Grab Instantly Never Let Me Go Outlined By Kazuo Ishiguro Released Through Digital Format
I'm sorry but I just didn't like it, Insert frowny face A few times I thought "okay, here we go!" But then nope, nothing, nada, The majority of the book felt like an epilogue, I just don't know how you take a book with a plotline as interesting and creepy and unique as this one and turn it into an unrelenting snoozefest, party of one.
When I hear "the best novel of the decade," I expect brilliance,
When I hear "now a major motion picture starring Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield, and Keira Knightley," I expect excitement.
When I hear "millions of copies sold, presumably, based on the number of Goodreads ratings there are," I expect memorable characters or writing or storytelling or SOMETHING.
But I got nothing,
I've put off writing this review for a month, which is kind of but not super unusual for me admittedly, because I do not remember a thing about it.
And not really because I have forgotten the whole thing, but more because, . . well, what's to remember
Bottom line: If anyone is looking for a nice little one way getaway to snoozeville, I have the book for you!
prereview
yes, the ending of this made me sad, but at the same time and in a much more pressing way this is maybe one of the most boring books i've ever read.
review to come /ish
tbr review
i will read:
every book that is called the best of the decade
every book that was then adapted into a movie starring carey mulligan OR keira knightley OR andrew garfield that i can watch.
so basically i'm reading thistimes over,
taking sitelinklily's idea and reading only books by asian authors this month!
book: sitelinkthe incendiaries
book: sitelinklast night at the telegraph club
book: sitelinkdear girls
book: sitelinksigh, gone
book: sitelinkfrankly in love
book: sitelinkemergency contact
book: sitelinkyour house will pay
book: sitelinkconvenience store woman
book: sitelinkon earth we're briefly gorgeous
book: sitelinkwe are not free
book: sitelinksearching for sylvie lee
book: sitelinkthe displaced
book: sitelinkschoolgirl
book: sitelinksweet bean paste
book: sitelinklittle fires everywhere
book: sitelinktrust exercise
book: sitelinkfront desk
book: sitelinkthe bride test
book: sitelinkinterior chinatown
book: sitelinkit's not like it's a secret
book: sitelinkalmost american girl
book: never let me go Ah fkin' 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, amp 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, amp 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, Scifi 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 amp especially for Kath, the wise but alltoofrail narrator, but at least their petition, which is the Never Let Me Go's title, is true.
This one is now on the list of all those I cannot let go or do without, I can see sitelink 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 about the tree at school and then the writer would tell you about the tree and why it was significant, then tell you about the fight.
This sort of device is interesting the first few times you see it, but it started to annoy me over time.
Maybe because I talk like that, and get off into tangents and anecdotes,
Also, at the heart of the store is the purpose/fate of the main characters, I get the impression that the author wanted to drop clues about it, and then reveal it so that it is a shocking twist who's Kaiser Soeze The thing is, the references really aren't that subtle, so by the time the twist is reavealed, it's not all that exciting.
Not only that, but I had so many questions at the end, Like these people know their fate, but they never think to question it, and, in fact, seem to be glad for it.
This was supposed to be a coming of age story, Generally "coming of age" involves people growing up and moving forward with their lives often they need to overcome some obstacle to reveal their potential.
However, the characters seem to be stagnate the whole way through their fate doesn't change, The blurb on the back of the book mentions that the characters, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, all have a shared background that's special, and implies that they're lucky.
When two of the charaters confront someone to see if they can defer their fate they don't even bother trying to change it, we find out a little bit of what makes their shared background special, but we aren't given anything to compare it to we're just told that similar people have horrible existences, but not how.
And they find out that they can't defer their fate, but they don't really seem to care they don't even seem to be particularly glad that they tried.
I've seen a couple of reviews compare this to book to Aldous Huxley's classic "Brave New World" and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale".
Not even close. In both of these books we're exposed to an alternate reality, and we see how the main characters deal with their situations.
Kazuo Ishiguro tries to sneak the alternate reality into the story, to take us by surprise,
I could go on, but I won't, Let's just say that I didn't care for this book and leave it at that, You know those random stock characters in scifi/action movies, the ones who never get names or any lines They're always spending their precious few minutes of screen time getting shoved out of the way as the hero hurtles desperately down a hallway, or watching from a safe distance as a climactic fight goes on, or diving out of the way whenever a murderous cyborg smashes through their office window.
Have you ever wondered what those people's lives were like Have you ever thought to yourself, "Man, this movie's interesting and all, but I want to know more about that guy who owned the hotel where Sarah Conner hid from the Terminator.
I bet he leads a fascinating life, " believe me, he doesn't.
Imagine if someone decided to write a book about this kind of person, The result is Never Let Me Go,
semispoilers ahoy, you've been warned So the book is about a sort of alternateuniverse England, where people are cloned and the resulting kids are raised in isolated boarding schools, spending all their time painting and playing sports and getting vague hints about how when they get older they'll have to make "donations.
" We learn eventually and with no drama whatsoever that these kids were created specifically as future organ donors, and that's all they're meant for.
Ishiguro introduces us to Kathy, the narrator, and her friends who lived at one of these schools with her Ruth and Tommy.
As I said, we gradually and laboriously learn about the school's real purpose, but it seems almost like a subplot, because the majority of the book is just Kathy nattering on about her school and how she and Ruth got into a fight this one time and also she had a crush on Tommy but he and Ruth were dating so Kathy had sex with some other random guys and oh my god can we get back to the organ donor thing Seriously the whole book is like that we get the sense that there's some creepy futuristic stuff going on in the background, but our protagonists don't care because they're too busy telling us about that one time Kathy lost her favorite cassette tape and it was very upsetting.
Even when it seems like a plot's about to start, it's always a false alarm, The trip to a nearby town that the three characters take to find a woman they think may be Ruth's "possible" a person she may have been cloned from doesn't pan out, and we realize that the real point of the trip was an attempt to convince the reader that Tommy and Kathy have some sort of romantic attraction to each other.
Ruth's possible, and everything it might have meant, is abandoned so that Ishiguro can have another chance to demonstrate his astonishing inability to create any kind of chemistry between two characters.
And the end, Without giving anything away, I'll just say that Kathy and Tommy finally get all the answers about their school and what was actually going on, and they respond by.
. . going about their lives in the exact same way as before,
I mean, good God, Even though this is supposed to be some sort of more intellectual science fiction, I don't care, There's cloning and dystopian undertones ergo it is scifi, And I like my scifi loud, shiny, and dramatic, with lots of explosions and computers that talk,
There's a reason Harry Potter starts when he gets his Hogwarts letter, folks, Because no one wants to hear about ordinary people being ordinary that's kind of the whole point of fiction.
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