{"id":6718,"date":"2007-06-18T15:59:57","date_gmt":"2007-06-18T19:59:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6718"},"modified":"2015-05-30T11:40:05","modified_gmt":"2015-05-30T15:40:05","slug":"never-let-me-go-part-deux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6718","title":{"rendered":"<i>Never Let Me Go<\/i>, by Kazuo Ishiguro, part deux"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ac&#038;ref=tf_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=thesheivari-20&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=1400078776&#038;asins=1400078776&#038;linkId=MGS6LTVU2VAGCCN7&#038;show_border=true&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=true\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/somanybooksblog.com\/2007\/05\/09\/never-let-me-go\/\">This was the post<\/a> that made me buy the book immediately.  The good thing about the post is that there are no spoilers &#8211; none at all.   And good discussion in the comments section (all of which I avoided first time I read it &#8211; because I feared there would be spoilers).<\/p>\n<p>I am mostly struck (at this moment &#8211; I&#8217;m still processing the book) by Kath&#8217;s <i>voice<\/i> in <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/1400078776\/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&#038;camp=1789&#038;creative=9325&#038;creativeASIN=1400078776&#038;linkCode=as2&#038;tag=thesheivari-20&#038;linkId=JUHKSMU7WHV7PG7K\">Never Let Me Go<\/a><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=thesheivari-20&#038;l=as2&#038;o=1&#038;a=1400078776\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" style=\"border:none !important; margin:0px !important;\" \/><\/i>.  The narrator&#8217;s <i>voice<\/i>.  The chatty, detailed, almost mundane voice &#8211; it reminded me a bit of the voice in <i>Prep<\/i> (which is one of the most distinctive and compelling first-person voices I&#8217;ve heard in a long time &#8211; I wouldn&#8217;t say the writing itself was great, but the voice!!  And the story!  Could not put the book down.  <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5556\">Yo<\/a>)  Anyway, Kath&#8217;s voice reminded me a bit of the voice in <i>Prep<\/i> &#8211; except there&#8217;s this overlay of portentousness and doom in <i>Never Let Me Go<\/i>.  Like: for all intents and purposes (or: &#8220;for all <i>intensive<\/i> purposes&#8221;) &#8211; it&#8217;s just your regular old kids-at-boarding-school novel.  It&#8217;s a novel of adolescent angst, a three-dimensional portrait of school, life, romance, teen sex, classes, authority figures, etc.  But you still get this creepy sense of how much you don&#8217;t know &#8230; and you know that when you find out, it&#8217;s going to be horrible &#8230; but we are never &#8220;in&#8221; on the secret before Kath is &#8230; We just have to listen to her babble on about her teenage romances and her love triangles, and I kept just getting a kind of gruesome feeling in the pit of my stomach, as I read on.  Like: who are they?  What are they?  Are they old? Deformed?  What is it??  It was awful.    The narrator&#8217;s voice (like I said before) is totally convincing &#8211; although I have to think about it a bit more.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s one essential part of the book that didn&#8217;t quiiiiite ring true for me &#8211; but it was alllllmost there.<\/p>\n<p>Sort of spoilers below &#8230; I hint at things that should not be hinted at, if you plan on reading the book.<\/p>\n<p>Only those who have read it follow me!!<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nSo &#8230; there was a false note, for me, in the whole bit about the artwork taken from the kids &#8211; and what the students all believe happened to it.  How rumors fly, and what they all settle on as the logical explanation.<\/p>\n<p>I need to be careful here, because I&#8217;m treading into real Spoiler Land.  I feel like the explanation they came up with (the students I mean) &#8230; I guess, if it wasn&#8217;t so fairy tale-ish, so: &#8220;They need our artwork because of THIS!&#8221; &#8211; I guess I just didn&#8217;t believe that the STUDENTS would believe that fairy tale explanation.  I realize they were sheltered, and in many ways naive &#8211; but &#8230; I guess I felt like it was too &#8220;and they lived happily ever after&#8221;&#8230;. It did add to the ominous feeling of that part of the book, because you KNEW something bad was coming &#8230; But I still think it might have been more powerful if I, the reader, hadn&#8217;t been so skeptical.  If I, too, had thought; &#8220;Maybe that IS why they took the artwork!!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But I didn&#8217;t believe it for a second.  Perhaps this just tells you that I&#8217;m a cynical person who&#8217;s gotten my heart broke one too many times to believe in that crap anymore.  This is highly possible.<\/p>\n<p>I do think Ishiguro is smarter than that, though &#8211; and was going for an unbalancing effect, a sort of dreamlike: &#8220;what is real, what isn&#8217;t real&#8221; feeling &#8230; and that one thing pulled me out of it.  Only momentarily, though.  It was like a semi-bad actor showing up in a movie with great actors.  You have to just forgive it, and go, &#8220;Okay, so I didn&#8217;t quite believe that &#8230; but oh well &#8230; here comes the next moment!  Moving on!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And when the real explanation comes &#8230; and what the artwork really was for &#8230; and how it was <i>kind <\/i>of close to their imagining about it &#8230; it was quite chilling.  Horrible, really.  Makes me want to puke.  To be honest, the whole book makes me want to puke.<\/p>\n<p>Am I insane to say that I think it could have made me want to puke <i>more<\/i>?<\/p>\n<p>I have to think more on it (obviously) &#8230; but I just want to say that I had the same response as Stefanie above, this morning.  I read the last 10 pages, and I truly believe if my bed had spontaneously combusted I would have been hesitant to leave the book behind &#8211; I was that engrossed, that sucked in &#8211; awful, it had an awful <i>inevitability<\/i> to it, once you truly understood what was going on &#8230; and because of that <i>inevitability<\/i> (which can take on almost Greek proportions) &#8211; there was a coldness to my response to the final 10 pages.  Like, the veil was lifted, all was clear &#8230; no escape &#8230; one must trudge with the characters to their fates &#8230; but, like Stefanie, at the last paragraph, I found myself welling up with tears.<\/p>\n<p>And the ending of the book has stayed with me all day.<\/p>\n<p>It reminds me of that one sentence in the last section of <i>Remains of the Day<\/i>.  Anyone who has read the book will know the moment I mean.  Something like, &#8220;To be truthful, my heart was breaking.&#8221;  No more, no less.  No description, nothing but that &#8230; and since the rest of the book was this elegant precise prose &#8230; My God, to suddenly be punched forward into this man&#8217;s heart like that &#8230; It hit me like a ton of bricks.<\/p>\n<p>The ending of <i>Never Let Me Go<\/i>, even with its inevitability, hit me in the same way. Ka-pow.<\/p>\n<p><p>\n<iframe style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ac&#038;ref=tf_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=thesheivari-20&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=1400078776&#038;asins=1400078776&#038;linkId=MGS6LTVU2VAGCCN7&#038;show_border=true&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=true\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This was the post that made me buy the book immediately. The good thing about the post is that there are no spoilers &#8211; none at all. And good discussion in the comments section (all of which I avoided first &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6718\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15],"tags":[977,976],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6718"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6718"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103269,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6718\/revisions\/103269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}