's about to start, it's always a false alarm. The trip to a nearby town that the three characters take to find a woman they think may be Ruth's "possible" (a person she may have been cloned from) doesn't pan out, and we realize that the real point of the trip was an attempt to convince the reader that Tommy and Kathy have some sort of romantic attraction to each other. Ruth's possible, and everything it might have meant, is abandoned so that Ishiguro can have another chance to demonstrate his astonishing inability to create any kind of chemistry between two characters.
And the end. Without giving anything away, I'll just say that Kathy and Tommy finally get all the answers about their school and what was actually going on, and they respond by...going about their lives in the exact same way as before.
I mean, good God. Even though this is supposed to be some sort of more intellectual science fiction, I don't care. There's cloning and dystopian undertones; ergo it is sci-fi. And I like my sci-fi loud, shiny, and dramatic, with lots of explosions and computers that talk.
There's a reason Harry Potter starts when he gets his Hogwarts letter, folks. Because no one wants to hear about ordinary people being ordinary - that's kind of the whole point of fiction.
Imagine if someone decided to write a book about this kind of person. The result is Never Let Me Go.
(semi-spoilers ahoy, you've been warned) So the book is about a sort of alternate-universe England, where people are cloned and the resulting kids are raised in isolated boarding schools, spending all their time painting and playing sports and getting vague hints about how when they get older they'll have to make "donations." We learn (eventually and with no drama whatsoever) that these kids were created specifically as future organ donors, and that's all they're meant for. Ishiguro introduces us to Kathy, the narrator, and her friends who lived at one of these schools with her - Ruth and Tommy. As I said, we gradually and laboriously learn about the school's real purpose, but it seems almost like a subplot, because the majority of the book is just Kathy nattering on about her school and how she and Ruth got into a fight this one time and also she had a crush on Tommy but he and Ruth were dating so Kathy had sex with some other random guys and oh my god can we get back to the organ donor thing? Seriously the whole book is like that - we get the sense that there's some creepy futuristic stuff going on in the background, but our protagonists don't care because they're too busy telling us about that one time Kathy lost her favorite cassette tape and it was very upsetting.
Even when it seems like a plot's about to start, it's always a false alarm. The trip to a nearby town that the three characters take to find a woman they think may be Ruth's "possible" (a person she may have been cloned from) doesn't pan out, and we realize that the real point of the trip was an attempt to convince the reader that Tommy and Kathy have some sort of romantic attraction to each other. Ruth's possible, and everything it might have meant, is abandoned so that Ishiguro can have another chance to demonstrate his astonishing inability to create any kind of chemistry between two characters.
And the end. Without giving anything away, I'll just say that Kathy and Tommy finally get all the answers about their school and what was actually going on, and they respond by...going about their lives in the exact same way as before.
I mean, good God. Even though this is supposed to be some sort of more intellectual science fiction, I don't care. There's cloning and dystopian undertones; ergo it is sci-fi. And I like my sci-fi loud, shiny, and dramatic, with lots of explosions and computers that talk.
There's a reason Harry Potter starts when he gets his Hogwarts letter, folks. Because no one wants to hear about ordinary people being ordinary - that's kind of the whole point of fiction.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 3, 2007
I can see Never Let Me Go being great for book clubs because it will generate a lot of discussion.
That being said, I didn't care for the book, for a couple of different reasons. The writing style is very conversational -- very much like you're having a discussion with the protagonist. The thing that annoyed me the most about this was the fact that the things that happened (so bob and I went walking to the store and we had a fight about the tree at school) and then the writer would tell you about the tree and why it was significant, then tell you about the fight. This sort of device is interesting the first few times you see it, but it started to annoy me over time. Maybe because I talk like that, and get off into tangents and anecdotes.
Also, at the heart of the store is the purpose/fate of the main characters. I get the impression that the author wanted to drop clues about it, and then reveal it so that it is a shocking twist (who's Kaiser Soeze? ;) The thing is, the references really aren't that subtle, so by the time the twist is reavealed, it's not all that exciting. Not only that, but I had so many questions at the end. Like -- these people know their fate, but they never think to question it, and, in fact, seem to be glad for it.
This was supposed to be a coming of age story. Generally "coming of age" involves people growing up and moving forward with their lives; often they need to overcome some obstacle to reveal their potential. However, the characters seem to be stagnate the whole way through; their fate doesn't change. The blurb on the back of the book mentions that the characters, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, all have a shared background that's special, and implies that they're lucky. When two of the charaters confront someone to see if they can defer their fate (they don't even bother trying to change it), we find out a little bit of what makes their shared background special, but we aren't given anything to compare it to (we're just told that similar people have horrible existences, but not how). And they find out that they can't defer their fate, but they don't really seem to care; they don't even seem to be particularly glad that they tried.
I've seen a couple of reviews compare this to book to Aldous Huxley's classic "Brave New World" and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale". Not even close. In both of these books we're exposed to an alternate reality, and we see how the main characters deal with their situations. Kazuo Ishiguro tries to sneak the alternate reality into the story, to take us by surprise.
I could go on, but I won't. Let's just say that I didn't care for this book and leave it at that.
That being said, I didn't care for the book, for a couple of different reasons. The writing style is very conversational -- very much like you're having a discussion with the protagonist. The thing that annoyed me the most about this was the fact that the things that happened (so bob and I went walking to the store and we had a fight about the tree at school) and then the writer would tell you about the tree and why it was significant, then tell you about the fight. This sort of device is interesting the first few times you see it, but it started to annoy me over time. Maybe because I talk like that, and get off into tangents and anecdotes.
Also, at the heart of the store is the purpose/fate of the main characters. I get the impression that the author wanted to drop clues about it, and then reveal it so that it is a shocking twist (who's Kaiser Soeze? ;) The thing is, the references really aren't that subtle, so by the time the twist is reavealed, it's not all that exciting. Not only that, but I had so many questions at the end. Like -- these people know their fate, but they never think to question it, and, in fact, seem to be glad for it.
This was supposed to be a coming of age story. Generally "coming of age" involves people growing up and moving forward with their lives; often they need to overcome some obstacle to reveal their potential. However, the characters seem to be stagnate the whole way through; their fate doesn't change. The blurb on the back of the book mentions that the characters, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, all have a shared background that's special, and implies that they're lucky. When two of the charaters confront someone to see if they can defer their fate (they don't even bother trying to change it), we find out a little bit of what makes their shared background special, but we aren't given anything to compare it to (we're just told that similar people have horrible existences, but not how). And they find out that they can't defer their fate, but they don't really seem to care; they don't even seem to be particularly glad that they tried.
I've seen a couple of reviews compare this to book to Aldous Huxley's classic "Brave New World" and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale". Not even close. In both of these books we're exposed to an alternate reality, and we see how the main characters deal with their situations. Kazuo Ishiguro tries to sneak the alternate reality into the story, to take us by surprise.
I could go on, but I won't. Let's just say that I didn't care for this book and leave it at that.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 20, 2020
Ah f**kin' British writers! My inclination to adore everyone from Evelyn Waugh to Charles Dickens, from Alex Garland to Zadie Smith seems very ingrained (VERY DEEP) inside me, primordial, & there must be SOME bloody reason why I find most English fiction so alluring. I think it has mostly to do with mood. It may linger deliciously...
The best book I've read all year (though not including Graham Greene's "The Quiet American") is about a microsociety of students in a boarding school hybrid named Hailsham. While there they do rounds and rounds of arts and crafts and come of age together, grow up, & yet there is something so not right with their seclusion and it takes page upon page to discover why it is that they are there. It is horrific, it is bizarre, this secret is handled with so much craft that it is indeed this attribute that marks this outstanding (quite brutal) masterpiece apart from all others.
There is an incredibly subtle mastery of several different genres here. Sci-fi meshes impeccably with allegory which is played out in the manner of a Gothic romance. Because the characters are trapped in all of this, the end result is (The Genre Supreme:) Tragedy. I feel so bad for Ruth, Tommy & especially for Kath, the wise but all-too-frail narrator, but at least their petition, which is the book's title, is true. This one is now on the list of all those I cannot let go or do without.
The best book I've read all year (though not including Graham Greene's "The Quiet American") is about a microsociety of students in a boarding school hybrid named Hailsham. While there they do rounds and rounds of arts and crafts and come of age together, grow up, & yet there is something so not right with their seclusion and it takes page upon page to discover why it is that they are there. It is horrific, it is bizarre, this secret is handled with so much craft that it is indeed this attribute that marks this outstanding (quite brutal) masterpiece apart from all others.
There is an incredibly subtle mastery of several different genres here. Sci-fi meshes impeccably with allegory which is played out in the manner of a Gothic romance. Because the characters are trapped in all of this, the end result is (The Genre Supreme:) Tragedy. I feel so bad for Ruth, Tommy & especially for Kath, the wise but all-too-frail narrator, but at least their petition, which is the book's title, is true. This one is now on the list of all those I cannot let go or do without.
December 13, 2023
I just...don't know how you take a book with a plotline as interesting and creepy and unique as this one and turn it into an unrelenting snoozefest, party of one.
When I hear "the best novel of the decade," I expect brilliance.
When I hear "now a major motion picture starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley," I expect excitement.
When I hear "millions of copies sold, presumably, based on the number of Goodreads ratings there are," I expect memorable characters or writing or storytelling or SOMETHING.
But I got nothing.
I've put off writing this review for a month, which is kind of but not super unusual for me admittedly, because I do not remember a thing about it.
And not really because I have forgotten the whole thing, but more because...well, what's to remember?
