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Enoch is Currently Reading

Enoch Page is currently reading

Never Let Me Go

by Kazuo Ishiguro (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in July 2022

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Enoch Page said: " It's surely not fair to say that I read this book because I loved and was profoundly moved by Ishiguro's Remains of the Day, both the film and book. In fact, a book must be read on its own merit, digested on its own terms. That is why I stuck it out It's surely not fair to say that I read this book because I loved and was profoundly moved by Ishiguro's Remains of the Day, both the film and book. In fact, a book must be read on its own merit, digested on its own terms. That is why I stuck it out even when it seemed to be going nowhere after the first third of the book. I felt so unengaged that I wanted to trash it, but I am glad I read it anyway. Why? Because it's important for me to read books that I do not necessarily like, and yet, I want some pay-off by the end of a novel. For me, that never came. I did come to agree with one reviewer that the film, The Island, did a better job with the theme. I also came to agree with another reviewer that the writing is a bit too deadpan for my taste. Yet, the book has a redeeming quality not emphasized in most reviews. It could be seen as an incredible character study, not so much in terms of character depth. They tend to be one-dimensional as one reviewer writes, but a lot more is going on, it seems to me. The power of these characters is their pattern of interrelatedness. One might say, Kathy, the narrator, was too long emotionally co-dependent with Ruth, who at times could be a bully. Kathy finally does stand up to Ruth, but there is never a truly clean break from Ruth who might be viewed as narcissistic. Ruth seems narcissistic to the extent that she needed to orchestrate the behavior of others to make herself feel safe. There are times when Ruth is downright cruel to her friends in trying to keep them under her control. She controls them to the point that she even tried to redeem her cruelty by dictating their destiny. For me, Never Let Me Go was their story as a friendship triangle eventually centered around a romantic competition between the women that renders their status as clones born to have their organs harvested rather secondary. That is, I think, what made the book hard for me to read and hard for me to take. It seems the author tries so hard to prove their humanity (for instance by having Ruth chase the possible human from which she became the clone). Yet, the very aspect of humanity that otherwise would have had these characters fighting to gain their freedom never sparks. Their conflicts are internal to the clone society and their activist educators. There are no confrontations with their real oppressors that might have gotten the reader more involved, just vague references to them. They end up being rather placid cardboard figures in a way that belies their humanity. Are they human or not might be the theme, but they embody both the sense of being human and not so human in the sense I just noted. Maybe that paradox is the central one driving Ishiguro's novel? Perhaps that is why I cannot highly recommend this award-winning novel to readers. I will not recommend it because the internalization of their unjust plight never sufficiently gets called into question amongst themselves. They just keep living it out a bit too much for me although I am sure others will disagree. In any case, that is what killed the plot for me as it threatens to bore the reader to death. Therefore, all discussions emerging from this text claiming to be about justice seem pyrrhic victories to me. ...more "

Jul 18, 2022 08:48AM · see review

Enoch’s Quotes

“Tomkins ultimately bases his theory of affect on a principle he calls “analog amplification.” He describes affect as a mechanism that magnifies awareness and intensifies the effects of operations associated with other biological subsystems (drive, cognitive, motor, perceptual, homeostatic) by “co-assembling” with these other vital mechanisms: “The affect amplifies by increasing the urgency of anything with which it is co-assembled. It is what I have called an analog amplifier” (EA,”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

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“In an equally counterintuitive fashion, affect’s distinctive function of amplifying the awareness and effects of other functions is based on its ability to “simulate” them. Affect produces “urgent analogs” not only of the rate and duration of its “external activator” (the pistol shot, for instance, that activates surprise), but of the abstract profiles of “neural firing” generated by the external activator, profiles which Tomkins calls “innate activators.”
― Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

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“The new discipline will be the study of the psychophysical nature of reality, that mysterious, interstitial space shimmering between mind and matter.”
― Dean Radin, Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe

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