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A review by kristinamv
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
5.0
How do we define our Humanness?
A mellow analysis on mortality and innocence set in a subtle dystopian world that is an eerily familiar version of our own.
Ishiguro lays down an almost ordinary story of three friends in the secluded boarding school of Hailsham. We are introduced to Ruth and Tommy in the memoties of an adult Kathy on her ninth year being a Carer. In the idyllic place of the countryside we witness the struggles of the characters as they navigate growing up in an art centric school. These mundane things are given an air of something not quite right.The gruesome truth is revealed to us in fragments.
In this story we are set to question how we define humanity, our souls. is it through art? is it through our acts to express ourselves that we prove our soul? validate our humanity? how do we deal with those that do not express the way we demand them to, how do we deal with those that come to existence that are different from us? if by that standard NLMG's world forms a hierarchy of humanity and classify those as subhuman, does it not mirror how our society sees POC in Orientalist lens of inscrutability and otherings in class and race? Society has always reacted the same way as the van vendors and Madame: with disgust, fear and indifference.
It is through the lens of mortality that Ishiguro concludes those questions. That we can all go through hoops to define humanness but what truly defines us and is our most human act in our short but tedious lives, is that ALL OF US..... we all "complete".
A mellow analysis on mortality and innocence set in a subtle dystopian world that is an eerily familiar version of our own.
Ishiguro lays down an almost ordinary story of three friends in the secluded boarding school of Hailsham. We are introduced to Ruth and Tommy in the memoties of an adult Kathy on her ninth year being a Carer. In the idyllic place of the countryside we witness the struggles of the characters as they navigate growing up in an art centric school. These mundane things are given an air of something not quite right.The gruesome truth is revealed to us in fragments.
In this story we are set to question how we define humanity, our souls. is it through art? is it through our acts to express ourselves that we prove our soul? validate our humanity? how do we deal with those that do not express the way we demand them to, how do we deal with those that come to existence that are different from us? if by that standard NLMG's world forms a hierarchy of humanity and classify those as subhuman, does it not mirror how our society sees POC in Orientalist lens of inscrutability and otherings in class and race? Society has always reacted the same way as the van vendors and Madame: with disgust, fear and indifference.
It is through the lens of mortality that Ishiguro concludes those questions. That we can all go through hoops to define humanness but what truly defines us and is our most human act in our short but tedious lives, is that ALL OF US..... we all "complete".