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Never Let Me Go
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Original price was: $17.00.$9.99Current price is: $9.99.
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NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • From the acclaimed, bestselling author of The Remains of the Day comes “a Gothic tour de force” (The New York Times) with an extraordinary twist—a moving, suspenseful, beautifully atmospheric modern classic.
One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century
As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.
Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy have reentered her life. And for the first time she is beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just what it is that makes them special—and how that gift will shape the rest of their time together.
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Categories: Science Fiction & Fantasy
Product name:
Never Let Me Go
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Original price was: $17.00.$9.99Current price is: $9.99.
J. C. Mareschal –
Nobel prize laureate, Kazuo Ishiguro, is not a very prolific writer, but each of his books is a real jewel. “Never let me go” is a very disturbing but also very moving story of a group of children educated in a secluded boarding school in England. Their education prepares them for a very special fate. These children are clones who are destined, after a couple of years of “normal life”, to give their organs for transplant, and after each operation recover for another organ removal until they die. What is so disturbing about the book is that this horrible scheme is so plausible when some governments and criminal gangs are engaged in organ trafficking. But not everything is dark in this story. The “victims” face their fate with incredible fortitude because they care for each other and find meaning in their togetherness. A very sad and very beautiful story!
Brendan A. MacWade –
Nearly 600 reviews here for Never Let Me Go. What can I possibly add to the discussion?
A few things.
*** Mild spoilers ahead ***
First, I love Ishiguro. He’s an outstanding writer. The Remains of the Day is perhaps the greatest novel about unrequited love ever written in the English language. But even Ishiguro is a master at only a few themes. Simply put, his best works are about characters who are unable to break free from their predestined paths. They can be constricted by Victorian manners (such are the protagonists in Remains of the Day), or they are constricted by an inescapable understanding that they will will live very short lives (as the protagonists in Never Let Me Go). The idea to break free and escape never occurs to any of these charaters in Ishiguro’s finest works. England might as well be a maximum security prison – a giant gray Alcatraz. And no matter what, none of his characters dare lose their dignity.
Never Let Me Go is not science fiction, nor is it a dystopia novel (like 1984). The best way I can put it is that it is a brilliant short story or novella, expanded to novel length if for no other reason than to let the reader soak-in the sterile, gray environments the protagonists inhabit. The novel is written as a free form memoir, with a terribly irritating literary device. The narrator, Kathy H., has a habit of getting ahead of herself, telling us of a crucial turning point or event, but forces herself to backtrack in order to set-up the next major point (usually expressed as “I’ll return to that later” or “more on that later”). And when she does divulge the details of this major turning point, it is usually a creepy, awkward conversation between her and one of her two closest friends, Tommy or Ruth. It becomes quite clear that these characters have a radically isolated and skewed worldview. For them (or at least Kathy H.) major events are not graduations, or moving to a new residence, or even death. No, major events are spilling secrets and making the occasional error of saying too much or being too harsh towards one’s somewhat distant friend. In other words, they are totally old school British schoolchildren in a bubble. These schoolchildren inhabit an alternate England – one that has advanced science far greater than the real postwar UK.
Never Let Me Go has scenes from this alternate England that you may never forget. The empty rural roads and service stations where Kathy H. finds peace driving her car. The perpetually gray skies. The refuse and trash collecting in the trees and barbed wire in a field somewhere in the east. The casual, passionless relationship the characters have with sex and death. The stiff upper lip attitude of wanting to make it to one’s fourth ‘donation’. It really is a brilliant work if you accept the argument that it is a dystopian story that avoids going into any details of the dystopia.
In other words, this is not Children of Men. The Europe in this novel might be in the midst of a serious public health crisis, but Never Let Me Go neither hints at one nor explains what it might be. Or Europe might be so prosperous, so technologically advanced, that the creation of these children might have seemed as natural as any advancement in a First World society. Ishiguro gives nothing away, expect for a key line about how science advanced so quickly after 1946 that there ‘was no time’ to consider the morality or logic of those advancements. In other words, England had become a well mannered monster. By 1996, England was consuming living, breathing, beautiful children as easily as stocks were traded on the FTSE. These children will be throughly educated, grow up, experience two years of independent, sexually liberated life, and then work to fulfill their predetermined destinies. And this England, as you might expect, seems quietly proud of that achievement, despite having ‘no time’ to ponder the consequences. Because, I suspect, more important things in English society must be maintained. There are cricket matches and afternoon tea parties to attend, after all. Carry on, you English. I am certain Ishiguro is attracted to that theme given the similarities to 20th century Japan’s adherence to honor, dignity, and constrained mannerisms.
That alone is highly disturbing and original. And while I suspect Ishiguro was inspired by Dolly the Sheep in 1996, others with more sinister agendas have already looked to this novel for ideological ammunition. Opponents of embryonic stem cell research and abortion see parallels in this novel. They see how a society, with good intentions of advancing health and science, can destroy perfectly good lives. The difference they cannot escape, however, is that the children in this novel are not in a lab or in a uterus. But I am just rubbed the wrong way when I see ‘Antis’ flocking to a book by a secular British man as a source for their petty arguments.
