{"id":3433,"date":"2006-11-13T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-11-13T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/9"},"modified":"2006-11-13T06:00:00","modified_gmt":"2006-11-13T06:00:00","slug":"never-let-me-go-by-kazuo-ishiguro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/eatmytoronto.com\/bmorrison\/wordpress\/never-let-me-go-by-kazuo-ishiguro\/","title":{"rendered":"Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hearing on The Writer’s Almanac that his birthday was this week reminded me of Ishiguro and his latest book which I read a few months ago. Ishiguro is always taking on new challenges. I’ve been a fan for a long time, enjoying the deeply felt precision of An Artist of the Floating World<\/em> and A Pale View of Hills<\/em> and the startling rightness of The Remains of the Day<\/em>. I struggled with The Unconsoled<\/em> because the narrative seemed to follow the logic of dreams where you might walk through a door to a cafe in Munich and find yourself in a mall in Tokyo or a boardroom in L.A. I finally gave up trying to puzzle out the dream logic and just let the scenes wash over me: certainly a different way for me to experience a novel.<\/p>\n

With Never Let Me Go<\/em>, Ishiguro returns to linear narrative (yes, I know there’s another book in the middle that I haven’t read yet\u2014gotta save something for the drought days). I found the book easy to read; the challenge came when I tried to figure out what I thought about the subject matter, even what I felt about it. I had thought I was pretty clear before I started the book, but have ended up having to reconsider. I’m so afraid of giving anything away that I don’t want to give any details about this story, just urge everyone to read it and talk to your friends about it. Believe me, you will have a lot to talk about.<\/p>\n

As a writer, I was curious about the way Ishiguro handled the withholding of information to create suspense. There are lots of techniques, such as the one I call “the Chinatown” after the film (“‘We used to work together. In Chinatown.'”). Stephen Greenblatt calls it “the creation of a strategic opacity” in his book Will in the World<\/em>. Ian Rankin\u2014one of my favorite authors\u2014uses this one effectively. There will just be an off-hand reference to an incident or a person early on, and I’ll think ‘Okay, there will be an explanation in the next page or two’. There isn’t, so I read a couple more pages. Eventually, I forget what it was I wanted to know, only that there was something . . . The missing information sets up a dissonance, something I’m barely aware of, like a burr under my mind saying ‘Read on! Read on!’ Then at the end of the book, there’s a profound sense of relief when the half-forgotten question is finally answered and the dissonance resolved.<\/p>\n

What Ishiguro does here is much more subtle. He uses normal, familiar words, words that I only gradually realised were somehow off. Thus began the dissonance, ever so slightly at first, but growing. My interest didn’t even end with the book’s resolution. Months later, I find myself thinking about it and finding new insights\u2014sometimes surprising ones\u2014into what I believe and the consequences of my beliefs. Just what I want from a book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hearing on The Writer’s Almanac that his birthday was this week reminded me of Ishiguro and his latest book which I read a few months ago. Ishiguro is always taking on new challenges. I’ve been a fan for a long time, enjoying the deeply felt precision of An Artist of the Floating World and A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/eatmytoronto.com\/bmorrison\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/eatmytoronto.com\/bmorrison\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/eatmytoronto.com\/bmorrison\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eatmytoronto.com\/bmorrison\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eatmytoronto.com\/bmorrison\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/eatmytoronto.com\/bmorrison\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3433\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/eatmytoronto.com\/bmorrison\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eatmytoronto.com\/bmorrison\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eatmytoronto.com\/bmorrison\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}