Bottom line: If anyone is looking for a nice little one way getaway to snoozeville, I have the book for you!
------------
pre-review
yes, the ending of this made me sad, but at the same time and in a much more pressing way this is maybe one of the most boring books i've ever read.
review to come / 2ish stars
------------
tbr review
i will read:
1) every book that is called the best of the decade
2) every book that was then adapted into a movie starring carey mulligan OR keira knightley OR andrew garfield that i can watch.
so basically i'm reading this 4 times over.
When I hear "the best novel of the decade," I expect brilliance.
When I hear "now a major motion picture starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley," I expect excitement.
When I hear "millions of copies sold, presumably, based on the number of Goodreads ratings there are," I expect memorable characters or writing or storytelling or SOMETHING.
But I got nothing.
I've put off writing this review for a month, which is kind of but not super unusual for me admittedly, because I do not remember a thing about it.
And not really because I have forgotten the whole thing, but more because...well, what's to remember?
Bottom line: If anyone is looking for a nice little one way getaway to snoozeville, I have the book for you!
------------
pre-review
yes, the ending of this made me sad, but at the same time and in a much more pressing way this is maybe one of the most boring books i've ever read.
review to come / 2ish stars
------------
tbr review
i will read:
1) every book that is called the best of the decade
2) every book that was then adapted into a movie starring carey mulligan OR keira knightley OR andrew garfield that i can watch.
so basically i'm reading this 4 times over.
March 3, 2008
It's very important, if you're intending to read this book, that you don't read any reviews or listen to any talk about it first. I had no idea what this book was about before I read it - and the blurb gives you a very different impression, actually - and so I slipped easily into a story that was as engrossing as it was revealing.
If you know something about what to expect, though, I don't think you'll enjoy it nearly as much. It's a bit like an art installation that requires audience participation: you have to do your bit, too, to make it work, so it makes sense, so it tells the story it was meant to tell. Keep yourself in the dark, that's my advice. Because of this, there's no point in writing an actual review.
If you know something about what to expect, though, I don't think you'll enjoy it nearly as much. It's a bit like an art installation that requires audience participation: you have to do your bit, too, to make it work, so it makes sense, so it tells the story it was meant to tell. Keep yourself in the dark, that's my advice. Because of this, there's no point in writing an actual review.
January 26, 2024
this book was not AT ALL what i expected.
from a writing standpoint, this is easily 5 stars. but overall, the story left something to be desired. i also didn’t find this to be as devastating as most people say it is. it’s objectively a sad story, but to me it was more disturbing than anything else.
no one who recommends this book ever says what it’s actually about (also i rarely read synopses), so i had no idea that this is speculative fiction and not literary fiction. so to say that i was shocked when i got to some of the more sci-fi elements would be an understatement loll
from a writing standpoint, this is easily 5 stars. but overall, the story left something to be desired. i also didn’t find this to be as devastating as most people say it is. it’s objectively a sad story, but to me it was more disturbing than anything else.
no one who recommends this book ever says what it’s actually about (also i rarely read synopses), so i had no idea that this is speculative fiction and not literary fiction. so to say that i was shocked when i got to some of the more sci-fi elements would be an understatement loll
October 30, 2022
DIALOGUE:
Imagine a restaurant, London, mid-2003.
Publisher: Hey, K, we need another novel and we need it quick.
K: I know, I know.
Publisher: Another “Remains of the Day”. Something Hollywood can turn into a hit.
K: I’m working on it.
Publisher: Any ideas?
K: Well, I’ve been reading some Jonathan Swift.
Publisher: Who?
K: You know, “Gulliver’s Travels”.
Publisher: Oh, yeah, Jack Black. It's in pre-production.
K: Well, he had a modest proposal about how to stop the children of the poor being a burden…
Publisher: I’m with you, yep, delinquents, sounds good.
K: …he wanted to stop them being a burden to their parents…
Publisher: Yep, with you.
K: … and the Country.
Publisher: Yep, a Thatcherite angle, I think it’s Maggie’s time again.
K: Anyway, he had this idea that you could kill two birds with one stone…you could end the kids’ misery and the poverty of their parents at the same time…
Publisher: Let me guess, you could eat them, ha ha.
K: You’ve read it?
Publisher: No… wait, you’re kidding me, aren’t you?
K: No, that’s the whole point of the story.
Publisher: What, eat your kids?
K: No, not your own kids, other people’s kids.
Publisher: How could anyone do it?
K: He goes into that… stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled…
Publisher: Yuck.
K: He even talks about making them into a fricassee or a ragout.
Publisher: It’s a bit out there, K.
K: I was thinking of updating it a bit.
Publisher: How would you do that?
K: I was thinking I could tell the story from the point of view of a midwife who…
Publisher: Someone who has to care for the kids?
K: Yeah, until they turn 12 months or something...
Publisher: Let me guess, then she hands them over to a child butcher or something?
K: Yeah.
Publisher: Look, I can see where you’re going with this, but it all sounds a bit grotesque.
K: That’s the whole point. It’s an allegory for our times.
Publisher: I just don’t know whether it’s got legs.
K: Legs? You’re kidding me…it’s got every damned limb and organ you can think of.
Publisher: I don’t want to think of it, I can just imagine the reviews. They’ll call it “The Remains of the Meat Tray”.
K: Ha, I hadn’t thought of that, I was going to call it “The Remains of the Creche”.
Publisher: It gets worse.
K: No, honestly, I was thinking of “Never Let Me Grow”.
Publisher: You mean, like…never let me grow up?
K: Yeah.
Publisher: Do you think you could turn the people into pigs or something, you know, like “Animal Farm”?
K: I was sort of hooked on the idea of using people and narrating the story in a really dead pan voice…
Publisher: I don’t know about dead pan, it sounds more frying pan to me.
K: …If it’s dead pan, people won’t be able to tell whether it’s set in the future or the present. They won’t know how close to reality it is.
Publisher: I just don’t know what I think about this eating babies stuff.
K: But it’s like sci-fi, you can do anything in sci-fi.
Publisher: Look, if we let you do this, they won’t be calling it sci-fi, they’ll be calling it sci-fry.
K: If you let me do it, I guarantee we’ll be able to get Helen Mirren to play the midwife.
Publisher: Who?
K: Helen Mirren, you know, the Queen.
Publisher: No, no. Look, if you can tweak it, you know, think about my idea for a second, set it on Animal Farm, make it about cloning pigs, so they can grow body parts for other pigs or something…
K: I know, put some wizard animals in it and call it “Hogparts”?
Publisher: Come on take me seriously, K, just clone it up and tone it down.
K: I’ll think about it.
Publisher: I’ll see if I can get Keira Knightley to voice one of the pigs.
K: She’s hot.
Publisher: You could call it “Never Let Me Go”.
K: What does that mean?
Publisher: It’s a song my mother used to play. Jane Monheit sang it.
K: I could get used to it. Don’t know what I think about the name Monheit though.
Publisher: It does sound a bit German, doesn't it?
K: What would you think if I called her something more English in the book.
Publisher: Like Judy Bridgewater?
K: Who’s Judy Bridgewater?
Publisher: It’s my mother’s maiden name.
K: Sounds good to me.
Publisher: Look, I normally like to respect an artist’s integrity, but hey, you’re the artist, so I guess that makes it OK.
K: Do you think I could get to meet Keira Knightley?
Publisher: I think so… look I’ve been thinking about it, maybe it’s not such a good idea to turn Keira Knightley into a pig.
K: Sometimes you can’t really see the depth of your own characters, until you can imagine who’s going to play them.
Publisher: So, no pigs?
K: No pigs. I don’t mind the cloning bit though.
Original Review: April 16, 2011
CRITIQUE:
Some More Serious Thoughts
I wrote the above dialogue before I even finished the book.
I wanted to read the book before seeing the film, which I will probably do in the next week or so during the holidays.
When I wrote the dialogue, I probably had about 50 pages to finish, but the dialogue had taken shape in my head, and I didn't want to risk losing it.
There might have been a chance that it would be superseded by my final thoughts on the novel itself.
I had high expectations that I would finally get to appreciate the novel more when I had finished it and absorbed the denouement.
Unfortunately, it left me feeling dissatisfied.
Narrative Style
I didn't find the narrative style appropriate or convincing.
It is told in the first person, by way of recollection of three different periods of Kathy's life.
The periods are discussed chronologically, although during each period, there are occasional allusions to each other period.
There is a lot of internal detail about each period, what was going on in Kathy's head.
Dialogue between the characters is infrequent and sparse.
The novel is overwhelmingly an interior monologue.
Occasionally, there are lapses or flaws in Kathy's memory that she self-consciously draws attention to.
Part of me wanted to say to the author, "It's your story, just get it right, you can remember anything you like, because you're making it up anyway."
But then I guess we have to differentiate between Ishiguro and Kathy.
We have to expect some flaws in the glass, rather than a word and memory perfect narrative.
Still I was never really confident who Kathy was talking to, it wasn't just an interior monologue, there were occasional mentions of a "you", a second person to whom she was talking.
If you had sat down to tell this story to someone else, I think you could or would have told the story far more succinctly and selectively.
The detail and the repetition of environment, atmosphere and mood bulk up the painting, but they don't add to the depth.
Each new layer of paint is superimposed on the previous layer, so that while there might be a lot of paint on the canvas, it is physically, rather then metaphorically, deep.
The Geometry of Love
SPOILER ALERT
While Kathy, Ruth and Tommy live in an horrific environment (perhaps a metaphorical equivalent to a concentration camp), the novel deals with the quality of their humanity under these circumstances.
