Consequences

A friend recommended Consequences by Penelope Lively with such enthusiasm when she was about ten pages into it that I had to pick it up immediately. I read The Photograph last year and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The theme of the novel is formulaic: fate and consequences control our destinies. However, the formula is deftly handled by Lively.

The novel focuses on the lives of three women: Lorna, her daughter Molly, and Molly’s daughter Ruth. The book opens with Lorna sitting on a park bench crying after an argument with her mother. She catches the eye of a young artist named Matt who is at the park sketching ducks for a wood engraving he has been commissioned to produce. They end up blissfully married and forever thankful for the commission, the argument, and the park bench. Lorna is a young bride with a small daughter living with her husband in a cottage nestled in the English countryside when World War II breaks out.

Not much more can be said about the plot without spoilers. As with most books focused on fate every event leads to a chain reaction of other events right up through the last page.

I’ve read some reviews of the book since finishing it and have been very surprised to find some rather harsh criticism of the pace of the story (too fast), the development of the characters (or lack thereof), and the stilted dialogue. I feel as if I read a different book. Granted, packing 3 generations of women and their families into 258 pages makes for a pace that never lets up. Herman Wouk she is not. On the other hand, though, do we need every detail of what was eaten and worn and thought to grasp the story and the feeling of the time? Either the answer is no or I am far more intuitive than I imagined.

As for character development, I finished the book over a week ago as of this writing and still miss the characters. They are well-drawn, warm, easy-to-relate-to characters.

The dialogue may not be as natural as one might like, but it makes a point and pulls pieces of the story together to highlight the events that move the characters through the story. I had no issue with the dialogue at all.

Maybe I missed something, but I thoroughly enjoyed the book and look forward to reading more by Penelope Lively.

Late to the Party: A Brief Review of The Raw Shark Texts

When my birthday money came in at the beginning of May it went straight back out to the bookstore. I finally got on the Steven Hall bandwagon and grabbed a copy of The Raw Shark Texts. I was reading something else at the time (review to follow soon) and put my new book aside for a bit. This past week I finally grabbed it and started reading. By the end of the first page I was engaged, and by the end of this weekend I was unable to concentrate on anything else. Like Shaft, I considered just posting a comment about this book but comments won’t suffice for a book like this. I want to talk about it endlessly and force a copy into the hand of everyone I know who hasn’t already read it.

I may be late to the party but I’m having a great time.

If you haven’t read this book yet please call in sick for the rest of the week so you can.

Tim: Can you arrange for Hall to be back in the US for my birthday next year?

The Bonesetter’s Daughter

I first found Amy Tan when The Kitchen God’s Wife was hip and hot. I thought she had a gift for what I call in my head “smooth writing”. That is writing which draws you in, enables you to get sucked in by the story, and still has the liquid beauty that makes you gasp at the occasional phrase. It was with some hesitation and the expectation that this book would let me down like The Hundred Secret Senses did that I picked up The Bonesetter’s Daughter at a book sale.

Tan tells the story here of Ruth, a San Francisco based ghost writer, and her complex relationship with her elderly mother. Ruth is shacking up with the man she loves and has two young step-daughters to take care of. Ruth feels smothered and miserable and on top of it all she has her elderly, failing mother to look after and deal with. LuLing, Ruth’s mother, lives nearby in an apartment and is losing her memory quickly. As she feels her memory fading she writes her story in Chinese calligraphy, which she had attempted to teach Ruth long ago. When Ruth becomes painfully aware of her mother’s failing mental capacity she has the story translated into English. As she it the wool falls from her eyes and she is able to empathize with her mother.

I don’t want to talk too much about LuLing’s life, presented as a story-within-a-story and a first person narrative, because I found the thread-by-thread unraveling of the story to be delicious. Suffice it to say that the story is rich in cultural detail and explains LuLing’s obsession with ghosts and particularly the ghost of her nanny “Precious Auntie.”

