What was never let me go about

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. 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. Facebook Twitter Insta Academia View all 31 comments. The story begins with Kathy, who describes herself as a carer, talking about looking after organ donors. She has been a carer for almost twelve years at the time of narration, and she often reminisces about her time spent at Hailsham, a boarding school in England, where the teachers are known as guardians.

Along with classes, they often emphasize the importance of being healthy to their students—smoking is considered to be taboo, almost on the level of a crime, and working in the vegetable garden is compulsory. The curriculum appears to be like that of any other school, but there is great encouragement for the students to produce art. The art is then displayed in an exhibition, and the best artwork is chosen by a woman known to the students as Madame.

The students speculate that she keeps their work in a gallery. The story revolves around three Hailsham students: Kathy and two others, Ruth and Tommy, who develop a close but complicated friendship. Kathy develops a fondness for Tommy, looking after him when he is bullied and having private talks with him.

However, Ruth and Tommy begin a romantic relationship during their time at the school that continues when they leave. Jan 02, Esteban del Mal rated it it was amazing Shelves: novel , fantasy-horror-scifi , fiction. 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. 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 I had previously avoided this book, having heard it referred to as British science fiction. 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.

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. 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. The story made me uncomfortable, and I hated myself for returning to it after having put it aside. 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? 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 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. View all 42 comments. Oct 13, Seth T. 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 pla I'm always excited when I run across a novel that is, so far as I can tell, essentially perfect.

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 s, 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.

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.

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. 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.

View all 15 comments. Aug 15, Scarlet rated it it was amazing Shelves: classics , lush-writing , booker-longlist-shortlist , most-loved , it-stays-with-you , 5-starred-perfection , dystopia , favorite-author , books-i-own , uk.

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.

I hate what this book did to me. I hate the author for creating Despair. 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. 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. View all 21 comments. Aug 16, Kevin Ansbro rated it did not like it Recommends it for: People with far more patience than me. Shelves: dystopian , contemporary-fantasy , don-t-feel-u-have-to-like-it , abandoned , parable , repetitive-yawnfest.

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.

S You know those irritating people who talk to children and old people as if they were babies, in a puerile, singsong voice? 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. 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 view spoiler [I carry an organ donor card in my wallet, though mine are only due to be harvested after my death. Read this book by all means, but don't say that I didn't warn you. Apr 23, Juushika rated it it was ok Shelves: status-borrowed.

As a child, Kathy H. 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 wor As a child, Kathy H. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. I'll admit, reading a book that you love for the second time is a scary thing.

I read it within 24 hours on a vacation, and it whisked me away from that trip I was on, taking me to '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 I'll admit, reading a book that you love for the second time is a scary thing.

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. 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.

View all 4 comments. Sep 12, NReads rated it liked it. Keira Knightley Ruth as Ruth. Carey Mulligan Kathy as Kathy. Andrew Garfield Tommy as Tommy. Hannah Sharp Amanda as Amanda. Christina Carrafiell Laura as Laura.

Oliver Parsons Arthur as Arthur. Luke Bryant David as David. Fidelis Morgan Matron as Matron. Damien Thomas Doctor as Doctor. Nathalie Richard Madame as Madame. Mark Romanek. More like this. Watch options. Storyline Edit. As children, Ruth, Kathy and Tommy spend their childhood at a seemingly idyllic English boarding school.

As they grow into young adults, they find that they have to come to terms with the strength of the love they feel for each other, while preparing themselves for the haunting reality that awaits them.

Welcome to Hailsham. The students have everything they need, except time. Drama Romance Sci-Fi Thriller. Rated R for some sexuality and nudity. Did you know Edit.

She was certain someone would make a film adaptation, and had hoped they could wait until she was old enough to play Kathy. She couldn't bear the idea of anyone else portraying Kathy, although she acknowledged that she thought other people would be able to do a better performance. Tommy later learns to control his temper after a guardian named Miss Lucy assures him that it is not necessary for him to be creative.

Although the students learn vaguely about the donation program, their guardians shield them from a full understanding of their future. Miss Lucy disagrees with this indirect approach, and often exhibits strange behavior in front of the students as a result, in one instance telling them explicitly about their futures.

After Miss Lucy speaks with Tommy about his artwork, he and Kathy theorize that creativity may be connected to donations. They speculate about Madame, a woman who visits Hailsham to collect the best student artwork. Madame is rumored to keep this art in a personal gallery. When the song ends, Kathy sees Madame crying in the doorway. Shortly afterwards, Kathy loses her tape. Kathy thinks he is upset about his recent breakup with Ruth, whom he has dated for six months. But Tommy is upset about Miss Lucy, who recently told him that she was wrong to dismiss the importance of creativity.

Miss Lucy departs Hailsham abruptly, and Tommy mends his relationship with Ruth. Ruth often ignores Tommy and Kathy in her efforts to blend in with the veterans, who are not from Hailsham. Kathy notices that the veterans regard the Hailsham students with awe.

One couple, Chrissie and Rodney, are especially interested in Hailsham. In Norfolk, Chrissie and Rodney ask about a rumored exception allowing Hailsham couples in love to defer their donations. Ruth pretends to know something about deferrals, which surprises Kathy and Tommy. The students eventually find the open-plan office. I n Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Unconsoled , Ryder, a pianist, is due to give an important concert in a foreign city.

The novel is written in the form of an extended anxiety dream: manifold impediments spring up to delay his arrival at the concert hall; at one point he realises he hasn't practised the pieces he intends to play. In a field outside the city where, through labyrinthine causes, he finds himself, he comes across the dilapidated wreck of his old childhood family car.

Much of it, I could see, was covered with fungus. This tendency — which might be called a type of impersonation, a kind of camouflaging of the writer's authority and hence his responsibility — can be seen throughout Ishiguro's work, and goes hand in hand with his most persistent themes: the fear of disorganisation and abandonment; the psychical aftermath of childhood; and the relationship between the institutional and the personal through which these themes are frequently dramatised.

His most popular novel, The Remains of the Day , recommended itself to readers by the purity of its translation of that perennial English favourite, the period piece: here the author's lack of presence was felt to be impeccable, as discreet and thorough as the butler himself, serving up an England of which he didn't personally partake.

But impersonation is also hubris, arrogance, control, for it seeks to undermine or evade the empathetic basis of shared experience. Without empathy, the impersonator can misjudge people quite as spectacularly as he second-guesses them: in Ishiguro's case, The Unconsoled bewildered and alienated the very readers The Remains of the Day had gone to such lengths to satisfy.

And indeed, The Unconsoled can on one level be regarded as a sort of outburst, almost an act of personal aggression, though it is a lengthy and meticulous work. Never Let Me Go is Ishiguro's sixth novel and has proved to be his most popular book since his Booker prize-winning heyday. As with The Remains of the Day , there is a film, replete with English celebrities. Ishiguro's ventriloquism announces itself in the novel's first lines: "My name is Kathy H.

I'm thirty-one years old, and I've been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the end of this year.

Kathy is a "carer", and indeed the notion of the "caring professions" represents precisely that elision of the institutional and the personal that generates the undertone of disturbance in so much of his work.