'Great Apes:' Life Among Randy Apes Can Be Tough on a Guy
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Books of the Times
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GREAT APES
By Will Self
404 pages. Grove Press. $24.
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Will Self is the Dennis Rodman of contemporary fiction.
Like Rodman, he has made a name for himself by specializing in willfully self-conscious outrage and by flirting with sexual transgression. And like Rodman, he possesses a genuine talent -- for writing in his case, not rebounding -- that is often overshadowed by his adolescent high jinks.
As his 1994 novel, "My Idea of Fun," demonstrated, Self is capable of creating genuinely engaging, innovative fiction, of turning his myriad influences -- Kafka, Burroughs and Lewis Carroll -- into something interesting and new. All too often, though, he has squandered his gifts for language and satire on silly, sophomoric stories: tales in which a man grows a vagina, a woman sprouts a penis or the phlegm of sick people coats the streets and contaminates the air. An obsession with bodily functions and the grosser aspects of sex infects all his work, as does a fascination with altered, often drug-induced states of mind.
Self's latest novel, "Great Apes," unfortunately, embodies most of his weaknesses as a writer, and few of his strengths. It is a slender idea for a satire, inflated into a fat, puffy novel, a "Twilight-Zone" episode blown into a full-length feature.
The novel's premise is borrowed, as was the first part of his novellas "Cock & Bull," from Kafka's "Metamorphosis." This time, an eminent artist named Simon Dykes wakes up to find himself turned into a chimpanzee and the world around him transformed into a planet of the apes. Simon is committed to the mental ward of a London hospital and diagnosed as suffering from a terrible delusion: he believes he is a human being.
As delineated by Self, the world Simon awakens to is very much like the human world he remembers: yuppies addicted to computers, would-be artists addicted to cocaine and careerists addicted to competition. The one difference: everyone -- from historical greats like Socrates, Plato and Freud through contemporary not-so-greats -- has become a chimpanzee. As for humans, they are regarded as a pathetic, inferior species; dying out in the wild, they can now be seen in zoos and experimental labs.
"Infants often had stuffed humans as toys," Self writes. "Birthday cards with humans dressed up as chimps on them were available in almost every news agent. There were also the notorious commercials for P.G. Tips tea, with their absurd use of humans mimicking chimp behavior; special effects used to convey the impression that they were signing intelligently and enjoying the beverage."
Although there are occasional moments of wacky comedy in "Great Apes," Self's usually inventive imagination is notably absent in this novel. His chimps tend to be lewd, pretentious sycophants: they are constantly saying things like "I admire your beautifully effulgent ischial scrag, your rump is like the morning star, and your maverick philosophy is a beacon of intrigue in a dull world." In fact, his planet of the apes turns out to be an even less surprising place than the one in the Charlton Heston-Roddy McDowall movie, a highly predictable place, mechanically constructed to allow the author to indulge in his sophomoric fascination (and disgust) with sex.
Self's chimps differ from humans in several respects: they greet one another with elaborate grooming rituals (involving fondling, petting and nit-picking); they do not wear clothes on the lower parts of their bodies (the better to display their genitals to others), and they routinely take part in public, and often incestuous, sex. This leads Self to go on, and on and on, at wearying length about an individual chimp's sexual endowments and about chimpanzee sex in all its varieties: sex between fathers and daughters, sex between doctors and patients, sex between dozens of strangers linked in a copulatory conga line in a public park.
All this chimp sex, of course, is supposed to make a satiric point: that humans, too, can be promiscuous and unfaithful to their spouses; they're just more hypocritical in pretending to be monogamous. This is a pretty banal point for a 400-plus page satire to make, and the book's other points are equally familiar: that human beings can act like beasts when competing for prestige, fame and money; that they can grovel and betray one another like chimps; that humans and animals actually have quite a lot in common.
The lumbering plot of "Great Apes" hardly makes up for the novel's flimsy satire: a long, meandering story line about Simon's efforts to come to terms with his "chimpunity," the efforts of a doctor to help him, and the suggestion that Simon's delusion may stem from his participation in an experimental trial of a drug called Inclusion (first mentioned in an earlier Self story, "Gray Area").
"Great Apes" may push Self's favorite theme of alienation (from family, friends, self) to a new extreme, but in doing so, it sorely tries the reader's patience. Like Rodman's recent antics, "Great Apes" is all juvenile calculation: meant to be provocative, it ends up being merely boring.