Amy Tan writes a great deal about mother’s and daughter’s and the generation gap that becomes more emphasized when one generation is raised in one culture and the other in an entirely different one. This book, I felt, steps beyond that and deals also with the idea that we must know someone’s motivation and history in order to fully explain their behavior. Joseph Campbell talks at length in The Power of Myth of the ideal of acceptance and seeing the divinity in other people. That’s easy to do when the other person brings you a cup of coffee or shares a good story but that jerk who cut me off on the interstate is obviously just a jerk. LuLing has been controlling and manipulative and difficult. She has threatened suicide over every issue under the son. At the beginning of the book I couldn’t stand her. As I read her story, though, everything began to fall together and she became a sympathetic character and a person with divinity within.

I found this to be a very good read. I did find that the relationship between Ruth and her boyfriend hit a hollow note with me. They end up happily-ever-after with next to nothing to explain the change. It’s also just another Amy Tan novel about mothers and daughters. Outside of her lexicon I think it’s a very good book but I do wish Tan would explore some new themes.

One cool side note: the photo on the cover of the book is actually Tan’s grandmother. I thought that was kinda cool.

Fact is Fiction and Fiction is Fact

During the whole kerfluffle over James Frey and his pants-on-fire book A Million Little Pieces a new debate began over the publisher’s role in validating autobiographical material in memoirs. Today I happened upon this article in the New York Times which tells of a lawsuit against a woman named Laura Albert who wrote a book called Sarah under the pseudonym J.T. Leroy. I need a map to follow this one….

Laura Albert is a woman who wrote as a man writing a novel (not a memoir) about a boy who has taken on a woman’s name (his mother’s name) growing up poor and sexually abused in and around West Virginia truck stops. 1+1=96.

The article gives the whole background but at the crux is a series of embarrassed film production studios who feel defrauded by the fact that J.T. Leroy did not have a childhood at all like the boy Sarah. Apparently, I am finding out with Google’s help, J.T. Leroy claimed to have AIDS but Laura Albert does not have AIDS.

It’s funny that even though this story first broke years ago it seems that the James Frey debacle created a longer and more global stir. Could it be because Oprah didn’t publicly back this book? Laura Albert, to my mind, is far more messed up than James Frey. She’s just better at marketing her insanity and has managed to stay something of celebrity rather than a public menace. She’s also a pro at masking her identity since she/he was interviewed on Fresh Air as J.T.Leroy.

As a footnote: Random House, it was announced in May, will be forking over $2.35 million to people who feel defrauded by James Frey’s fairy tale of drug addiction and recovery.

William Styron dies at 81

We lost a good one yesterday. I am offended by the repeated emphasis this article gives to the relatively small contribution to letters offered by Styron over the last 15 years. Had he been the president of a multi-national corporation he would not have been questioned for taking time off in his 70′s. Writers, however, are supposed to produce magic no matter what their stage of life. Styron was a champion of liberal causes up to his death. He will be missed for that as well as for his luscious prose.

There’s an interesting article in the LA Times today about the announcement of the National Book Award Finalists.

I felt decidedly ignorant when the Booker’s were announced. I think the NBA’s seal the verdict.

I think I need to hit the books this weekend!

The Book Meme Revisited

1. One book that changed your life: This is a tough one. There have been so many books that made me change my viewpoint on one area of life but to name one life-changing book is challenging. I would have to go with Gone With the Wind. If you’ve only seen the movie you are missing out on a fine work of literature. Scarlett is so scarred by the war that today she would be diagnosed with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and given a prescription for Paxil. Watching her transform into a wounded woman, hoarding money and ruthlessly running her business was powerful for me. Scarlett teaches us that we lose the war again if we let it run our futures and make us lose the people we love. She is no hero but she is a feminist icon and one tough broad.

2. One book you’ve read more than once: Oliver Twist. I read it about once a year and have since I was eight years old. It never gets old. In fact, I’m re-reading it right now.

