Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
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| Margaret Atwood's review | 4 | 06/08/2008 07:43PM |
| Do we already have a program like this? | 3 | 12/27/2007 06:32AM |
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Read in June, 2008
In "Never Let Me Go," a fictional story focusing on three classmates from a unique boarding school, author Kazuo Ishiguro deals with questions of loss and mortality that each of must eventually confront. As we get older, as we lose our friends and family, as the environment around us changes and things once familiar to us disappear or become unfamiliar, as we cling to our memories of how things used to be, how do we come to accept the fact that our lives are finite and attach some mea...more
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Read in January, 2008
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Read in September, 2007
As a child, Kathy H. attended Hailsham, an elite boarding school where children were raised to be both healthy and artistic and taught to believe that both their health and creativity were essential to themselves and to the world they would one day enter. 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...more
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(SPOILER ALERT! This book has one major “Crying Game”/ “Sixth Sense”-style secret that I will discuss below. If you are going to read this book, and don’t want me to ruin it for you, don’t read this post. Then again, everybody seems to “know” the secret without reading it, so … well, consider yourself warned)
At first glance this book would seem to be a departure for KI. Some might want to call this his attempt at science fiction, except it’s set in the late 1990’s, and ...more
At first glance this book would seem to be a departure for KI. Some might want to call this his attempt at science fiction, except it’s set in the late 1990’s, and ...more
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Read in January, 2007
recommends it for:
almost anyone
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 w...more
The themes that make this book most interesting are to do w...more
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Read in January, 2005
The book was written in 2005, and opens in Britain, late-1990s. It starts out in a co-ed boarding school following the story of Kathy, a young student. At this point she and her close friends are essentially early high school age. It is a very closed school, where liberties are very sparse and minimal contact with the outside world. The students are often reminded how special they are, and how important it is that they take care of their bodies. Their lives revolve around their classmates and th...more
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Read in June, 2008
recommends it for:
People with plane and cab/bus rides in their future
A quick read, but one I never felt very enthusiastic towards. I remembered reading "The Remains of the Day" in high school, and thought another of Ichiguro's books would be equally gripping. Not quite so with "Never".
One great thing about "Never" is that, like it or not, it's over quickly. There are just enough hooks thrown in to keep the pages going, and Ichiguro's style is straightforward and rarely makes you double back on a line. Outside of a few British phras...more
One great thing about "Never" is that, like it or not, it's over quickly. There are just enough hooks thrown in to keep the pages going, and Ichiguro's style is straightforward and rarely makes you double back on a line. Outside of a few British phras...more
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I found myself surprisingly drawn to this after a while, though I did not really anticipate that; I also cannot say that I was drawn to it in a way which was entirely satisfying. From the very beginning, it had a strange atmosphere, and that was both appealing and distracting at times. Perhaps because all conversation was just being remembered, there were times it was really rather plodding; Kathy's remembrances seem rather contrived at times -- the way she always says "but I'll get back to...more
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Read in February, 2008
I finished this book late last night and am probably not quite ready to review it. However, I feel compelled to while the story is still making its way around my head. I thought that the writing was strong in style and the story was engaging enough for me to complete it in two sittings. The problem was that I felt there was so much more to say and that the protagonist - an emotional, analytical, and intelligent young woman - would have spent as much time questioning the bigger issues involving h...more
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Read in March, 2007
I can see Never Let Me Go being great for book clubs because it will generate a lot of discussion.
That being said, I didn't care for the book, for a couple of different reasons. The writing style is very conversational -- very much like you're having a discussion with the protagonist. The thing that annoyed me the most about this was the fact that the things that happened (so bob and I went walking to the store and we had a fight abo...more
That being said, I didn't care for the book, for a couple of different reasons. The writing style is very conversational -- very much like you're having a discussion with the protagonist. The thing that annoyed me the most about this was the fact that the things that happened (so bob and I went walking to the store and we had a fight abo...more
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Read in April, 2007
I'd expected this book to be about friends growing up in a boarding school, which it was, but it was about so much more than that. The science fiction elements were very intriguing, but I wished for more scientific details. I would have liked to know how some students could do up to three or four donations before "completing" (Ishiguro's unique and suitable word for dying). Were they cloned to have an extra liver, a third kidney? I don't believe so, because I thought the general public...more
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Read in March, 2008
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Read in January, 2007
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