Showing posts with label Book club list. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Book club list. Show all posts
Monday, October 27, 2008
Great Apes by Will Self.....A Review......
The Ape Who Mistook Himself for a Man
By GARY KRIST
Read the First Chapter | Read Michiko Kakutani's review of "Great Apes" (September 12, 1997)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More on Will Self from The New York Times Archives
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GREAT APES
By Will Self.
404 pp. New York:
Grove Press. $24.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
r. Zack Busner -- distinguished clinical psychologist, maverick neuropharmacologist, noted television commentator and tooth-clacking, lice-picking chimpanzee -- is a figure of commanding presence. In the world of Will Self's latest novel, ''Great Apes,'' a world in which chimps rather than humans are the species cursed by the gift of advanced civilization, Busner is one of the greatest apes of all. An ''elder stateschimp of the psychiatric fraternity,'' he has achieved an Oliver Sacks-ish eminence in his field, writing about his encounters with various neurological misfits in popular books like ''The Chimp Who Mated an Armchair'' and ''Nestings.'' As a result, he is met wherever he knuckle-walks with a flurry of obsequious groveling from subordinates, reinforcing his position as an alpha male at the very top of the professional hierarchy.
But now Busner is confronted with his most puzzling case: that of Simon Dykes, a celebrated artist suffering from the bizarre delusion that he is human. Indeed, Dykes's psychosis is so comprehensive that he even regards the true reality as one in which -- get this -- humans are the evolutionarily successful primates. Evidently thinking ahead to his next book (''The Ape Who Mistook His Fur for an Overcoat,'' perhaps?), Busner takes on the unfortunate Dykes as a patient. And that's where the trouble begins, for there are subordinate males afoot who, while paying homage to Busner in public, are secretly working to undermine him, and see his handling of the deluded artist's case as just the opportunity they seek.
Such, believe it or not, is the story line of ''Great Apes,'' and if it doesn't sound like your idea of literature, you're probably not alone. In earlier books, like ''My Idea of Fun'' and the story collection ''Grey Area'' (in which both Zack Busner and Simon Dykes previously appeared, though in human form), Self made a name for himself as a defiant satirist with a peculiar mastery of the vocabulary of modern neurosis. Cultivating controversy in his life as well as in his work (during his stint as a reporter in the recent British election campaign, he was thrown off John Major's plane, accused of shooting heroin in the bathroom), he has polarized the reading public both here and in England, earning the usual iconoclast's reward of rabid denunciations and hyperbolic praise.
In ''Great Apes,'' his seventh book, Self carries this outrageousness into new realms. Taking a device that most comic writers would have dared to employ only over the space of a four-page satirical piece, he instead develops it into a 400-page novel. And although that may sound like a recipe for disaster -- like deciding to make an animated all-Simpsons version of ''Long Day's Journey Into Night'' -- the real surprise here is not only that the device works but that it works so brilliantly. What should have been the literary equivalent of a parlor trick turns out to be an utterly absorbing and affecting work of fiction.
The success of Self's feat is due in large part to the completeness with which he has imagined his alternate universe of ascendant ''chimpunity.'' Though much of the civilization depicted in ''Great Apes'' will be recognizable to human readers (there are chimp versions of Freud, O. J. Simpson and even Jane Goodall -- who, of course, has spent her career studying the wild humans of Gombe), it is the differences that are most telling. For instance, since chimps lack the vocal range necessary for complex spoken language, Self's primates have instead developed an eloquent vocabulary of hand signs punctuated by generic vocalizations. Thus the cry ''HoooGraaa!'' is the all-purpose attention getter, while ''H'huuu?'' is the question signifier and ''chup-chupp'' the inevitable accompaniment to all palliative gestures. Similarly, the human idea of the family has been replaced here by the hierarchical grouping of chimpanzees, where promiscuous copulation (even among blood relatives) is warmly encouraged and the major antisocial act is to upset the group structure by failing to groom with sufficient deference or mate with appropriate frequency and abandon. Self's grip on his extended trope is so tight, in fact, that I found only a few transmogrification errors in the entire book -- instances, for example, in which a ''bed'' is referred to instead of the more proper ''nest.'' (But then, as Alexander Pope once wrote, ''To err is chimp,'' and so on.)