3. One book you’d want on a deserted island: The nice thing about this question is that it does not preclude having other books along. It sort of implies that one could have many books (like DJ Cayenne’s survival guide) but one of them would be: The Complete Works of Flannery O’Connor. I have read every word she ever wrote that has been published but haven’t touched her books since taking a course in her writing at Georgia College. One of the students in my class asked the professor if anyone taking the course had committed suicide. The professor said no, but there had been some close calls. The class so sapped my emotional strength that I have never revisited her. However, on a desert island I would like to take the time to read every word again, to pore over it. There has to be some hope in there somewhere under the grotesque and I am determined to find it.

4. One book that made you cry: That’s easy. Villette by Charlotte Bronte. Every. Damn. Time. She finally finds out that he loves her and….. I can’t go on.

5. One book that made you laugh: The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 ¾ by Sue Townsend. I don’t laugh out loud because of TV or books very often. I usually soak it all in and then laugh days later. This book had me teary-eyed and snotty I was laughing so hard. Maybe it was because of where I was in my life but that little self-absorbed British prick was a delight.

6. One book you wish had been written: This is a tough one because my assumption usually is that the book HAS been written and I just have to FIND it. I guess I keep looking for a really good biography of Dickens. I want one like Hilary Spurling’s Matisse biography(s). It needs to be all-emcompassing, covering his sense of humor with the same depth as the way disdained his wife. There are so many great Dickens stories but the only way to find them is one by one.

7. One book you wish you had written: All of them. Okay, that’s more than one. Imagining the author circuit and answering all of the idiot questions people like me ask about a book I would say America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines by Gail Collins. Impeccably researched and enthusiastically well written it is a book I could talk about for years. And it’s a book everyone should read – regardless of gender.

8. One book you wish had never been written: Shaft’s answer to this question is solid. I feel compelled to give a different answer just to provide variety but if pushed I agree with him 100%. That being said, I will go with The Bridges of Madison County. Having worked in a bookstore when that (and please insert a curse word between every word of this paragraph) book came out and was so successful I HATE it and I hate Waller. This trite piece of crap took over the country but not one person could remember the damn title. “Do you have The Bridges of Montgomery Town?” I wanted to shove a copy up the nose of every snobby little trash-reading idiot who bought it. Whew. That felt good!

9. One book you are currently reading: Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee. Not sure how I feel about it yet. This is my third or fourth book by Coetzee and the first to not bowl me over. We’ll see.

10. One book you’ve been meaning to read: So many. What to choose….. I guess Corelli’s Mandolin which I’ve started a half-dozen times and love but can’t finish. Or Dante’s Inferno. Or The Iliad. See? I can’t follow instructions.

The Photograph

The Photograph, Penelope Lively’s 2003 novel, is a psychological novel about memory and time. When Glyn Peters finds a photograph of his deceased wife holding hands with another man (her sister’s husband) he is driven to uncover the full story behind it. As a historian he takes an almost detached approach to researching the story behind the affair and whether his wife, Kath, had a history of infidelity.

He starts with Kath’s orderly and distant sister, Elaine. Elaine promptly and efficiently confronts her husband, Nick and tells him that he must move out. He settles into their daughter’s London flat. Glyn also contacts Nick’s former publishing partner, Oliver, and Kath’s best friend, Mary Packard.

What results is a haunting reflection on the past and an attempt to capture an accurate vision of who Kath was in life.

Each chapter is told from a different character’s perspective. At times the voice changes within a chapter – from third person sympathetic to first person narrative and back again. It is almost as if Lively is allowing the characters, particularly the unlikable and unapproachable, Elaine, to defend their emotions.

Kath is remembered more as an idea, as a feeling, than as a person. She is fragmented and ethereal. Everyone seems to have loved her but no one ever understood her. Very near the end of the book there is a chapter about the day Kath died and only then do you get the tiniest glimpse into the person she was.

