This is the second time I have read this book - I could only remember liking it and not much more so I really wanted to reread this now that Kazuo Ishiguro has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And I am certainly glad I did.

The novel is speculative fiction but that speculative part is only at the periphery of the meditation on what makes us human, what makes live worth living, what friendship can do for us and how to make the most of the time we have been given. It is a novel about growing up, about friendship and love, about trust and betrayal, and about loss more than anything else. Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy grow up on what at the beginning sounds like a normal boarding school but as the book progresses turns out to be something else completely. The story is told more or less chronologically by Kathy looking back at her life and greatly influenced by how she sees the world.

This time around Kathy struck me even more so than before as an unreliable narrator. She wants to see the world a certain way and makes everything else fit into that narrative. She puts her head in the sand and refuses to see the horrific reality of her life and those of her friends. But even more so, her relationship with Ruth is what made me think. Ruth sounds awful, do not get me wrong, but then again Kathy always goes out of her way to excuse her own behaviour while only paying lip service to Ruth's intentions. Kathy's snide remarks are always in reaction to something Ruth has supposedly done or thought. I liked how Ishiguro made their friendship so ambiguous and how the interactions have different layers to them. It added so much to my reading enjoyment and made me think about narrators in fiction and how we tend to trust them unless they make it clear that they are unreliable.

I adored the way Ishiguro tells his story, thoughtful and slowly and very clever. He builds an atmosphere of both dread and melancholy while creating highly believable characters. It is genre fiction with literary aspects which just is my favourite.

So glad I finished this book.

Completely unforgettable. This is, and will remain, one of my favourite novels of all time.

--->EXCERPT<---

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. That'll make it almost exactly twelve years.

I own this movie and have watched it many times (including today). I always thought it was so very sad and I never knew there was a book about it until friends on Goodreads had it listed. The book is just as sad and of course has more things added in that the movie did not. The book shares a lot more about the donors childhood at Hailsham.

The main characters are Kath, Ruth and Tommy. They all grew up together at Hailsham and were together later at the cottages and later at the end. Well, at least Kath was with them at their end.



Kath and Tommy seemed to be having a little thing start up with them as kids but Ruth pushed in and took over with Tommy. I'm not sure why Kath or Tommy never pushed Ruth away. You really know in the movie and maybe a little in the book that Ruth wanted it that way. But she later apologizes for it.

These poor kids are growing up in this place thinking things are so normal. Until finally one day a teacher tells them what they truly are, they are donors. They were raised as a sort of clone of someone else and when they grew up they were to be used as donors for other people. Their lives were to be nothing. This didn't really bother them too much when they found out because I guess they thought that was just life. They never really knew about the outside world until they went to the cottages at age 16. They stayed there until it was time to donate or unless they signed up to be a carer like Kath did. This means she just goes around and gives the donors comfort. But they were all together for a while at the cottages trying to live a normal little life there.





Later on when Kath finds Ruth again when she's in the hospital and on her second donation, they go and find Tommy. Ruth apologizes to them for keeping them apart for all of those years. She tries to help by finding them information to see if they can have a few more years together since they are in love.



This really is a very sad story for these people. If you watch the movie you will see how much more sad it can be, showing one of them dying on the table after the last donation. It's just disturbing and just the thought that the world COULD actually do something like this to people.

Either way, I loved the book and the movie.

MY BLOG: Melissa Martin's Reading List

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 carry an organ donor card in my wallet, though mine are only due to be harvested after my death. : )

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!
: )

Somtimes sad is ok. If you are looking for something "Ok sad", might I recommend Sad Keanu.

n  n

See it is sad, but kind of funny and people can have fun and have had fun for quite sometime.

Sad Keanu in a boat

n  n

Sad Keanu watching football

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and my personal favourite Sad Keanu with panda.

n  n

With "Never Let Me Go" there is no fun to be had here,none. Not only is it sad and depressing as shit, it is also cold. It is set in England which goes without saying...damp(the worst kind of cold). The teachers are cold, Ruth is cold, the doctors, the nurses, us as a society,COLD.Like the friggen North Pole. This is a really well written book, I added an extra star because I am acknowledging the writing, its the suicidal thoughts afterwards that are killing the star rating here and I was not looking for rainbows and unicorns, but when I finished this I just thought "God Damn I am so sad now" So I want to be very clear I found this DE-PRESS-ING.

What fresh hell is this??
What is this salty discharge leaking from my eyes??

And... there's a movie? I will never watch it. Ever. I will give up my Netflix account, break my tv, and move out to Amish country to avoid it.



Oh, thank God I don't work! Dodged that bullet!

i love rereads. not only do i get to revisit favourite stories, but i also get to see how i have grown as a reader. and comparing my previous review to my current thoughts, man. i have done a lot of growing.

the first time around, i solely focused on the sci-fi/dystopian aspects (i love how its set in an parallel universe) and the narration. this time, i found myself so much more invested in the characters themselves. i spent so much time thinking about their existence, their reasons to live, and how they navigated each day with that knowledge. it was a much more emotional and thought-provoking reread.

not that i didnt enjoy this story the first time i read it, but i feel like i got a whole lot more out of it this time. which only shows me that my reading experiences have become more meaningful than they were years ago. and that is a rewarding feeling.

↠ 4 stars

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.

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.

Three stars for bringing me into the depressive mood. I mean, I've read his books before and got used to a permanent feeling of sadness and nostalgia, but this is a new level of phychological devastation.
Behind a simple story of growing up in a boarding school are hidden search for the meaning of life, disturbing questions of love, friendship and what makes us humans.
I watched the movie years ago, so the ending didn't strike me as surprise. Yet still it was heart-breaking.

A major disappointment. Ishiguro starts with an interesting premise but makes very little out of it, and ends up with a limp, unsatisfying story.

Some of the positive reviews about this book seem a little strained -- we're supposed to reflect on the similarity of our own "doomed" lives to those of the clones. But it doesn't really wash. There's never a sense that any of the characters are struggling with the dead-serious issues that make life worth living; they're herded from stage to stage like cattle, mooing articulately and chewing their cuds with a vague sense of malaise, but never actually taking their lives in hand. Their own impending fates don't seem to mobilize them into action, or concentrate their minds at all.

So it's a frustrating read. Ishiguro's deliberately sketched this story in a low key way (which is cool to read), but there are way too many holes in the story and the drama just leaks out steadily. With few genuinely provocative ideas and a wispy narrative line, you hope for a climax that's going to pull it ll together. But when it arrives, it's a drippy and embarrassing affair, with much preaching and obviousness. Any impact the story might have had gets instantly diluted.

Hate to sound harsh. But by the time the book ambled to a close, I felt like the characters might as well be carved up for their innards -- they didn't seem to be willing to take the risks necessary to have an actual life.