The guardians might have been trying to work out (incidentally) whether they had souls, but ultimately what we learn is that the positive aspects of human nature can survive or prevail despite the circumstances.
It's interesting that the characters' quest for love initially seemed to be motivated by a belief that it would postpone their donations and prolong their lives.
While this belief turns out to be mistaken, Kathy discovers that love is worth seeking in its own right, regardless of any consequences or notions of cause and effect.
Ruth promoted the belief in the life prolonging effect of love.
In effect, Kathy acquiesced in it and never deliberately interfered in or disrupted the relationship between Ruth and Tommy.
However, when she comes to the end of the story, perhaps she realises that she should have been less acquiescent and let herself express her love for Tommy.
So ultimately, "Never Let Me Go" is a love story, a triangular one at that.
Life is short, you just have to get on with it, you have to take your (true?) love wherever you can find it, even if someone else gets hurt in the process.
When we pair up in love, there is always a chance that someone will miss out or get hurt.
Three into two won't go.
Perhaps, this is actually calculus rather than geometry, but you know what I mean.
Imagine a restaurant, London, mid-2003.
Publisher: Hey, K, we need another novel and we need it quick.
K: I know, I know.
Publisher: Another “Remains of the Day”. Something Hollywood can turn into a hit.
K: I’m working on it.
Publisher: Any ideas?
K: Well, I’ve been reading some Jonathan Swift.
Publisher: Who?
K: You know, “Gulliver’s Travels”.
Publisher: Oh, yeah, Jack Black. It's in pre-production.
K: Well, he had a modest proposal about how to stop the children of the poor being a burden…
Publisher: I’m with you, yep, delinquents, sounds good.
K: …he wanted to stop them being a burden to their parents…
Publisher: Yep, with you.
K: … and the Country.
Publisher: Yep, a Thatcherite angle, I think it’s Maggie’s time again.
K: Anyway, he had this idea that you could kill two birds with one stone…you could end the kids’ misery and the poverty of their parents at the same time…
Publisher: Let me guess, you could eat them, ha ha.
K: You’ve read it?
Publisher: No… wait, you’re kidding me, aren’t you?
K: No, that’s the whole point of the story.
Publisher: What, eat your kids?
K: No, not your own kids, other people’s kids.
Publisher: How could anyone do it?
K: He goes into that… stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled…
Publisher: Yuck.
K: He even talks about making them into a fricassee or a ragout.
Publisher: It’s a bit out there, K.
K: I was thinking of updating it a bit.
Publisher: How would you do that?
K: I was thinking I could tell the story from the point of view of a midwife who…
Publisher: Someone who has to care for the kids?
K: Yeah, until they turn 12 months or something...
Publisher: Let me guess, then she hands them over to a child butcher or something?
K: Yeah.
Publisher: Look, I can see where you’re going with this, but it all sounds a bit grotesque.
K: That’s the whole point. It’s an allegory for our times.
Publisher: I just don’t know whether it’s got legs.
K: Legs? You’re kidding me…it’s got every damned limb and organ you can think of.
Publisher: I don’t want to think of it, I can just imagine the reviews. They’ll call it “The Remains of the Meat Tray”.
K: Ha, I hadn’t thought of that, I was going to call it “The Remains of the Creche”.
Publisher: It gets worse.
K: No, honestly, I was thinking of “Never Let Me Grow”.
Publisher: You mean, like…never let me grow up?
K: Yeah.
Publisher: Do you think you could turn the people into pigs or something, you know, like “Animal Farm”?
K: I was sort of hooked on the idea of using people and narrating the story in a really dead pan voice…
Publisher: I don’t know about dead pan, it sounds more frying pan to me.
K: …If it’s dead pan, people won’t be able to tell whether it’s set in the future or the present. They won’t know how close to reality it is.
Publisher: I just don’t know what I think about this eating babies stuff.
K: But it’s like sci-fi, you can do anything in sci-fi.
Publisher: Look, if we let you do this, they won’t be calling it sci-fi, they’ll be calling it sci-fry.
K: If you let me do it, I guarantee we’ll be able to get Helen Mirren to play the midwife.
Publisher: Who?
K: Helen Mirren, you know, the Queen.
Publisher: No, no. Look, if you can tweak it, you know, think about my idea for a second, set it on Animal Farm, make it about cloning pigs, so they can grow body parts for other pigs or something…
K: I know, put some wizard animals in it and call it “Hogparts”?
Publisher: Come on take me seriously, K, just clone it up and tone it down.
K: I’ll think about it.
Publisher: I’ll see if I can get Keira Knightley to voice one of the pigs.
K: She’s hot.
Publisher: You could call it “Never Let Me Go”.
K: What does that mean?
Publisher: It’s a song my mother used to play. Jane Monheit sang it.
K: I could get used to it. Don’t know what I think about the name Monheit though.
Publisher: It does sound a bit German, doesn't it?
K: What would you think if I called her something more English in the book.
Publisher: Like Judy Bridgewater?
K: Who’s Judy Bridgewater?
Publisher: It’s my mother’s maiden name.
K: Sounds good to me.
Publisher: Look, I normally like to respect an artist’s integrity, but hey, you’re the artist, so I guess that makes it OK.
K: Do you think I could get to meet Keira Knightley?
Publisher: I think so… look I’ve been thinking about it, maybe it’s not such a good idea to turn Keira Knightley into a pig.
K: Sometimes you can’t really see the depth of your own characters, until you can imagine who’s going to play them.
Publisher: So, no pigs?
K: No pigs. I don’t mind the cloning bit though.
Original Review: April 16, 2011
CRITIQUE:
Some More Serious Thoughts
I wrote the above dialogue before I even finished the book.
I wanted to read the book before seeing the film, which I will probably do in the next week or so during the holidays.
When I wrote the dialogue, I probably had about 50 pages to finish, but the dialogue had taken shape in my head, and I didn't want to risk losing it.
There might have been a chance that it would be superseded by my final thoughts on the novel itself.
I had high expectations that I would finally get to appreciate the novel more when I had finished it and absorbed the denouement.
Unfortunately, it left me feeling dissatisfied.
Narrative Style
I didn't find the narrative style appropriate or convincing.
It is told in the first person, by way of recollection of three different periods of Kathy's life.
The periods are discussed chronologically, although during each period, there are occasional allusions to each other period.
There is a lot of internal detail about each period, what was going on in Kathy's head.
Dialogue between the characters is infrequent and sparse.
The novel is overwhelmingly an interior monologue.
Occasionally, there are lapses or flaws in Kathy's memory that she self-consciously draws attention to.
Part of me wanted to say to the author, "It's your story, just get it right, you can remember anything you like, because you're making it up anyway."
But then I guess we have to differentiate between Ishiguro and Kathy.
We have to expect some flaws in the glass, rather than a word and memory perfect narrative.
Still I was never really confident who Kathy was talking to, it wasn't just an interior monologue, there were occasional mentions of a "you", a second person to whom she was talking.
If you had sat down to tell this story to someone else, I think you could or would have told the story far more succinctly and selectively.
The detail and the repetition of environment, atmosphere and mood bulk up the painting, but they don't add to the depth.
Each new layer of paint is superimposed on the previous layer, so that while there might be a lot of paint on the canvas, it is physically, rather then metaphorically, deep.
The Geometry of Love
SPOILER ALERT
While Kathy, Ruth and Tommy live in an horrific environment (perhaps a metaphorical equivalent to a concentration camp), the novel deals with the quality of their humanity under these circumstances.
The guardians might have been trying to work out (incidentally) whether they had souls, but ultimately what we learn is that the positive aspects of human nature can survive or prevail despite the circumstances.
It's interesting that the characters' quest for love initially seemed to be motivated by a belief that it would postpone their donations and prolong their lives.
While this belief turns out to be mistaken, Kathy discovers that love is worth seeking in its own right, regardless of any consequences or notions of cause and effect.
Ruth promoted the belief in the life prolonging effect of love.
In effect, Kathy acquiesced in it and never deliberately interfered in or disrupted the relationship between Ruth and Tommy.
However, when she comes to the end of the story, perhaps she realises that she should have been less acquiescent and let herself express her love for Tommy.
So ultimately, "Never Let Me Go" is a love story, a triangular one at that.
Life is short, you just have to get on with it, you have to take your (true?) love wherever you can find it, even if someone else gets hurt in the process.
When we pair up in love, there is always a chance that someone will miss out or get hurt.
Three into two won't go.
Perhaps, this is actually calculus rather than geometry, but you know what I mean.
March 7, 2016
Despair. That's what I felt after reading this book. The kind of despair that suffocates you, that makes you want to break things, or, at the very least, go out for a run so you can let out the agony bubbling inside you.
It's ironic, but Never Let Me Go is about three friends who are destined to let go of everything - their bodies, their dreams, their lives and the people they love. And there's NOTHING they can do to avoid that fate.
I hate what this book did to me. I hate the author for creating a semblance of hope, only to completely crush it later.
And that means I hate this book for all the right reasons.
“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever.”
It's ironic, but Never Let Me Go is about three friends who are destined to let go of everything - their bodies, their dreams, their lives and the people they love. And there's NOTHING they can do to avoid that fate.
I hate what this book did to me. I hate the author for creating a semblance of hope, only to completely crush it later.
And that means I hate this book for all the right reasons.
“I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever.”
December 31, 2022
I had this book on my TBR shelf for years without realizing that it was essentially dystopian science fiction.
The main character is a woman in her early thirties reflecting back on her life as a child at a private school in England. Kids in the school grew up in an isolated but almost idyllic setting; not knowing their parents but realizing somehow they were “special.” After finishing school they live together in small groups in cottages before heading out into the world on their own. The story is set in the late 1990s.