Lively has done a lovely job of interweaving the past and present and showing the effect they have on each other. Her characters and their voices are very real. I’ve read a few reviews that criticize the book for having such unreachable and unlovable characters but I didn’t have any issues with them at all.

One warning – it is a slow-ish book, holding secrets until the very end for no reason other than to mess with your head. (Of course, that’s the whole point of literature: head messing!) Otherwise, I recommend it highly.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian

I picked up A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian for two reasons:

1) It had a “Nominated for the Mann Booker Prize” sticker and I’m a sucker for that.

2) It had an irresistible quote on the cover, “Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade.”

The book is by Marina Lewycka who was born in a refugee camp at the end of World War II but who has lived in Britain for most of her life. She was the first woman to win the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for a comedic novel. (I love Google!)

When a book has such a powerhouse first line I live in fear that the rest cannot equal it in any way. Fortunately, the book held its course. The story centers on the main character, Nadia’s, father and his aged loved affair with this buxom beauty (Valentina) who is so obviously focused only on his pension it’s amazing that even testosterone could so blind a man – especially an impotent man. This disastrous relationship brings Nadia and her estranged older sister, Vera together. With a mission before them they can set aside an old disagreement about the money from their mother’s will. In the course of visits with lawyers and court proceedings they learn about each other and, in the end, are able to come close to being friends.

The book is rife with misunderstandings and stubbornness – from all characters. I detested Valentina. She was here for money and not much else it seemed. Her presence in England tested Nadia’s liberal sympathies to the max, and conservative Vera used that as an attack tool for quite a while. She tested MY liberal sympathies as well, and I found myself cheering for her deportation back to the concrete apartments of Ukraine.

Under all of the bosom waving of Valentina and hacking, coughing, and defecating of the father there are stories of the horrors of refugee camps, war, nations falling, families being separated. It reaches as far back as a famine caused by the Soviet industrialization program where collective farming was supposed to become the norm.

So what’s the deal with the tractors? Nadia’s father is an engineer and as he deals with crazy Valentina and his protective daughters he writes a short history of the tractor and its developments. These sections of the book frustrated me at first but then I found them surprisingly interesting.

Last weekend I met a young lady from Belarus. We talked a bit about this book and she said that many different tractor functions and engineering feats came out of Belarus rather than Ukraine. I will defer to the author here since she did the research and the young lady I met is a jeweler. But the encounter highlighted something I did not know – people from that part of the world are very defensive about their tractors!!

Lewycka’s book, her debut novel, is well worth reading. It’s fun and heartfelt and exciting. I recommend it.

(ed: Here’s another BGB post on this book.)

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

I picked up A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian for two reasons:

1) It had a “Nominated for the Mann Booker Prize” sticker and I’m a sucker for that.

2) It had an irresistible quote on the cover, “Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade.”

The book is by Marina Lewycka who was born in a refugee camp at the end of World War II but who has lived in Britain for most of her life. She was the first woman to win the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for a comedic novel. (I love Google!)

When a book has such a powerhouse first line I live in fear that the rest cannot equal it in any way. Fortunately, the book held its course. The story centers on the main character, Nadia’s, father and his aged loved affair with this buxom beauty (Valentina) who is so obviously focused only on his pension it’s amazing that even testosterone could so blind a man – especially an impotent man. This disastrous relationship brings Nadia and her estranged older sister, Vera together. With a mission before them they can set aside an old disagreement about the money from their mother’s will. In the course of visits with lawyers and court proceedings they learn about each other and, in the end, are able to come close to being friends.

The book is rife with misunderstandings and stubbornness – from all characters. I detested Valentina. She was here for money and not much else it seemed. Her presence in England tested Nadia’s liberal sympathies to the max and conservative Vera used that as an attack tool for quite a while. She tested MY liberal sympathies as well and I found myself cheering for her deportation back to the concrete apartments of Ukraine.

