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...

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.

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 n  I get Kathy.n

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...

I’m not sure why... There is something languid and at the same time shadowy about Ishiguro’s prose that reminds me of Franz Schubert. Something at once elegant and tense, lyrical and anguished, crystalline and autumnal. In the end, I confess that this novel moved me deeply.

It is not at once obvious what the story is about. It is composed in the form of a memoir, written by a young woman, Kathy H., who looks back on her experiences as a child and, later on, as a teenager in an outlying boarding school, somewhere in England. She recounts several episodes involving her closest friends, most of them around minute events: a hand brushing against another, some kids’ artwork, a stark warning against smoking, a lost music tape, a teacher weeping, a scratched elbow, some dirty magazines, how some of the students give each other a pat, some causal sex, some inappropriate comments, etc.

Yet, underneath all these minutiae, the narrator lets us feel that there is always something unsaid, troubling and strange. In many ways, Ishiguro’s book also echoes Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale and that feeling of confusion and unease, but with a softer, low-key tone. Each chapter is built around one of these tiny events going on in this crooked little world, so that the mystery and suspense slowly build up, but we will hardly know what dark secret lies beneath it all until practically the very ending of the novel. A devastating, revolting reveal which is exposed in an almost pensive, resigned yet hopeless manner. It all comes down to a tragic tale about destiny and what it means to be mortal. Something like an impromptu by Franz Schubert...

What a fascinating book... at the start I had problems getting into the story, but when I picked it up again after some time, I was totally intrigued by the story. In these last times, I have been working long hours and had really little time to read. But when going to bed I read a couple of pages before going to sleep, two, three, four... and more. And I ended up really looking forward to reading these few pages at the end of the day, getting slowly to the end and in some wonderous way taking away my thoughts of work and high pressure. It relaxed me. Apparently this book is suitable for a slow interrupted read. How can anyone invent such a dark, chilling and heartbreaking story? Wow, five stars...!

Inconsequential
It is a highly acclaimed best-selling novel, dramatised as a film, and a highly acclaimed author, so my expectations were pretty high. The concept from Kazuo Ishiguro is intriguing, with a slight twist from other science fiction books in this space. The focus is on Kathy and primarily her relationships with Tommy and Ruth, her childhood friends. They all attended Hailsham Boarding School, with no reference to their parents or any family connections. Life was peaceful and gentle; however, not everything seems normal. Kathy and her friends' knowledge and experiences of the real world were biased until they came of age and journeyed into the wider world.

The story's premise is that each child has been cloned and brought up as an organ donor or donor carer to provide backup organ replacement for the original person. In her early thirties, Kathy reflects on her childhood and early adulthood, trying to make sense of life and where she belongs. The old headmistress may have some answers if she can track her down. Can she ever let go of her destiny and the world she was born into at Hailsham?

I spent most of the book waiting for the action to kick-off, for the graduates from Hailsham to forcefully want answers, hold to account their guardians, and demand a human individual's rights over their bodies. It all seemed incredibly sedate and accepting, and I thought there may have been more investigation and refusal to accept the lives they had mapped out. The characters were one dimensional, and largely disappointing with no energy or depth.

Fundamentally a story of humanity, what it means to be human. How sacred each of us is, with the dreams and ambitions and freedom to live the best life we can rather than live a life as an organ catalogue. The concept and plot offered so much potential, even if it was a simple love story, but it all felt inconsequential. I was deeply moved by the idea but highly disappointed in the execution of the story. I would struggle to recommend it.

The first note I want to make about this book is to clarify from the Publisher's Summary that it is not an "edge-of-your seat mystery." I wouldn't even factor the mystery element of this story into deciding whether or not you want to read it.

The primary categorization I'd use is Dystopian. I must admit that when I picked it up, I was looking forward to a dark & mysterious tale, and that isn't altogether what I got from this book so I can't help but feel let down in some ways. I am hoping that by mentioning this point from the get go I can save someone else from that potential disappointment.

Never Let Me Go is a sequence of memories, as told by 31-year-old Kath, about her time at an English private school, Hailsham. This book raises some interesting ideas about autonomy & morality, but I also found myself having some feelings about the modern meat industry. It's hard to explain the relevance of these themes without spoiling specific points of the story, but suffice it to say each theme is communicated with a subtlety that I think worked well for the book.

But that being said, the most eerie thing about this book is how the characters being affected never rail against the system that's oppressing them. There's no "aha" moment, no rebellion, no outrage. There's no satisfaction of knowing that the system has been toppled & that things will change after the conclusion. There's a bit of hang wringing, some muttered disappointment, but most of all there is a quiet acceptance.

The characters we often look up to in Dystopian tales are the ones who sacrifice life & limb to dismantle their society's flawed ideas about social justice. These are the characters we rally behind & support even when the odds seem insurmountable. Those aren't the characters you will find here.

By the end, there isn't even an outright condemnation of the Dystopian set up. It's left up to the reader to decide how their own morality applies to the situation.

That's what makes it so scary to read.

One of things I really enjoyed is Ishiguro's writing style. His flow is graceful & the diary entry style language is very relatable. Often times it felt like I was listening to a close friend tell me about her life.

However, there is a quirk about Kath's storytelling that got on my nerves a bit. It has to do with the way she repeatedly uses a certain phrasing structure in order to build up tension before she reveals a plot point. It's something along the lines of "...until what happened a couple weeks later" or "...until I said what I said next," after which she proceeds to explain the thing.

This method may have been more powerful if I found Kath's individual stories as interesting or dramatic as that lead up suggests, but unfortunately I just didn't. In fact, I felt somewhat underwhelmed with the actual content of her memories. It's not to say that they were boring, I just never felt 100% engaged with Kath or with the development of her relationships.

Ishiguro did well creating an ominous atmosphere & the overarching conflict was unique enough for me to need to see it through. But I never fell in love with this book. It was fine, but I'm looking forward to watching the film now that I've read the book. I believe a talented cast of actors with the proper direction could create a more compelling final product with this Dystopian idea.

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.

Know when to hold them and know when to fold them comes to mind when trying to write a review on this novel.
I have been meaning to read this book for so long but something kept me from doing so for many years and sometimes it best to go with your instincts when it comes to books and this is just one of those novels that I couldn’t connect with from the very first page. Having read 50% I felt I have given it ample time to improve.

I purchased my paperback copy in a second hand book shop and I struggled with the characters from the beginning and found the book “dull” reading, I just couldn’t connect with the story or the characters. I found myself reluctant to pick this novel up and after a couple of nights struggling to even get a understand what exactly was happening in the story I realized I didn't really care one way or another and Never Let Me Go was just a confusing read, wasn’t bringing me joy and time for us to part company.

I know I am in the minority on this one and thats fine, but the older I get the wiser I am becoming and realize my reading time is precious and I don't need to finish a book if I am getting nothing from it especially if I have paid for the privilege.

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.

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.

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.