From the very first page we learn something is not right just from the language. We read that they have become “carers” and “donors;” their teachers are called “guardians” and they know there are people out there called their “possible.” We also learn they can have sex but are incapable of having children and that after their third of fourth “donation” they have “completed.” So we catch on pretty quickly what life has in store for these kids.
There are some genuine mysteries though. Why does the school seem obsessed with encouraging them to do creative work, giving them awards and collecting the best work to go to a gallery that they never see? Where does it go and who sees it and why?
Much of the plot is built around a three-way love story between a boy and two girls at school. One of the girls is the main character. All three are good friends but the boy and one of the girls are a couple.
This quote tells us about the title: “Because maybe, in a way, we didn’t leave it [the school] behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and – no matter how much we despised ourselves for it – unable quite to let each other go.”
I thought it was a good story; it kept my attention all the way through, although not quite as good as the author’s best-known work, Remains of the Day.
Top photo from englishcottagevacation.com
The author from newyorker.com
[Revised, pictures added, spoiler hidden 12/31/22]
The main character is a woman in her early thirties reflecting back on her life as a child at a private school in England. Kids in the school grew up in an isolated but almost idyllic setting; not knowing their parents but realizing somehow they were “special.” After finishing school they live together in small groups in cottages before heading out into the world on their own. The story is set in the late 1990s.
From the very first page we learn something is not right just from the language. We read that they have become “carers” and “donors;” their teachers are called “guardians” and they know there are people out there called their “possible.” We also learn they can have sex but are incapable of having children and that after their third of fourth “donation” they have “completed.” So we catch on pretty quickly what life has in store for these kids.
There are some genuine mysteries though. Why does the school seem obsessed with encouraging them to do creative work, giving them awards and collecting the best work to go to a gallery that they never see? Where does it go and who sees it and why?
Much of the plot is built around a three-way love story between a boy and two girls at school. One of the girls is the main character. All three are good friends but the boy and one of the girls are a couple.
This quote tells us about the title: “Because maybe, in a way, we didn’t leave it [the school] behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and – no matter how much we despised ourselves for it – unable quite to let each other go.”
I thought it was a good story; it kept my attention all the way through, although not quite as good as the author’s best-known work, Remains of the Day.
Top photo from englishcottagevacation.com
The author from newyorker.com
[Revised, pictures added, spoiler hidden 12/31/22]
July 15, 2024
Edit July 2024: I finally got the time to peruse the NY Times The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.I am happy that Never Let me Go got a deserved place in Top 10 (no.9).
Just announced as Winner of the Nobel Prize 2017!!! Well deserved.
****
I believe a good book transmits a feeling, happiness, sadness, outrage etc. Of i do not feel anything after I read a certain book I do no consider it was worth it. And this book defenitely made me feel something. What? I cannot put it into words. A feeling that made me take a break from the for two weeks but also made me return to it when I felt I was in the right spirits. I do not know why but I really liked this book. It is quite different than anything I've read before.
Just announced as Winner of the Nobel Prize 2017!!! Well deserved.
****
I believe a good book transmits a feeling, happiness, sadness, outrage etc. Of i do not feel anything after I read a certain book I do no consider it was worth it. And this book defenitely made me feel something. What? I cannot put it into words. A feeling that made me take a break from the for two weeks but also made me return to it when I felt I was in the right spirits. I do not know why but I really liked this book. It is quite different than anything I've read before.
April 16, 2020
The thing I enjoy most about Ishiguro’s writing is the sheer level of depth he gets into his characters; he captures all the intensity of real emotions whether they are self-serving or destructive. His writing style is simple, plain even, but he builds up many layers within his storytelling to unleash the full symphony of conflicted feelings in powerful bursts.
However, I saw none of his brilliance here.
Indeed, for all his talent, I don’t think this novel was as effective as The Remains of the Day or even When We Were Orphans. For me. this is a lesser novel by a great writer.
This is his most popular work, and his most critically acclaimed, and I think that’s only because of the particular themes he explores here. This is science-fiction, but I prefer the term pseudo-science fiction. It’s slightly futuristic, but the fictional elements are relatively comparable to what man can do today. Vivisection transplant is nothing new. Organ donors are nothing new. This book is very similar to the movie “The Island” (2005) where a select group of people have special clones bred for the singular purpose of providing them with replacement body parts.
What I find interesting is how these two were released so close together. For me, such forms of artifice reflect the worries and concerns of that decade. Discussions over designer babies and animal rights issues (in regards to testing, transplants and cloning) were often in the media. If we look back to the Victorians, the elements in the literature reflected the concerns of the age. This is true for all literary movements; I just used this one for an example, but the point is I think this novel reflects an aspect of the time in which it was written. And for me that’s why I think it’s worthy of study, it's timely.
But did I enjoy it?
Not overly. Do I think it is a success artistically and dramatically? Not really. For me the novel continuously fails to deliver. The retrospective narrative remains detached from the happenings. Granted, the voice has lost all sense of hope and is looking back at a life of sorrow and incompleteness, but it just didn’t have a sense of life. You could say that’s because she is semi-human in the state imposed on her, but, for me, it was too despairing. And that’s coming from someone who counts Edgar Allan Poe amongst his favourite authors.
The inability of the characters to question the situation also somewhat puzzled me. Surely, they must have had some glimpses of thought that considered their present situation an injustice? There was a lack of inquisitiveness into the morality of the situation. And this, when paired with their complete failure of recognising their own feelings about each other, made the narrative feel slightly incomplete. They didn’t seem to look beyond their own situation. As a reader, we make our own judgement calls, but where were theirs? A certain emotional immaturity, that bordered on the absurd, ran through the work.
Overall, I can see why this book is so popular. But I don’t think it’s all that. Ishiguro’s other books are much more accomplished.
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However, I saw none of his brilliance here.
Indeed, for all his talent, I don’t think this novel was as effective as The Remains of the Day or even When We Were Orphans. For me. this is a lesser novel by a great writer.
This is his most popular work, and his most critically acclaimed, and I think that’s only because of the particular themes he explores here. This is science-fiction, but I prefer the term pseudo-science fiction. It’s slightly futuristic, but the fictional elements are relatively comparable to what man can do today. Vivisection transplant is nothing new. Organ donors are nothing new. This book is very similar to the movie “The Island” (2005) where a select group of people have special clones bred for the singular purpose of providing them with replacement body parts.
What I find interesting is how these two were released so close together. For me, such forms of artifice reflect the worries and concerns of that decade. Discussions over designer babies and animal rights issues (in regards to testing, transplants and cloning) were often in the media. If we look back to the Victorians, the elements in the literature reflected the concerns of the age. This is true for all literary movements; I just used this one for an example, but the point is I think this novel reflects an aspect of the time in which it was written. And for me that’s why I think it’s worthy of study, it's timely.
But did I enjoy it?
Not overly. Do I think it is a success artistically and dramatically? Not really. For me the novel continuously fails to deliver. The retrospective narrative remains detached from the happenings. Granted, the voice has lost all sense of hope and is looking back at a life of sorrow and incompleteness, but it just didn’t have a sense of life. You could say that’s because she is semi-human in the state imposed on her, but, for me, it was too despairing. And that’s coming from someone who counts Edgar Allan Poe amongst his favourite authors.
The inability of the characters to question the situation also somewhat puzzled me. Surely, they must have had some glimpses of thought that considered their present situation an injustice? There was a lack of inquisitiveness into the morality of the situation. And this, when paired with their complete failure of recognising their own feelings about each other, made the narrative feel slightly incomplete. They didn’t seem to look beyond their own situation. As a reader, we make our own judgement calls, but where were theirs? A certain emotional immaturity, that bordered on the absurd, ran through the work.
Overall, I can see why this book is so popular. But I don’t think it’s all that. Ishiguro’s other books are much more accomplished.
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April 28, 2023
Sometimes I don't choose a book but it chooses me. Sounds weird?
In the beginning, I don't understand and was a bit confused by the words such as donor, and carer.
I may say this book is a bit slow, boring, and mundane but it is growing interesting when you continue discovering it.
The imaginative or sci-fiction story of Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth makes me reminisce about my life and I am grateful that we can live in a free world.
Remember, we never take the "free world" for granted. We must protect it. Sorry, a little bit of politics here. 😁
So, in short, "Never Let Me Go" is a poignant and heart-wrenching tale that will leave you in tears, but with a few laughs along the way to lighten the mood.
By the way, don't forget to watch the movie too.
In the beginning, I don't understand and was a bit confused by the words such as donor, and carer.
I may say this book is a bit slow, boring, and mundane but it is growing interesting when you continue discovering it.
The imaginative or sci-fiction story of Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth makes me reminisce about my life and I am grateful that we can live in a free world.
Remember, we never take the "free world" for granted. We must protect it. Sorry, a little bit of politics here. 😁
So, in short, "Never Let Me Go" is a poignant and heart-wrenching tale that will leave you in tears, but with a few laughs along the way to lighten the mood.
By the way, don't forget to watch the movie too.
November 23, 2019
You know those irritating people who talk to children and old people as if they were babies, in a puerile, singsong voice?
Well, those idiots sprang to mind as I endured the narrative voice of this glacially slow yawnfest of a novel.
This is a book so plodding, so dreary and so pretentious that I gave up on it halfway through.
With a less-than-pleased harrumph, I shoved it into a slot on my bookshelf alongside The Remains of the Day, which I'd bought at the same time, anticipating dual sublimity.