But as Kathy H. might say, let me return to what I was saying about the novel itself.
I feel like such a picky reader when I complain that this could have been a novella or short story. As great and elegant a writer as Ishiguro is, even he has no serious justification for the length of this work. There is much creepiness and some suspense, but no tension. Rather it is a largely atmospheric work. At least the book gives us two amazing sequences, the road trip to Norfolk, and Tommy’s moment of rebellion and passion (which may very well reflect the frustration of many readers of this book). Even a quiet, introverted student like Tommy has to let it all out when he (and we) discover that we were told so much and at the same time, so very little.
But there is a glimmer of hope – the 2010 movie directed by Mark Romanek. Not only will the story line be tighter, it might play better in the medium of cinema, despite offering no answers as to what happened to this alternate world.
And of course, that is Ishiguro’s point. This novel is intended to make us think about our real world and our lives. For succeeding at that, I give him tons of credit. For reprising his themes of people locked in their manners, bubbles, and fates, I also bestow him much credit. But for stretching it to 287 pages, I feel I must deduct stars.
Luis Ayala –
El libro llego en perfecto estado y en el tiempo pactado.
Referente al contenido del libro aún no lo termino de leer, pero por el autor Kazuo Ishiguro se sabe que es una novela que valdrá la pena, además que es un libro con múltiples reconocimientos.
Laura Toerner –
There’s something incredibly relatable about the narrator’s childhood recollections—of conversations and relationships, the inner workings of a child’s brain. The author’s writing style was especially beautiful and captivating to me. “Let me tell you why that happened next…” And the overall premise is also compelling and interesting. But even with incomplete-feeling or tragic endings in other books, I usually have a stronger take-away—a good cry or need to google theories of what happened next. But for Never Let Me Go, overall, the story, characters and ending just left me feeling numbly hopeless.
Amazon Kunde –
Tolles Buch
Maurício Fontana Filho –
to cheio de coisa pra fazer e li rapidinho do início ao fim porque o livro é top demais
Lacaria enrico roberto –
Tutto ok, Amazon al top come sempre
Just K –
Ishigiro’s Never Let Me Go is beautifully written and the character development is excellent. I did not put this book down and read it in several hours. It’s a wonderful example of modern literature and completely unique in the fact that we read the most unspeakable horror and swallow it up, wide-eyed and alarmed, all the while amazed that something so terrifying can be written so poetically.
This is not a horror novel by any means! This is an examination of a certain aspect of our culture and how we can all be indoctrinated to accept it.
I don’t want to re-outline the entire plot, since so many reviewers have already done so. What makes this story so powerful is how understated it is. We watch these children grow from childhood to adulthood, always knowing how their lives will unfold. Cloned from their “models”, they know that they will eventually be harvested for their vital organs. This is their purpose, and it is never questioned. Ever. Sometimes certain events or things will cause the protagonists to stop and almost reconsider their destinies, but they fail to consider it fully and go on with their lives as they’ve been taught to. Notably, there is an abandoned boat towards the end of the book. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy make their way to the dock to peer at this ticket to freedom. Kathy notes the cabin size and condition and it’s clear they could take that boat somewhere and be free. They don’t. They don’t even discuss it. They just watch it sitting there. Kathy and Tommy drive all over the English countryside– it’s clear they have their physical freedom. They drive to clinics to visit other donors, to stores to shop, cafes to relax in, and hospitals for pre-donation testing. There are no doors or bars holding these people in. They are conditioned from day one to live their lives knowing they will one day donate and “complete”. Nobody they know has done otherwise. There are no rumors about anyone refusing their preordained destinies.
Herein lies the books strength and its weakness. Throughout the novel, I thought it seemed as if it was leading up to a more climactic event. And, it did and didn’t. The climax was a bit anticlimactic and the characters brought in to meet with the two heroes seemed flat (while empathetic) and lacking depth. The horror this meeting could have evoked was felt more fully through the use of Tommy’s hopeful art, through some of the thoughts Kathy had and immediately disregarded. It seemed as if more could have and should have been done with that rather than this macabre meeting with the two former school administrators.
Yet, at the same time, maybe this is the novel’s strength. Freedom is hinted at, yet not taken. There is no prison, yet they are prisoners of society and their own minds. There is love, but maybe the passion is lacking because they know subconsciously there is no future. And, Kathy has seen her friends complete. She knows what’s coming after donation number 4 for the man she loves. She changes the subject when he brings the subject up. She dismisses it because it’s too difficult to openly discuss it. We know this and they know this. And, although this might be the book’s strength, I do yearn for this discussion. I’m left without real closure and I want them to wake up.
This is heartily recommended.