Under all of the bosom waving of Valentina and hacking, coughing, and defecating of the father there are stories of the horrors of refugee camps, war, nations falling, families being separated. It reaches as far back as a famine caused by the Soviet industrialization program where collective farming was supposed to become the norm.

So what’s the deal with the tractors? Nadia’s father is an engineer and as he deals with crazy Valentina and his protective daughters he writes a short history of the tractor and its developments. These sections of the book frustrated me at first but then I found them surprisingly interesting.

Last weekend I met a young lady from Belarus. We talked a bit about this book and she said that many different tractor functions and engineering feats came out of Belarus rather than Ukraine. I will defer to the author here since she did the research and the young lady I met is a jeweler. But the encounter highlighted something I did not know – people from that part of the world are very defensive about their tractors!!

Lewycka’s book, her debut novel, is well worth reading. It’s fun and heartfelt and exciting. I recommend it.

Bleak House on TV

New Internet Plaything

Throwing in the Towel

I am doing something I only do with great reluctance… I am giving up on a book.

For the last month I have been enmeshed in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I’m about halfway through it. A couple of weeks ago my husband begged me to set it aside for a while when the detailed, vivid description of a man being skinned alive troubled me. I don’t like THAT much reality, thank you. But that’s not what has made me put the book away. [hit “more” for the rest of the story…]

Murakami is a tremendous writer. He draws you in and medicates you with beautiful decriptions and fluid transitions until you are there…. you are in the book. I loved Norwegian Wood. So if anyone out there can offer me some kind of hope that something redeeming will happen in the last 200 pages of the novel I will pick it back up.

The story is narrated by Toru, a young man whose cat and wife have disappeared with no explanation or warning. His life becomes complicated by a stream of bizarre, almost inhuman characters who seem to appear with the sole purpose of messing with his mind. Toru, in an attempt to find himself, to find the answers to why his relationships are so complicated, literally goes down into a well to, as Gomer Pyle would say, take a think. I really thought that this would hold me. I love the idea of going to that kind of extreme in order to find out something important about yourself or about your life. But I’m leaving in Toru in the well.

I read some reviews of the book, hoping for encouragement to continue. It seems that this is not a delightful Western novel with a happy ending and neat little package at the end that makes you say, “See, life IS worth living. Silly Toru!” Instead it continues plodding its dismal, dream-like course for another 200 pages and leaves you hanging with unanswered questions.

I loved, at the beginning, questioning the characters’ motives and, in some cases (i.e. the phone sex woman) who the characters were. But when Toru’s wife started working unusually late and was distant and emotional and he couldn’t put two and two together to get ‘affair’ I became impatient with him and his lack of motivation and lack of passion for anything.

Now…. all of what I have said here (except the positive stuff) is completely unfair because I haven’t finished the book. So if anyone has an arsenal of reasons why I’m a moron (who obviously lacks motivation and passion) feel free to hurl blunt objects in my direction.

The Mermaid Chair

I read Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees last year and raved about it to everyone from the baggers at Publix to my cousin who reads only books with half-naked people looking windblown on the cover. When The Mermaid Chair was released I rushed out to buy it. I read the first few chapters, flung it across the room and didn’t pick it up again for several months. It kept taunting me, though, and good friend and fellow blogger had read it and recommended it highly so I figured I’d give it another shot.

The Secret Life of Bees was written in this wonderful, lyrical, southern voice. The characters became like family and when I finished reading it I missed them dreadfully.

I was looking for that kind of involvement in The Mermaid Chair but I never got it. I read a review on Amazon that compared it to Danielle Steel. I don’t think that’s fair. If a comparison were to made I would name Anne Rivers Siddons. It was a good book, not nearly great, and it left me empty. But it was well written in spots and actually did include some insights into faith and marriage and the sacrifices we will make for one we love. And that sets it above Danielle Steel. [more after the jump]

The story is about Jessie, a middle-aged woman who has hit a point in her marriage where she feels stifled and held back from being her true self. When her mother cuts off her own finger and Jessie has to stay with her on a fictional island off the coast of South Carolina it gives her a necessary break from the mundane. While on the island she meets Brother Thomas, aka Whit, and they fall madly in love, meeting for secret picnics and making love in the sand. When Jessie’s mother cuts off another finger it brings the book to its climax where all mysteries are revealed and everyone ends up doing what they ought to have done in the first place.

