Scan barcode
A review by mackreads324
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
5.0
Never Let Me Go is one of those books that creates a slow-growing uneasiness in your stomach, and leaves you with a sucker-punch to the gut feeling that lingers. Ishiguro masterfully uses this first-person narration to develop a portrait of its “truth” in not in dramatic revelations but in fragments. The conversational, non-linear narration allows us to see the nature of this reality through the eye of our naive Kathy H, and her memories of her childhood and young adult life.
Though our narrator herself offers a voice of innocence and naïveté, the feelings of dread come from between the lines as the novels truth reveals itself. Just like Miss Emily and the madame, readers quarrel with sympathy and repulsion of and for the students.
A recurring theme in Ishiguro's work, he explores the question of, “what defines humanity?” While this book is certainly marketed as a dystopian science fiction, it also stands as a coming of age novel that is existential in nature; just because it exists in a sort of “parallel universe” doesn’t mean it’s themes are that far off from our own existence. The use of art and creativity as a distraction from our mortality, the use of imagination and pretending as a means of protection from truth, the inevitability of our end and the search to find connection and meaning before we leave this earth.
I found myself asking, why didn’t the students run or fight? When I read Tommy in his temporary fit of rage after their meeting with the Madame, it culminated my own feelings as well. Ishiguro piece-by-piece crafts the truth of his novel into a portrait, which is really a mirror we then hold to ourselves. In asking the question of why they resignedly accept their place in their world and the loss of everything their lives could have been -we should really be asking ourselves the same.
Though our narrator herself offers a voice of innocence and naïveté, the feelings of dread come from between the lines as the novels truth reveals itself. Just like Miss Emily and the madame, readers quarrel with sympathy and repulsion of and for the students.
A recurring theme in Ishiguro's work, he explores the question of, “what defines humanity?” While this book is certainly marketed as a dystopian science fiction, it also stands as a coming of age novel that is existential in nature; just because it exists in a sort of “parallel universe” doesn’t mean it’s themes are that far off from our own existence. The use of art and creativity as a distraction from our mortality, the use of imagination and pretending as a means of protection from truth, the inevitability of our end and the search to find connection and meaning before we leave this earth.
I found myself asking, why didn’t the students run or fight? When I read Tommy in his temporary fit of rage after their meeting with the Madame, it culminated my own feelings as well. Ishiguro piece-by-piece crafts the truth of his novel into a portrait, which is really a mirror we then hold to ourselves. In asking the question of why they resignedly accept their place in their world and the loss of everything their lives could have been -we should really be asking ourselves the same.