Here's the book, "Never Let Me Go."
I've never seen this in a book before. I wonder when that was added and why. I suspect it's because there's at least one really obvious question that they wanted to get out there to say, yeah, we know, the author knows, and he meant to do that. It's your job to figure out why the book doesn't contain pages answering that question for you.
Spoilers after the page break:
The issue I'm talking about is raised in the 8th of the 11 questions in the Reader's Guide:
8. Some reviewers have expressed surprise that Kathy, Tommy, and their friends never try to escape their ultimate fate. They cling to the possibility of deferral, but never attempt to vanish into the world of freedom that they view from a distance. Why might Ishiguro have chosen to present them as fully resigned to their early deaths?
Funnily enough, I only noticed the Reader's Guide because I search the text for the word "death." The word "death" never appears in the book. The characters are clones, brought into the world for medical purposes, to donate organs, so the first-person character speaks of donations and "completion."
Anyway, here's video of Ishiguro answering the question that the Reader's Guide presents as question #8:
He doesn't really care about the special problem of the organ-donation clones. He's using their especially compressed lives as a way to create strangeness that opens up our thinking about our own life, which also unfolds and has meaning though we are certain to die.
"I just concertina-ed the time span through this device. A normal life span is between 60 to 85 years; these people artificially have that period shortened. But basically they face the same questions we all face.”
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5 comments:
Joe writes:
"I read a lot of different books and have started buying actual paper books since the pandemic. I've noticed these readers' guides for a while and they seem aimed at (middle-class, straight, white) women's social reading groups and appear in potential selections for that audience. They don't appear in novels towards the literary part of the spectrum or in more pulp/pop kind of stuff (romance, etc.). For example, there's a reader's guide in Donna Woolfolk Cross's Pope Joan but not in Lawrence Durrell's Pope Joan (at least in my copies of these).
"It's super weird: I don't understand why people need reading questions to prompt discussions. How can you read a novel and not be able to discuss it without prompts? -- unless the point is that some people have "kinda" read the book and need discussion points. I imagine there are several unwritten dissertations analyzing which questions that appear here, which novels are chosen for these, etc."
I think the prompts would be helpful to keep reading groups from circling the drain with conventional topics like:
1. Liking or identifying with the characters.
2. Predicting the ending or disapproving of the ending.
3. How good the book is compared to other books.
4. What's your favorite scene or what was really funny or sad.
Temujin writes:
""Never let me go" has been granted 'cuts' on my ridiculously long list of books to be read. I've moved it up to next in line because I've wanted to get to it anyway and all these posts about Ishiguro (today and previously) are making me want to dive into it.
"But first...Just started Amor Towles "Rules of Civility", which was another one of those that has been hanging around the list. Towles is a terrific writer and his book "A Gentleman in Moscow" was one of the best books I'd read in a long time...whenever it was that I'd read it."
I had started to read "Never Let Me Go" then put it aside. I can't remember what made me pass it back up to the top of the list. The last thing I'd read was "Goodbye, Columbus." And before that "Notes From Underground."
Leora writes:
"I thought that such a system in real life would have a runaway problem – perhaps an underground railroad to send them to places where such practices were not allowed. Perhaps there might be feelings by some that this would be unethical as Huck agonized about being a slave stealer. The writing was good enough that I was able to accept the author’s opinion that people who read novels would not think about how to change their own lives by challenging or escaping their society. I don’t think it would work if the characters were Americans or Russians."
Todd writes:
PARTS: THE CLONUS HORROR, mocked by Mystery Science Theatre, covers essentially the same ground as NEVER LET ME GO, no doubt naively, in the manner of a B-movie, but I found some of it affecting nonetheless. It can be viewed for free. I recommend skipping the MST3K framing nonsense.
The satirical commentary is heavy-handed.
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