This is not a book that leaves you with any burning questions. The characters were hollow. What made Bees so magical is that you KNEW these people and wanted to be closer to them. This book does not have that selling point.

Part of the problem is the way Kidd shifts the point of view. Most of the book is narrated by Jessie. Other sections, though, are theoretically meant to give more insight into Brother Thomas’ feelings and thoughts. One section is dedicated to the Jesse’s husband, Hugh. Why only one section? We learn nothing except for the obvious: he’s mad at Jessie for having an affair. Duh. Brother Thomas’ sections are mainly comprised of the suspicions of the other monks at the abbey on the island. He’s having an affair with a married woman and he’s afraid of being caught. Again, duh.

The part of the book that makes it worth slogging through the rest is when Jessie’s mother cuts off the second finger. That scene and the transformation she and Jessie go through while she is in the hospital and immediately upon her release are moving and beautiful. I think the image of Jessie with her head in her mother’s lap, weeping, and being stroked by a hand missing a finger will stay with me for some time.

In summary, this is a vacation read and not much more. I hope that Kidd can bring more to the table in her next novel.

Revenge of the Paste-Eaters

Last night I read the final section of Revenge of the Paste Eaters by Cheryl Peck.

Ms. Peck is the author of Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs, originally self-published and then picked up by Warner. The book is comprised of sixty-four vignettes and poems, if one includes the introduction.

My initial reaction when I picked up the book was that it looked funny and fun. And I was very much in the mood for both of those. My reaction upon completing it is that, although choppy and amateurish in style, it is a book that is worth reading. [more at the “more” link]

Ms. Peck works, for her day job, for the welfare department in Michigan. She is fat. She is a Lesbian. She is one of five children. And she talks about all of this at great length. She tells stories of growing up, of being fat, of being a Lesbian, of being a sibling. She does it all with frank honesty. The book, on the whole, reads like a blog. She uses aliases for her sisters (The Wee One and UnWee) and her partner (my Beloved). When I saw that her cat’s name is Babycakes I thought that might, perhaps, be an alias as well. Alas, it was not, and somewhere in Michigan lives a well-loved cat who every day must face reality as ‘Babycakes.’ I’m not sure the purpose of the aliases since anyone who reads the book and knows her will know who she is talking about but I didn’t have any real problem with their use.
The best pieces are near the beginning of the book. I found ‘The Vole Hole’ to offer the most meaning and insight. It describes her job situation in a faceless, windowless corporate environment juxtaposed with that of her Beloved’s job in a small company where her office has a window that opens. (I am lucky enough to work for a small company but have no window in my office and the folks who do have windows must never open them for fear of defying building management’s fierce energy saving strategies. I read this section with more than a touch of envy.)‘Waiting’, ‘Mine’ and ‘Silly Rabbit’ were also very funny. This is not a book about which a whole lot can be said. It was sharp and witty at times, depressing and miserable at others. She has an irritating tendency to start a story in one place and wrap it around to an entirely different one. The style is cryptic at times to the point of being jarring. At other times her words sing out and are so beautifully placed they bring you right into her life. I think she is a writer who could stand to attend some writing seminars to polish her style and find confidence in her voice (which does peep though in several of the vignettes). If she were to do that we would have a formidable new humorist on our hands.

Hollywood Literacy

Yesterday the winners of the Quill Awards were announced. According to the Quill Foundation website the mission behind the new award is: A new book award program that pairs a populist sensibility with Hollywood-style glitz to bestow the first literary prizes reflecting the tastes of the people who matter most–readers.