What's more, all of this literary skylarking is grounded in a lush, scrupulously exact prose that can vault from the poignant to the grotesque to the ridiculous with vertiginous ease. Here, in a typical passage, Self riffs on the emotional consequences of Simon's recently failed marriage and his relationship with his children:
''No matter how much he saw them now, how many times he picked them up from school, how many times he made them oven chips and fish fingers, how many times he petted them, kissed them, told them he loved them, nothing could assuage this sense of wrenching separation, their disjunction from his life. He may not have snacked on the placenta, but somehow the umbilici still trailed from his mouth, ectoplasmic cords, strung across summertime London, snagging on rooftops, car aerials, advertising hoardings, and tied him to their little bellies.''
A few pages later, Self reprises the snacking imagery in an entirely different tone, when Simon idly imagines the crowds in Oxford Circus being ravaged by a ''post-imperial Kong'': ''These people were finger food to the god, sushi for the divinity. He disentangled them from his fur, eyed their knotted faces, and then popped them between his teeth, each of which was the size of a dentist. Mmmm . . . ! Crunchy . . . and yet chewy.''
With such reckless bravado, Self manages to turn his novel into a high-powered satirical weapon capable of blasting a wide range of targets. The circus of celebrity psychiatry, the jungle of hospital politics, the Vanity Fair of the London art scene -- all are brutally sent up in their apish reincarnations. But Self is also after bigger game. In scope, his book's obvious predecessor is ''Gulliver's Travels,'' which made similar use of anthropomorphized beasts to point up the general corruption and foolhardiness of Homo sapiens. And like Swift's book, ''Great Apes'' can be unexpectedly moving in its more ambitious moments, as in this passage, where Simon's human mind/chimp body problem takes the form of a drug-induced fever dream:
''He identified the lost infant as himself -- or to be more precise his lost body. He saw his infant's body, standing, shivering, naked of its protective coat. Little Simon, as gracile as a young bonobo; head fur blond and cropped at the back, features refined and serious. . . . Simon turned towards the lost infant, wafted across the grassy floor to get him. But as he drew nearer the infant's blue eyes widened, and his red red lips parted, and the sapling body bent in an afflatus of anguish. Then Simon heard the awful, meaningful vocalizations; so guttural -- but so just. 'Get away! Get away, Beelzebub! Foul beast! Ape man!' ''
It's in moments like this that Simon's situation -- the radical alienation he feels from his environment, his family, his own nature -- becomes more than just a clever comic device. Simon, the human-minded ape, could at times be speaking for all divided souls of the modern urban savanna, where the demands of everyday life in society often seem at odds with the inclinations of our animal selves.
Obviously, ''Great Apes'' is not a book that will delight everyone. In places, its humor caroms toward the sophomoric (not to mention the scatological), and there are times when Self's readers may feel as if they're trapped in a windowless room with a monstrously intelligent, diabolically articulate adolescent. Moreover, like some of Self's earlier work, this book ends lamely, with a reductive conclusion that seems almost intentionally to trivialize what has come before. But the value of the novel shouldn't be obscured by the inevitable skirmishes it will inspire on the battlefield of taste. With ''Great Apes,'' his most satisfying book so far, Will Self establishes himself as an alpha male in the British literary hierarchy. He deserves every thunderous ''HoooGraaa!'' we can offer him.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gary Krist is the author of two story collections, ''The Garden State'' and ''Bone by Bone.'' His first novel, ''Bad Chemistry,'' will be published this winter.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More on Will Self
From the Archives of The New York Times
REVIEWS:
Cock & Bull (1993)
"[Will Self] possesses all those gifts a satiric writer might want....Unfortunately, in this volume, these copious gifts are all too frequently put in the service of a misogynistic and ridiculously sophomoric vision."
My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale (1994)
"Although he is British and this novel is set in England, it has family resemblances to the work not only of Nabokov, but also of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo....Will Self belongs in their company."
The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1995)
"Mr. Self was fired as a cartoonist for The New Statesman because he was "too depressing." And he does seem very fond of that word."
By GARY KRIST
Read the First Chapter | Read Michiko Kakutani's review of "Great Apes" (September 12, 1997)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More on Will Self from The New York Times Archives
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
GREAT APES
By Will Self.