So for the past few years there they both sat, on the bookcase equivalent of a naughty step, sulking like teenagers and glaring at me each time I passed.
"Oh, get over yourselves!" I berated, turning them around so that only their pages were on show. Ha! That taught them a lesson they'll never forget!
But right now, I'm giving The Remains of the Day its day in the sun. It's highly spoken of by numerous Goodreaders, so I'm hoping that Ishiguro can belatedly turn my frown upside down.
As for Never Let Me Go, the only thing that I have in common with its improbable story line is that : )
I remember someone describing this as being somewhere between Kafka and Enid Blyton, which is most apt.
Read this book by all means, but don't say that I didn't warn you.
UPDATE: The Remains of the Day was a triumph, in my view!
: )
Well, those idiots sprang to mind as I endured the narrative voice of this glacially slow yawnfest of a novel.
This is a book so plodding, so dreary and so pretentious that I gave up on it halfway through.
With a less-than-pleased harrumph, I shoved it into a slot on my bookshelf alongside The Remains of the Day, which I'd bought at the same time, anticipating dual sublimity.
So for the past few years there they both sat, on the bookcase equivalent of a naughty step, sulking like teenagers and glaring at me each time I passed.
"Oh, get over yourselves!" I berated, turning them around so that only their pages were on show. Ha! That taught them a lesson they'll never forget!
But right now, I'm giving The Remains of the Day its day in the sun. It's highly spoken of by numerous Goodreaders, so I'm hoping that Ishiguro can belatedly turn my frown upside down.
As for Never Let Me Go, the only thing that I have in common with its improbable story line is that : )
I remember someone describing this as being somewhere between Kafka and Enid Blyton, which is most apt.
Read this book by all means, but don't say that I didn't warn you.
UPDATE: The Remains of the Day was a triumph, in my view!
: )
February 8, 2013
I'm always excited when I run across a novel that is, so far as I can tell, essentially perfect. Never Let Me Go is one of those. There is not a single thing wrong with this book. Ishiguro is a master craftsman and it shows here.
The novel's characterizations are pitch perfect. Its narrative flow reveals things in exactly the right order. Mystery is preserved until it no longer matters and then, under the light of revelation, we discover the mystery was never the thing that mattered. Ishiguro plays with the reader as he unfolds his exploration of what it means to live—but never does so unfairly or at the expense of his characters' right to dignity and reality (a right that he very much does grant his characters).
Never Let Me Go is narrated from nearly a decade before its publication. As Kathy quietly reminisces from her vantage in the late 1990s, she gradually comes to explore a life fraught with meaning and purpose—and fraught simultaneously with that kind of superlative meaninglessness that Ecclesiastes bemoans in all of its somber weariness. Kathy is a caregiver to recuperating donors and relates her special pleasure in the few instances in which she had been able to offer care to those who had been students at the exclusive (and, as it turns out, much envied) Hailsham, where she herself grew up. Memories of Hailsham water a fertile delta of memories through which we gradually come to understand both Kathy and the world she has inherited—a world filled both with much light and much darkness.
In other words, a world much like mine or yours. Still, Kathy's story is unique and it is in her own tale's peculiarities that our own is better revealed. Better explored.
Some may be tempted to see Never Let Me Go as ethical question and admonishment to this generation of readers and to the one that follows us. Certainly, that is there, but only as mise-en-scène to the larger panorama of a woman's quest to discern her past, present, and future from a glut of memories (some of which are only mostly trustworthy or even trusted) and how that journey sheds light on questions more important than mere ethical concerns. In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro continues to play as he has in past works with memory and perception and how memory is so often the primary defense against perspicacity, yet as his narrator is acutely aware of her own remolding of history through nostalgia and forgetfulness, we are assured that perspicuity is not his target here.
No. I believe Never Let Me Go is much more a perfectly plotted meditation (and its style is itself quite meditative) on the human condition, the place of our own hands in shaping our destinies, and what it means to live. These could all be clichéd topics but Ishiguro approaches with such a vaguely detached sublimity that he breathes (through Kathy his narrator) a certain verdant spirit into these things. They are never treated as anything more than mundane, but it is precisely by that treatment that he gives his purpose such power and impact.
The novel's characterizations are pitch perfect. Its narrative flow reveals things in exactly the right order. Mystery is preserved until it no longer matters and then, under the light of revelation, we discover the mystery was never the thing that mattered. Ishiguro plays with the reader as he unfolds his exploration of what it means to live—but never does so unfairly or at the expense of his characters' right to dignity and reality (a right that he very much does grant his characters).
Never Let Me Go is narrated from nearly a decade before its publication. As Kathy quietly reminisces from her vantage in the late 1990s, she gradually comes to explore a life fraught with meaning and purpose—and fraught simultaneously with that kind of superlative meaninglessness that Ecclesiastes bemoans in all of its somber weariness. Kathy is a caregiver to recuperating donors and relates her special pleasure in the few instances in which she had been able to offer care to those who had been students at the exclusive (and, as it turns out, much envied) Hailsham, where she herself grew up. Memories of Hailsham water a fertile delta of memories through which we gradually come to understand both Kathy and the world she has inherited—a world filled both with much light and much darkness.
In other words, a world much like mine or yours. Still, Kathy's story is unique and it is in her own tale's peculiarities that our own is better revealed. Better explored.
Some may be tempted to see Never Let Me Go as ethical question and admonishment to this generation of readers and to the one that follows us. Certainly, that is there, but only as mise-en-scène to the larger panorama of a woman's quest to discern her past, present, and future from a glut of memories (some of which are only mostly trustworthy or even trusted) and how that journey sheds light on questions more important than mere ethical concerns. In Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro continues to play as he has in past works with memory and perception and how memory is so often the primary defense against perspicacity, yet as his narrator is acutely aware of her own remolding of history through nostalgia and forgetfulness, we are assured that perspicuity is not his target here.
No. I believe Never Let Me Go is much more a perfectly plotted meditation (and its style is itself quite meditative) on the human condition, the place of our own hands in shaping our destinies, and what it means to live. These could all be clichéd topics but Ishiguro approaches with such a vaguely detached sublimity that he breathes (through Kathy his narrator) a certain verdant spirit into these things. They are never treated as anything more than mundane, but it is precisely by that treatment that he gives his purpose such power and impact.
December 22, 2015
I had previously avoided this book, having heard it referred to as British science fiction. And when I hear "British science fiction," I think of Dr. Who. Then I think about all those childhood snuff film fantasies where Captain Kirk zaps him. (Phasers set to kill, dammit! Inter-dimensional traveling dandies in phone booths are the exception to Federation regulations. What is it about the British, anyway? A phone booth? That's Superman's bag, baby. Superhero envy much? The sun may have never set on the British Empire, but we Yankees have a guy who can fly faster than the speed of light.) But then I found myself alone in a big bookstore in a big city trying to divine what the angelic face on the book's cover was looking askance at (itself manipulated, no doubt, like the fictional clones whose story it was fashioned to sell) and thinking of Kurosawa's definition of art being about the ability to look at humanity in its entirety without flinching.
Mulligan. I flinched.
But Kazuo Ishiguro hasn't. And he doesn't think much of me. Or you. And he's probably correct in that judgment.
Imagine the most genteel, tea-sipping people gathered around fine china in a flowery patterned drawing room somewhere in the English countryside. A shaft of midday sun shines through drawn curtains as they politely discuss the day's happenings. Then imagine Leatherface, Jack the Ripper, Lex Luther, Sarah Palin and Michael Jackson's dad ransacking everything around them, starting at the furthest perimeters of the house, slowly working their way toward our happy people and ultimately cannibalizing them. Then imagine both groups acting as if this is completely normal. Nary a word of protest or questioning, mind you.
That's what this book is like to me.
It was very difficult to read, in the psychological sense of "read." The pathos was too overwhelming. I had to take a break from it, about two-thirds of the way through. I tried to tell myself that it was because I had read the bulk of it as I was hidden away in some claustrophobic hotel room, or that I found the prose tedious at times. In truth, though, it succeeds in shining a light on human nature, and I just couldn’t bear to look.
The story made me uncomfortable, and I hated myself for returning to it after having put it aside. I was irked by the characters, my inner-Kirk screaming, "SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING!" The lethargic creepiness made me realize that no, not only was nobody going to do anything, but that neither I, nor you, nor any of us, are all that different from the people who harvest these poor souls for their organs. After all, I'm a fat and happy first-worlder who less and less has a care or thought for all those who are exploited to make my life possible.
We homo sapiens adapt to anything and hang our hats on the most contorted and worn rationalizations.
I would grind my teeth and ask, "Where is their Marx? Their Malcolm X?" Fuck, I'd have settled for Stalin or Benedict Arnold. But maybe the revolutionary gene had been isolated and bred out of their clone bodies -- a distinct possibility, owing to the imperfect knowledge of the first-person narrator. What's worse is that whereas science may have manipulated them to be docile, we, all of us, have been likewise manipulated by the inertia of history.
As I have written, I grew tired with what I saw as tedious prose, the catalog of details about everyday life cited by the narrator. But then it dawned on me that this cataloging is exactly the sort of thing a dying person would do. Life would take on more urgency. What you and I may take for granted is pregnant with wonder to the condemned. In fact, happy serendipity, this view is supported by a study cited in the November 2009 issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin -- researchers have found that those who profess to be in love are more analytical. And what is someone condemned to die other than someone in love with life?