Un-huh.

The Book of the Year Award (that’s right… the whole year) was awared to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I read it. I enjoyed it. I think she’s an amazing writer for children. I do not think that a Book of the Year Award is deserved.

The award ceremony will be aired on NBC on October 22nd and my Tivo box will be capturing it for sheer curiosity value. I cannot conceive of debasing literature to the point where Elmo is handing out awards for Children’s Illustrated Book. (Note that there is no “Best” in that title. It’s as if this might be the only illustrated book to come out this year. Or maybe they forgot to choose a title and sent a runner over B&N to grab something.)

What’s next folks…. an award for Best Dust Jacket…. Best Bargain Title… Best Cookbook Featuring the Creative Use of Guavas?

Kim Cattrall and Candice Bushnell are presenters. Sex and the City comes to literature – at Pier Sixty in New York.

Never Let Me Go

First, hi! I’m new to the blog and thrilled to be here.

Now… to the books!

On Monday I finished reading Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I am a rabid fan of Ishiguro. He is on my list of “The Five People I Most Want to Meet.” Therefore, my comments should be read with the understanding that there may have been some rose-colored glasses between me and the text. [Click the “more” link for the rest of the post]

That being said, the novel is a victory for Ishiguro and will be thrust into the canon along with 1984 and Flowers for Algernon. What struck me most about the book (and here come the spoilers) is the distance that Ishiguro purposefully places between the reader and the narrator. There is a cold, clinician’s touch in the handling of the characters and their relationships with each other. This coldness serves to make the reader question their own perceptions of the clones. Are we truly sympathetic toward them, or do we, like Madame and Miss Emily, shrink from their presence and have to avert our eyes?

Those familiar with Ishiguro’s writing style might argue that this distance is present in all of his books and is not different here. However, there are so many devices used to create this distance and emphasize it that I don’t think it can be anything less than deliberate.

The dialogue, I find, is stilted to an unusual degree even for Ishiguro. This alone makes the reader feel outside the story. While I was caught up in the suspense of the story as it moved along I felt uneasy with the narrative. Unsettled might be a better word. There was no warmth. While I gathered pretty quickly that Kathy and Tommy were destined to be more than friends I found her descriptions of her feelings to be minimalist and therefore ineffective. Is that Ishiguro’s voice or is it Kathy’s? I believe that Ishiguro set up the narrative this way.

Another technique to further the distance is the way Kathy and Ruth’s relationship is constructed. Although we peak through the doors at more intimate moments between them, where they cozy up and have long talks, we never get much detail about those talks. To me, those details are not extraneous and would have made Kathy, and perhaps even Ruth, more emotionally accessible. But, while we get play-by-play detail on their arguments, the nice times are glossed over. I came away not caring very much for Ruth.

DJ Cayenne mentioned in his post on the book that he questions why Ishiguro chose to set the book in the 1990’s. I think it is to make us question whether or not a subculture like that of the clones could possibly exist under our noses without our knowing. Ishiguro loves to play with our perceptions of memory and time and I think this was simply a technique to make us stop and take note of the current scientific research going on and question the end results.

There was an undercurrent of suspicion in the book. As Kathy goes from center to center to care for her donors it seems as though she’s afraid to set a toe out of line. When she and Tommy stop the car so that Tommy can scream and thrash out his anger at the world he gets covered with mud and is concerned about how to explain that to the people at his center. Even at Hailsham there are repeated mentions of how little privacy there is. People are looking out of windows and skulking around. I think the undertone suggests that the clones are under watch all of the time and to escape would mean some unnamed punishment. I wonder, too, if it is possible that given Hailsham’s seclusion and the protection offered to the students if the main characters here might not have heard of escape attempts even if some have happened. Kathy, despite her occasional displays of moxie, does not strike me as a flight risk. Miss Emily tells Kathy and Tommy that most clones are not offered a chance to have a childhood. She makes it sound as though they are farmed and penned like animals. If a person is treated that way from “birth” they would have no context for “freedom” and “escape” and therefore proceed through the donor process without a thought as to alternatives.

