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A review by lpm100
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
dark
slow-paced
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
0.5
Book Review
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
1/5 stars
"Never judge a book by its number of Amazon reviews."
*******
This book is definitely overrated.
Remember that feeling when you went to high school/undergraduate and the instructor gave you a book that was so boring that you thought you weregoing to *perish* before you got to the end?
And then the the instructor told you that you needed to read this because it is "good" literature. (Stephen King or Lee Child are infinitely more readable, but they are not "good" literature.)
That's exactly the way I felt reading this book (it sold tons of copies, had 34,000+ Amazon reviews, and even had a movie made about it).
Only the inclination to finish what I started made me finish *this* book.
Problem 1: It seems like the suspense is dragged out wwwaaayyy too much; one oblique hint, forward 10 or 12 pages, and then another.
Problem 2: The characters slip into all of these emotional states for which we don't have any reason. And since it is just one fiction book among tens of millions of others, I don't want to invest that much time trying to speculate what is the subtext of what Ishiguro is trying to tell us.
For example: The character Tommy has all of these rages that are exposited frequently, and I'm still clueless as to WHY?
Problem 3: Can we get some time devices here? We keep hearing times such as "years later" and "years ago." Are we talking about 20 years? 50 years?
Problem 4: 1001 unanswered questions.
-How do they select who should be cloned for?
-Does anybody else in the entire country know about this?
-Why does the will to live not make these people want to run away?
-If they could be engineered to be sterile and technology was in such a level, why not just biologically engineer organs for needed recipients? (It's a hell of a lot cheaper than supporting an entire human being.)
-The organs that can be transplanted are: heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, pancreas, and intestines. But the thing is, you can't live without any one of these (Well, maybe, one kidney.) So, how are these clones living after two donations, let alone three and four? Not really do they live, but they also have full sex lives (p.238).
-Has the issue of rejection medication been solved?
-These characters must not have normal emotional states, because they couldn't if they would just allow themselves to have organs harvested with no resistance. So, what is the point of all of these pages of the characters (in the protagonist in particular) trying to sort out their emotional states, when we wouldn't expect that they would be like normal human beings anyway?
Problem 5: A couple of footnotes would have done for the American readers. (Let's remember that there are at least five times more speakers of American English than British.)
rounders? (≈baseball)
drafts? (=checkers)
bluebottle? (=Blow fly)
The penny dropped? (=it clicked)
stage whisper? (=under one's breath)
Wellingtons? (=rain boots)
hoarding? (=billboard)
******
Proof positive that the book is no good is the fact that they couldn't even make a profitable movie out of it. (Let's remember that "Dune" was a decent book and even when pieces were chopped out of it and spliced into many different movies, they still made money.)
A $15 million dollar budget (enough to hire a bunch of nice looking young white people with English accents) and a $9.9 million box office take.
Even though the same dystopian novel is never written twice, they all have similar perfume about them.
-Nancy Farmer. "House of the Scorpion." (If you know that someone is being harvested for organs, do you react to them with disgust? Contempt? )
-Lois Lowry. "The Giver" (Distancing language from death. Lowry recalls it "being released." This book calls it "completion." Lowry's book as professional "nurturers" and this book has professional "carers." )
Verdict:
Not recommended. Save your time. It was actually more fun to read certain other reviews that blowtorched the book than the book itself.
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
1/5 stars
"Never judge a book by its number of Amazon reviews."
*******
This book is definitely overrated.
Remember that feeling when you went to high school/undergraduate and the instructor gave you a book that was so boring that you thought you weregoing to *perish* before you got to the end?
And then the the instructor told you that you needed to read this because it is "good" literature. (Stephen King or Lee Child are infinitely more readable, but they are not "good" literature.)
That's exactly the way I felt reading this book (it sold tons of copies, had 34,000+ Amazon reviews, and even had a movie made about it).
Only the inclination to finish what I started made me finish *this* book.
Problem 1: It seems like the suspense is dragged out wwwaaayyy too much; one oblique hint, forward 10 or 12 pages, and then another.
Problem 2: The characters slip into all of these emotional states for which we don't have any reason. And since it is just one fiction book among tens of millions of others, I don't want to invest that much time trying to speculate what is the subtext of what Ishiguro is trying to tell us.
For example: The character Tommy has all of these rages that are exposited frequently, and I'm still clueless as to WHY?
Problem 3: Can we get some time devices here? We keep hearing times such as "years later" and "years ago." Are we talking about 20 years? 50 years?
Problem 4: 1001 unanswered questions.
-How do they select who should be cloned for?
-Does anybody else in the entire country know about this?
-Why does the will to live not make these people want to run away?
-If they could be engineered to be sterile and technology was in such a level, why not just biologically engineer organs for needed recipients? (It's a hell of a lot cheaper than supporting an entire human being.)
-The organs that can be transplanted are: heart, kidneys, liver, lungs, pancreas, and intestines. But the thing is, you can't live without any one of these (Well, maybe, one kidney.) So, how are these clones living after two donations, let alone three and four? Not really do they live, but they also have full sex lives (p.238).
-Has the issue of rejection medication been solved?
-These characters must not have normal emotional states, because they couldn't if they would just allow themselves to have organs harvested with no resistance. So, what is the point of all of these pages of the characters (in the protagonist in particular) trying to sort out their emotional states, when we wouldn't expect that they would be like normal human beings anyway?
Problem 5: A couple of footnotes would have done for the American readers. (Let's remember that there are at least five times more speakers of American English than British.)
rounders? (≈baseball)
drafts? (=checkers)
bluebottle? (=Blow fly)
The penny dropped? (=it clicked)
stage whisper? (=under one's breath)
Wellingtons? (=rain boots)
hoarding? (=billboard)
******
Proof positive that the book is no good is the fact that they couldn't even make a profitable movie out of it. (Let's remember that "Dune" was a decent book and even when pieces were chopped out of it and spliced into many different movies, they still made money.)
A $15 million dollar budget (enough to hire a bunch of nice looking young white people with English accents) and a $9.9 million box office take.
Even though the same dystopian novel is never written twice, they all have similar perfume about them.
-Nancy Farmer. "House of the Scorpion." (If you know that someone is being harvested for organs, do you react to them with disgust? Contempt? )
-Lois Lowry. "The Giver" (Distancing language from death. Lowry recalls it "being released." This book calls it "completion." Lowry's book as professional "nurturers" and this book has professional "carers." )
Verdict:
Not recommended. Save your time. It was actually more fun to read certain other reviews that blowtorched the book than the book itself.