I winced at Ishiguro's condemnation of liberal half-measures in the face of social norms. The narrator and her group of friends are raised in an almost "humane" manner -- educated, encouraged to cultivate personal friendships with one another, encouraged to pursue art. And while they represent the exception, an experiment to demonstrate that clones have souls, they are condemned nonetheless. All the petty jealousies and transcendent friendships that framed their short, beautiful lives, are consumed by larger society. And while there is never a mention of God, the closest they come is looking up a former instructor who is only mildly repulsed by them and who bids them eat from the Tree of Complete Knowledge.
Repeat after me: I am pathetic. I am powerless.
Kirk, succumbing to the Borg after all.
Mulligan. I flinched.
But Kazuo Ishiguro hasn't. And he doesn't think much of me. Or you. And he's probably correct in that judgment.
Imagine the most genteel, tea-sipping people gathered around fine china in a flowery patterned drawing room somewhere in the English countryside. A shaft of midday sun shines through drawn curtains as they politely discuss the day's happenings. Then imagine Leatherface, Jack the Ripper, Lex Luther, Sarah Palin and Michael Jackson's dad ransacking everything around them, starting at the furthest perimeters of the house, slowly working their way toward our happy people and ultimately cannibalizing them. Then imagine both groups acting as if this is completely normal. Nary a word of protest or questioning, mind you.
That's what this book is like to me.
It was very difficult to read, in the psychological sense of "read." The pathos was too overwhelming. I had to take a break from it, about two-thirds of the way through. I tried to tell myself that it was because I had read the bulk of it as I was hidden away in some claustrophobic hotel room, or that I found the prose tedious at times. In truth, though, it succeeds in shining a light on human nature, and I just couldn’t bear to look.
The story made me uncomfortable, and I hated myself for returning to it after having put it aside. I was irked by the characters, my inner-Kirk screaming, "SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING!" The lethargic creepiness made me realize that no, not only was nobody going to do anything, but that neither I, nor you, nor any of us, are all that different from the people who harvest these poor souls for their organs. After all, I'm a fat and happy first-worlder who less and less has a care or thought for all those who are exploited to make my life possible.
We homo sapiens adapt to anything and hang our hats on the most contorted and worn rationalizations.
I would grind my teeth and ask, "Where is their Marx? Their Malcolm X?" Fuck, I'd have settled for Stalin or Benedict Arnold. But maybe the revolutionary gene had been isolated and bred out of their clone bodies -- a distinct possibility, owing to the imperfect knowledge of the first-person narrator. What's worse is that whereas science may have manipulated them to be docile, we, all of us, have been likewise manipulated by the inertia of history.
As I have written, I grew tired with what I saw as tedious prose, the catalog of details about everyday life cited by the narrator. But then it dawned on me that this cataloging is exactly the sort of thing a dying person would do. Life would take on more urgency. What you and I may take for granted is pregnant with wonder to the condemned. In fact, happy serendipity, this view is supported by a study cited in the November 2009 issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin -- researchers have found that those who profess to be in love are more analytical. And what is someone condemned to die other than someone in love with life?
I winced at Ishiguro's condemnation of liberal half-measures in the face of social norms. The narrator and her group of friends are raised in an almost "humane" manner -- educated, encouraged to cultivate personal friendships with one another, encouraged to pursue art. And while they represent the exception, an experiment to demonstrate that clones have souls, they are condemned nonetheless. All the petty jealousies and transcendent friendships that framed their short, beautiful lives, are consumed by larger society. And while there is never a mention of God, the closest they come is looking up a former instructor who is only mildly repulsed by them and who bids them eat from the Tree of Complete Knowledge.
Repeat after me: I am pathetic. I am powerless.
Kirk, succumbing to the Borg after all.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 17, 2020
3 stars
The story is interesting but it is not exciting enough for me. I liked the main characters, their backgrounds and everything but something was definitely lacking and I can't figure out what.
Was it worth reading? - I don't know. Need more time to process it.
Will I read it again? - Highly unlikely.
Do I recommend it? - It didn't work for me. Maybe it will work for you.
The story is interesting but it is not exciting enough for me. I liked the main characters, their backgrounds and everything but something was definitely lacking and I can't figure out what.
Was it worth reading? - I don't know. Need more time to process it.
Will I read it again? - Highly unlikely.
Do I recommend it? - It didn't work for me. Maybe it will work for you.
April 24, 2008
As a child, Kathy H. attended Hailsham, an elite boarding school where children were raised to be both healthy and artistic and taught to believe that both their health and creativity were essential to themselves and to the world they would one day enter. Now an adult, Kathy reflects back on her life. She charts the very slow progression of her growth, her friendships with fellow students Tommy and Ruth, and her knowledge, as she herself gradually began to learn about her role in the outside worldand what this role dictates about her identity. A combination of heavy introspection and soft-scifi, Never Let Me Go has a thought-provoking premise and is brilliantly written, but fails to reach its potential, spending all its time in excruciatingly slow buildup and none of it in impact, theory, or debate. Enjoyable, but somewhat empty, and so moderately recommended.
This book's greatest strength is its writing style, but it is also one of the most irritating aspects. Kathy, the narrator, is intensely thoughtful and analytical, breaking down her personal history into eras, important moments, and developing themes. She walks the reader through the story of her life much in the way she lived it, slowly, very slowly, bringing to light her final realizations. In other words, there is a lot hidden in this book, and it takes the book's entire lengthliterally until the last fifteen pagesto reveal it all. In between are circuitous examples, where Kathy starts to talk about one event, goes back a bit to explain why the event was relevant, explains the event itself, and then goes on without having drawn a major conclusioninstead, she's just mapped another point on her gradual arc or argument. The resulting pace is excruciating, both artful, brilliantly thought-out and executed, and simply painful as the reader is lead along, disappointed, and lead along again. The book's pace bring the characters to life (although both Ruth and Tommy lack some dimension) and, with it, the life that they lived, through Hailsham and beyond. As such, it is the highlight of the book, worked like an artform, but it is also intensely irritating and makes the book (which actually reads quite quickly) seem longer than it is.
There are a near-infinite number of issues, from the ethical to philosophical, that could be brought to question and debate in this book. The very premise almost begs themboth the science of the base culture and the purpose of Hailsham itself. Unfortunately, however, none of these topics are brought to issue in the text. Instead, the book is consumed by the very slow progression of the story, the creep towards the "twist" revelations of who the children are and what purpose they serve. When finally revealed, these revelations are not all that bignot because they lack the potential to be, but because they pale in comparison to the immense buildup that leads to them. The characters just barely exceed the gradual revelation of the book's premise and are largely just passive carriers of the story, and so the other various issues, the possible debates, never enter into the text. So when other reviewers talk about the questions this book raises, what they're really talking about is the potential for questionsand that is not the same thing. The burden of meaning for this book, everything that the reader could take away and continue to think about, rests entirely on the reader, who must pull out the themes and ask the questions himself, carry on the debates himself. The author shirks his responsibility, and the book suffers for it, failing to live up to its potential.
My final complaint with this book is that the underlying concept seems, blandly, unrealistic. **SPOILERS** follow, so be warned: The fact that in the book's contemporary culture the clones are considered non-human despite looking, acting, and living like humans seems entirely impossible. Consider: Humans never viewed the first cloned animals as different than their original counterparts; indeed, we were amazed and drew attention to the fact that they were identical, that they were clones. So why would cloned humans be any different (especially that these clones pass in human society as normal and indistinguishable)? Outside of the huge wastefulness of cloning entire humans just to harvest their organs, the fact that the cloned humans were not considered humans seems unreal to me, no matter who the gene donors were, no matter what brief attempts Ishiguro (though Ms. Emily) makes to justify it. **END SPOILERS** This is the underlying basis of the book's conflict and plot, and so problems with this concept create problems throughout the book. They weaken the foundations, making it difficult to accept the book and, as a result, even more difficult to take on the work of finding and analyzing themes, which the author fails too do. In the end, Never Let Me Go has a thoughtful premise with heavy potential for thought, theory, and debate, and it is skillfully, even artfully written, but the book fails to live up to its potential: the author does not tackle his own themes, and no matter how interesting the premise, it is an unreasonable one. I wanted to enjoy this book, and I did, but I felt cheated at the end: the final product was surprisingly empty, with the burden of meaning placed entirely and unfairly upon the reader alone.
This book's greatest strength is its writing style, but it is also one of the most irritating aspects. Kathy, the narrator, is intensely thoughtful and analytical, breaking down her personal history into eras, important moments, and developing themes. She walks the reader through the story of her life much in the way she lived it, slowly, very slowly, bringing to light her final realizations. In other words, there is a lot hidden in this book, and it takes the book's entire lengthliterally until the last fifteen pagesto reveal it all. In between are circuitous examples, where Kathy starts to talk about one event, goes back a bit to explain why the event was relevant, explains the event itself, and then goes on without having drawn a major conclusioninstead, she's just mapped another point on her gradual arc or argument. The resulting pace is excruciating, both artful, brilliantly thought-out and executed, and simply painful as the reader is lead along, disappointed, and lead along again. The book's pace bring the characters to life (although both Ruth and Tommy lack some dimension) and, with it, the life that they lived, through Hailsham and beyond. As such, it is the highlight of the book, worked like an artform, but it is also intensely irritating and makes the book (which actually reads quite quickly) seem longer than it is.