Obviously the book asks many questions and provides no answers. It has made me pause and contemplate things like racism and class-ism and how we relate to our fellow humans. In so many instances there have been entire peoples that assumed that other peoples lacked souls. This book provides an interesting view of that problem.

Never Let Me Go – 2

First, hi! I’m new to the blog and thrilled to be here.

Now… to the books!

On Monday I finished reading Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I am a rabid fan of Ishiguro. He is on my list of “The Five People I Most Want to Meet.” Therefore, my comments should be read with the understanding that there may have been some rose-colored glasses between me and the text. [Click the “more” link for the rest of the post]

That being said, the novel is a victory for Ishiguro and will be thrust into the canon along with 1984 and Flowers for Algernon. What struck me most about the book (and here come the spoilers) is the distance that Ishiguro purposefully places between the reader and the narrator. There is a cold, clinician’s touch in the handling of the characters and their relationships with each other. This coldness serves to make the reader question their own perceptions of the clones. Are we truly sympathetic toward them, or do we, like Madame and Miss Emily, shrink from their presence and have to avert our eyes?

Those familiar with Ishiguro’s writing style might argue that this distance is present in all of his books and is not different here. However, there are so many devices used to create this distance and emphasize it that I don’t think it can be anything less than deliberate.

The dialogue, I find, is stilted to an unusual degree even for Ishiguro. This alone makes the reader feel outside the story. While I was caught up in the suspense of the story as it moved along I felt uneasy with the narrative. Unsettled might be a better word. There was no warmth. While I gathered pretty quickly that Kathy and Tommy were destined to be more than friends I found her descriptions of her feelings to be minimalist and therefore ineffective. Is that Ishiguro’s voice or is it Kathy’s? I believe that Ishiguro set up the narrative this way.

Another technique to further the distance is the way Kathy and Ruth’s relationship is constructed. Although we peak through the doors at more intimate moments between them, where they cozy up and have long talks, we never get much detail about those talks. To me, those details are not extraneous and would have made Kathy, and perhaps even Ruth, more emotionally accessible. But, while we get play-by-play detail on their arguments, the nice times are glossed over. I came away not caring very much for Ruth.

DJ Cayenne mentioned in his post on the book that he questions why Ishiguro chose to set the book in the 1990’s. I think it is to make us question whether or not a subculture like that of the clones could possibly exist under our noses without our knowing. Ishiguro loves to play with our perceptions of memory and time and I think this was simply a technique to make us stop and take note of the current scientific research going on and question the end results.

There was an undercurrent of suspicion in the book. As Kathy goes from center to center to care for her donors it seems as though she’s afraid to set a toe out of line. When she and Tommy stop the car so that Tommy can scream and thrash out his anger at the world he gets covered with mud and is concerned about how to explain that to the people at his center. Even at Hailsham there are repeated mentions of how little privacy there is. People are looking out of windows and skulking around. I think the undertone suggests that the clones are under watch all of the time and to escape would mean some unnamed punishment. I wonder, too, if it is possible that given Hailsham’s seclusion and the protection offered to the students if the main characters here might not have heard of escape attempts even if some have happened. Kathy, despite her occasional displays of moxie, does not strike me as a flight risk. Miss Emily tells Kathy and Tommy that most clones are not offered a chance to have a childhood. She makes it sound as though they are farmed and penned like animals. If a person is treated that way from “birth” they would have no context for “freedom” and “escape” and therefore proceed through the donor process without a thought as to alternatives.

Obviously the book asks many questions and provides no answers. It has made me pause and contemplate things like racism and class-ism and how we relate to our fellow humans. In so many instances there have been entire peoples that assumed that other peoples lacked souls. This book provides an interesting view of that problem.