There are a near-infinite number of issues, from the ethical to philosophical, that could be brought to question and debate in this book. The very premise almost begs themboth the science of the base culture and the purpose of Hailsham itself. Unfortunately, however, none of these topics are brought to issue in the text. Instead, the book is consumed by the very slow progression of the story, the creep towards the "twist" revelations of who the children are and what purpose they serve. When finally revealed, these revelations are not all that bignot because they lack the potential to be, but because they pale in comparison to the immense buildup that leads to them. The characters just barely exceed the gradual revelation of the book's premise and are largely just passive carriers of the story, and so the other various issues, the possible debates, never enter into the text. So when other reviewers talk about the questions this book raises, what they're really talking about is the potential for questionsand that is not the same thing. The burden of meaning for this book, everything that the reader could take away and continue to think about, rests entirely on the reader, who must pull out the themes and ask the questions himself, carry on the debates himself. The author shirks his responsibility, and the book suffers for it, failing to live up to its potential.
My final complaint with this book is that the underlying concept seems, blandly, unrealistic. **SPOILERS** follow, so be warned: The fact that in the book's contemporary culture the clones are considered non-human despite looking, acting, and living like humans seems entirely impossible. Consider: Humans never viewed the first cloned animals as different than their original counterparts; indeed, we were amazed and drew attention to the fact that they were identical, that they were clones. So why would cloned humans be any different (especially that these clones pass in human society as normal and indistinguishable)? Outside of the huge wastefulness of cloning entire humans just to harvest their organs, the fact that the cloned humans were not considered humans seems unreal to me, no matter who the gene donors were, no matter what brief attempts Ishiguro (though Ms. Emily) makes to justify it. **END SPOILERS** This is the underlying basis of the book's conflict and plot, and so problems with this concept create problems throughout the book. They weaken the foundations, making it difficult to accept the book and, as a result, even more difficult to take on the work of finding and analyzing themes, which the author fails too do. In the end, Never Let Me Go has a thoughtful premise with heavy potential for thought, theory, and debate, and it is skillfully, even artfully written, but the book fails to live up to its potential: the author does not tackle his own themes, and no matter how interesting the premise, it is an unreasonable one. I wanted to enjoy this book, and I did, but I felt cheated at the end: the final product was surprisingly empty, with the burden of meaning placed entirely and unfairly upon the reader alone.
October 18, 2025
Recitesc, așadar, Să nu mă părăsești. Mi se pare și acum o carte foarte bună, chiar dacă unii au găsit-o „terifiantă”. Nu e neapărat un SF, nu este nici o carte horror (cum au catalogat-o - cam rapid - cîțiva cronicari), deși e neliniștitoare. Este mai degrabă un roman trist, foarte trist. Cineva mi-a mărturisit că a plîns la sfîrșitul cărții. Îl înțeleg:
„Iar acum eu mă aflu aici, în faţa tuturor acelor lucruri, şi dacă aştept suficient de mult, de dincolo de cîmp va apărea o siluetă micuţă, care va creşte pe măsură ce se va apropia, pînă cînd am să văd că e Tommy, iar el îmi va face cu mîna, poate chiar mă va striga. Fantezia mea nu a mers mai departe - n-am lăsat-o eu - şi, deşi lacrimile începuseră să mi se prelingă pe obraji, nu plîngeam în hohote şi nu îmi pierdusem complet cumpătul. Am aşteptat puţin, apoi m-am întors la maşină ca să pornesc mai departe, indiferent care era locul unde trebuia să ajung” (p.323).
Faptul cel mai ciudat din romanul lui Ishiguro este că „donatorii-clone” sînt liberi. Dar ei își asumă condiția ca și cum ar fi o fatalitate. Ishiguro a scris un roman despre condiția umană (omul ca ființă înrobită) și despre fragilitatea iubirii, cînd îți accepți soarta fără un singur murmur...
P. S. Pe o idee înrudită, Klara și soarele mi-a plăcut mult mai puțin...
„Iar acum eu mă aflu aici, în faţa tuturor acelor lucruri, şi dacă aştept suficient de mult, de dincolo de cîmp va apărea o siluetă micuţă, care va creşte pe măsură ce se va apropia, pînă cînd am să văd că e Tommy, iar el îmi va face cu mîna, poate chiar mă va striga. Fantezia mea nu a mers mai departe - n-am lăsat-o eu - şi, deşi lacrimile începuseră să mi se prelingă pe obraji, nu plîngeam în hohote şi nu îmi pierdusem complet cumpătul. Am aşteptat puţin, apoi m-am întors la maşină ca să pornesc mai departe, indiferent care era locul unde trebuia să ajung” (p.323).
Faptul cel mai ciudat din romanul lui Ishiguro este că „donatorii-clone” sînt liberi. Dar ei își asumă condiția ca și cum ar fi o fatalitate. Ishiguro a scris un roman despre condiția umană (omul ca ființă înrobită) și despre fragilitatea iubirii, cînd îți accepți soarta fără un singur murmur...
P. S. Pe o idee înrudită, Klara și soarele mi-a plăcut mult mai puțin...
January 8, 2023
Kazuo Ishiguro tells us the story of a clique of students living in the congenial atmosphere of Hailsham, an English boarding school far away from the city. Is there something flagrant or collusion happening behind the consonant nature of this school? Are the students of Hailsham different in some sort of way? The author tries to tell it through the eyes of Kathy, who was a schoolgirl who leaves the school after she grows up into a young woman. How will the products of Hailsham face the stark realities of their future? This novel explores hope and hopelessness, love and betrayal simultaneously. The author is also trying to discuss the importance of ethics in science. This novel is a conglomeration of literary fiction, science fiction, and romantic fiction.
What I learned from this book
1) What should we do if things are not going according to our plans in our life?
If things are not going according to our wishes, we should try hard to get things back on track. Even after we try our best, if it is still not going to our wish; then, we should learn to let it go.
"You have to accept that sometimes that's how things happen in this world. People's opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up at a certain point in this process."
"I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart."
2) The importance of solitude
Everyone is so vocal about the problems of loneliness and how loneliness can lead to anxiety and depression. It is indeed an important topic that needs discussion. But most of us are forgetting about the importance of solitude. Solitude is also a vital ingredient to make a person sane, just like companionship.
“The solitude, I've actually grown to quite like... I do like the feeling of getting into my little car, knowing for the next couple of hours I'll have only the roads, the big gray sky and my daydreams for company."
3) The purest form of Love
The author tries to discuss love from multiple angles in this novel. If we try to read between the lines, we can see love from a different angle that we haven't seen anywhere else, which is unique, pristine in its purest form, and has the propensity to touch our hearts and bring tears to our eyes.
“You say you’re sure? Sure that you're in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple? ”
My favourite three lines from this book
"It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to."
"Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don't go along with that. The memories I value most, I don't ever see them fading."
“It might be just some trend that came and went," I said. "But for us, it’s our life.”
What could have been better?
The pace of this novel, especially in the initial part, was a little slow. This is one of those rare novels which slowly grows on you.
Rating
5/5 This is a must-read book for all those who loves to read literary fiction.
May 22, 2022
I have no words…that’s my review
*sobs heavily*
*sobs heavily*
April 14, 2017
Um...I'm sorry but I just didn't like it. (Insert frowny face) A few times I thought "okay, here we go!" But then nope, nothing, nada. The majority of the book felt like an epilogue.
April 13, 2014
Very disappointing, despite a promising opening. It is a ridiculous story that is increasingly badly told. If you don't want to know the key plot point, beware of reading the back cover of some editions. :(
GENRE
Although often classed as sci-fi, I think that's more because dystopian fiction is often categorised that way, rather than anything inherently sci-fi in the book itself. In fact, it doesn't even feel dystopian for a while. In many ways, it's more of coming-of-age novel: coping with loss of innocence and accepting responsibilities.
STYLE
The narration is very conversational (which is fine).
SETTING AND PLOT
It is initially set in a co-educational English boarding school, in a country house. There are the usual friendships and fallings out, and it has children as young as 5 (maybe younger), but in many ways it seems quite idyllic. However, there is an understated menace from the outset, and the school is oddly obsessed with creativity.
The pupils' vagueness about their eventual fate perhaps shadows that of the reader. Mention is made early on about , but it's only towards the end that the details are made explicit. I think I might have enjoyed the book slightly more if I'd had to work it out for myself (rather than read it on the cover).
The middle section is set in "the cottages" where the leavers go to live for a couple of years or so, and the story narrows to be more specifically about Kathy (the narrator), Ruth and Tommy. This exaggerates the contrast of the first part: they can indulge their hobbies (reading and sex, mostly), living comfortably without the need to work, but they are increasingly aware that soon things will change.
LOSING CREDIBILITY
The final section follows the three of them when they leave, and this is where the book completely lost any trace of believability for me. The underlying story is too full of holes, even within its own dystopian world. I just do not believe anyone would have the means to go to such extraordinary lengths when there are far simpler, quicker and cheaper solutions. I was reminded of this when I read Under the Skin, which is also set in an apparently normal contemporary world, but has a similarly far-fetched, overly complex, expensive and time-consuming way of solving a problem.
Also, why have carers travelling round the country to be with different donors, rather than each carer being based in one location? That is implausible and not even necessary for the story!
I was also a little surprised that they were as accepting as seemed to be the case .
Finally, it goes from bad to worse, with the cheap James Bond/Blofeld trick of having one character near the end explaining everything in a rush.
GENRE
Although often classed as sci-fi, I think that's more because dystopian fiction is often categorised that way, rather than anything inherently sci-fi in the book itself. In fact, it doesn't even feel dystopian for a while. In many ways, it's more of coming-of-age novel: coping with loss of innocence and accepting responsibilities.
STYLE
The narration is very conversational (which is fine).
SETTING AND PLOT
It is initially set in a co-educational English boarding school, in a country house. There are the usual friendships and fallings out, and it has children as young as 5 (maybe younger), but in many ways it seems quite idyllic. However, there is an understated menace from the outset, and the school is oddly obsessed with creativity.
The pupils' vagueness about their eventual fate perhaps shadows that of the reader. Mention is made early on about , but it's only towards the end that the details are made explicit. I think I might have enjoyed the book slightly more if I'd had to work it out for myself (rather than read it on the cover).
The middle section is set in "the cottages" where the leavers go to live for a couple of years or so, and the story narrows to be more specifically about Kathy (the narrator), Ruth and Tommy. This exaggerates the contrast of the first part: they can indulge their hobbies (reading and sex, mostly), living comfortably without the need to work, but they are increasingly aware that soon things will change.
LOSING CREDIBILITY
The final section follows the three of them when they leave, and this is where the book completely lost any trace of believability for me. The underlying story is too full of holes, even within its own dystopian world. I just do not believe anyone would have the means to go to such extraordinary lengths when there are far simpler, quicker and cheaper solutions. I was reminded of this when I read Under the Skin, which is also set in an apparently normal contemporary world, but has a similarly far-fetched, overly complex, expensive and time-consuming way of solving a problem.
Also, why have carers travelling round the country to be with different donors, rather than each carer being based in one location? That is implausible and not even necessary for the story!
I was also a little surprised that they were as accepting as seemed to be the case .
Finally, it goes from bad to worse, with the cheap James Bond/Blofeld trick of having one character near the end explaining everything in a rush.
December 21, 2015
I'll admit, reading a book that you love for the second time is a scary thing. I read Never Let Me Go for the first time 2 and a half years ago, and I loved it. I read it within 24 hours on a vacation, and it whisked me away from that trip I was on, taking me to 1990's England, and into the lives of these children growing up and learning the harsh reality of their world. But it also reminded me of the beauty of friendship, the complicated nature of relationships, the importance of art, and most importantly, the power of words on a written page to instill emotion.
Now, the second time reading this book, I will admit there were some writing techniques that threw me, that I didn't recognize or at least didn't bother me the first time. I also saw some of the characters in totally different lights. Ruth seems like a terrible person, and yet this reading, 2 and a half years later, had me sympathizing with her so much more. Tommy & Kath's relationship didn't move me as much as I remember. But one thing that didn't change about this book for me is how much I love it.
I love the creativity behind it. I love Ishiguro's ability to give away so much by sharing so little. I love the tone this book has, one I will continue to describe as flipping through an old, faded photo album. It's musty and opaque, yet there's a candidness to it that I adore. Ishiguro doesn't shy away from the darker parts of the world. But he is able to approach these subjects from a perspective that offers relatability and insight that is hard to recreate. It's a simple story from the perspective of a simple woman, and still it touches on so much of the complexity of human existence. A book I will return to again and again, and one that keeps me thinking event after finishing it. 5/5 stars
Now, the second time reading this book, I will admit there were some writing techniques that threw me, that I didn't recognize or at least didn't bother me the first time. I also saw some of the characters in totally different lights. Ruth seems like a terrible person, and yet this reading, 2 and a half years later, had me sympathizing with her so much more. Tommy & Kath's relationship didn't move me as much as I remember. But one thing that didn't change about this book for me is how much I love it.
I love the creativity behind it. I love Ishiguro's ability to give away so much by sharing so little. I love the tone this book has, one I will continue to describe as flipping through an old, faded photo album. It's musty and opaque, yet there's a candidness to it that I adore. Ishiguro doesn't shy away from the darker parts of the world. But he is able to approach these subjects from a perspective that offers relatability and insight that is hard to recreate. It's a simple story from the perspective of a simple woman, and still it touches on so much of the complexity of human existence. A book I will return to again and again, and one that keeps me thinking event after finishing it. 5/5 stars
May 21, 2017
My very first Kazuo Ishiguro's work. Certainly not the last.
This book aggressively provoked emotions in me without ever being that emotional at all. It didn't whine; didn't scream at me, just smoothly narrated the story to me, very matter-of-factly, even at times in a detaching way. And yet, the sadness I felt after finishing it, and even before that, was so disproprotionate, it took me wholly by surprise.
It wasn't a love at first sight by any means, I needed a whole month to finish it. The first time I got stuck in the middle of the first half and put it aside for months. *gasp*
So even with my 5 stars rating, I understand it's far from perfect and is certainly not a book for everybody.
A few reviewers mentioned that it depends on your personal experiences how much you can appreciate this book. And by god truer words have never been said. Yes! I'm positive that I would not have loved it as much if I read it prior to 2009 / when I still had my 'good health'. I would even venture to say I'd probably have hated this book when I was still one of the normal healthy population. But as it happens, I met Never Let Me Go in 2013 and that fact directly impacted how I conceive the premise and the characters' thought process.
The thing was I get Kathy.
I get why she was so passive. I get why she resisted believing there was a 'way out' for them. Because to lose that kind of hope, that staunch a believe could be extremely devastating. And I understand why Kathy wanted to avoid that kind of heartbreak. I think, in a way, it sort of became her defense mechanism to not be passionate, about anything. To avoid all the disappointments.
I felt so sorry for her. So sorry for them all. For their 'fate', for their ruined friendships, for everything.
It's hard for me just writing about this book and these 'cursed' characters...
It just hit me like a brick to the chest. That is all I can say...
This book aggressively provoked emotions in me without ever being that emotional at all. It didn't whine; didn't scream at me, just smoothly narrated the story to me, very matter-of-factly, even at times in a detaching way. And yet, the sadness I felt after finishing it, and even before that, was so disproprotionate, it took me wholly by surprise.
It wasn't a love at first sight by any means, I needed a whole month to finish it. The first time I got stuck in the middle of the first half and put it aside for months. *gasp*
So even with my 5 stars rating, I understand it's far from perfect and is certainly not a book for everybody.
A few reviewers mentioned that it depends on your personal experiences how much you can appreciate this book. And by god truer words have never been said. Yes! I'm positive that I would not have loved it as much if I read it prior to 2009 / when I still had my 'good health'. I would even venture to say I'd probably have hated this book when I was still one of the normal healthy population. But as it happens, I met Never Let Me Go in 2013 and that fact directly impacted how I conceive the premise and the characters' thought process.
The thing was I get Kathy.
I get why she was so passive. I get why she resisted believing there was a 'way out' for them. Because to lose that kind of hope, that staunch a believe could be extremely devastating. And I understand why Kathy wanted to avoid that kind of heartbreak. I think, in a way, it sort of became her defense mechanism to not be passionate, about anything. To avoid all the disappointments.
I felt so sorry for her. So sorry for them all. For their 'fate', for their ruined friendships, for everything.
It's hard for me just writing about this book and these 'cursed' characters...
It just hit me like a brick to the chest. That is all I can say...
June 5, 2011
I finally finished reading this book. Finally - is the key word. At first I thought the problem was with me - too busy to read, but now that I've finished it, I realise that the book itself was the problem. I've never read any Kazuo Ishiguro's works before, but this book is just pure boredom.
Now don't get me wrong, the idea, the story, the characters are amazing. But the writing itself is simply horribly tedious. Right after finishing the book I downloaded the movie based on it. It's one of those rare cases when the movie is way better than the book. Why? Because things actually happen in the movie, the movie made me think, made me ask questions, made me shed a few tears... while every time I picked up the book, my attention was hopelessly lost after a few pages. The book consists of endless descriptions, memories of the main character... those are described so plainly and senselessly that seem to be pointless, arise no emotions at all. I honestly got the impression at some point that Ishiguro was just filling up empty spaces to ensure that the book gets published.
Hope I haven't offended anyone with this, but I'm used to expressing what I really think about books.
I regret that I spent so much time on this book. I advise people not to repeat my mistake and (can't believe I'm saying this) just go and see the movie. It's really great.
Now don't get me wrong, the idea, the story, the characters are amazing. But the writing itself is simply horribly tedious. Right after finishing the book I downloaded the movie based on it. It's one of those rare cases when the movie is way better than the book. Why? Because things actually happen in the movie, the movie made me think, made me ask questions, made me shed a few tears... while every time I picked up the book, my attention was hopelessly lost after a few pages. The book consists of endless descriptions, memories of the main character... those are described so plainly and senselessly that seem to be pointless, arise no emotions at all. I honestly got the impression at some point that Ishiguro was just filling up empty spaces to ensure that the book gets published.
Hope I haven't offended anyone with this, but I'm used to expressing what I really think about books.
I regret that I spent so much time on this book. I advise people not to repeat my mistake and (can't believe I'm saying this) just go and see the movie. It's really great.
October 10, 2021
This book is scary. Not because it’s horror in the common sense of the word. But because it’s terrifying that we might reach a point in society where children and people are so violated and used. And worse, complying. This isn’t a happy book. There’s no rebellion. This is a harsh story from the perspective of someone so okay with how they’re regarded. Not because the characters are stupid but because this is what they’re told and raised to believe.
I recommend this book especially to the fans of The Handmaid's Tale. The narration style is different from the usual but I didn’t mind it. Kathy’s voice was a bit detached telling her story but I believe it was all part of the book and how society shaped her. It was certainly different from anything I read recently. I’m also glad I didn’t consider reading it when I was younger because I would’ve appreciated it less.
I recommend this book especially to the fans of The Handmaid's Tale. The narration style is different from the usual but I didn’t mind it. Kathy’s voice was a bit detached telling her story but I believe it was all part of the book and how society shaped her. It was certainly different from anything I read recently. I’m also glad I didn’t consider reading it when I was younger because I would’ve appreciated it less.
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