404 pp. New York:
Grove Press. $24.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
r. Zack Busner -- distinguished clinical psychologist, maverick neuropharmacologist, noted television commentator and tooth-clacking, lice-picking chimpanzee -- is a figure of commanding presence. In the world of Will Self's latest novel, ''Great Apes,'' a world in which chimps rather than humans are the species cursed by the gift of advanced civilization, Busner is one of the greatest apes of all. An ''elder stateschimp of the psychiatric fraternity,'' he has achieved an Oliver Sacks-ish eminence in his field, writing about his encounters with various neurological misfits in popular books like ''The Chimp Who Mated an Armchair'' and ''Nestings.'' As a result, he is met wherever he knuckle-walks with a flurry of obsequious groveling from subordinates, reinforcing his position as an alpha male at the very top of the professional hierarchy.
But now Busner is confronted with his most puzzling case: that of Simon Dykes, a celebrated artist suffering from the bizarre delusion that he is human. Indeed, Dykes's psychosis is so comprehensive that he even regards the true reality as one in which -- get this -- humans are the evolutionarily successful primates. Evidently thinking ahead to his next book (''The Ape Who Mistook His Fur for an Overcoat,'' perhaps?), Busner takes on the unfortunate Dykes as a patient. And that's where the trouble begins, for there are subordinate males afoot who, while paying homage to Busner in public, are secretly working to undermine him, and see his handling of the deluded artist's case as just the opportunity they seek.
Such, believe it or not, is the story line of ''Great Apes,'' and if it doesn't sound like your idea of literature, you're probably not alone. In earlier books, like ''My Idea of Fun'' and the story collection ''Grey Area'' (in which both Zack Busner and Simon Dykes previously appeared, though in human form), Self made a name for himself as a defiant satirist with a peculiar mastery of the vocabulary of modern neurosis. Cultivating controversy in his life as well as in his work (during his stint as a reporter in the recent British election campaign, he was thrown off John Major's plane, accused of shooting heroin in the bathroom), he has polarized the reading public both here and in England, earning the usual iconoclast's reward of rabid denunciations and hyperbolic praise.
In ''Great Apes,'' his seventh book, Self carries this outrageousness into new realms. Taking a device that most comic writers would have dared to employ only over the space of a four-page satirical piece, he instead develops it into a 400-page novel. And although that may sound like a recipe for disaster -- like deciding to make an animated all-Simpsons version of ''Long Day's Journey Into Night'' -- the real surprise here is not only that the device works but that it works so brilliantly. What should have been the literary equivalent of a parlor trick turns out to be an utterly absorbing and affecting work of fiction.
The success of Self's feat is due in large part to the completeness with which he has imagined his alternate universe of ascendant ''chimpunity.'' Though much of the civilization depicted in ''Great Apes'' will be recognizable to human readers (there are chimp versions of Freud, O. J. Simpson and even Jane Goodall -- who, of course, has spent her career studying the wild humans of Gombe), it is the differences that are most telling. For instance, since chimps lack the vocal range necessary for complex spoken language, Self's primates have instead developed an eloquent vocabulary of hand signs punctuated by generic vocalizations. Thus the cry ''HoooGraaa!'' is the all-purpose attention getter, while ''H'huuu?'' is the question signifier and ''chup-chupp'' the inevitable accompaniment to all palliative gestures. Similarly, the human idea of the family has been replaced here by the hierarchical grouping of chimpanzees, where promiscuous copulation (even among blood relatives) is warmly encouraged and the major antisocial act is to upset the group structure by failing to groom with sufficient deference or mate with appropriate frequency and abandon. Self's grip on his extended trope is so tight, in fact, that I found only a few transmogrification errors in the entire book -- instances, for example, in which a ''bed'' is referred to instead of the more proper ''nest.'' (But then, as Alexander Pope once wrote, ''To err is chimp,'' and so on.)
What's more, all of this literary skylarking is grounded in a lush, scrupulously exact prose that can vault from the poignant to the grotesque to the ridiculous with vertiginous ease. Here, in a typical passage, Self riffs on the emotional consequences of Simon's recently failed marriage and his relationship with his children:
''No matter how much he saw them now, how many times he picked them up from school, how many times he made them oven chips and fish fingers, how many times he petted them, kissed them, told them he loved them, nothing could assuage this sense of wrenching separation, their disjunction from his life. He may not have snacked on the placenta, but somehow the umbilici still trailed from his mouth, ectoplasmic cords, strung across summertime London, snagging on rooftops, car aerials, advertising hoardings, and tied him to their little bellies.''
A few pages later, Self reprises the snacking imagery in an entirely different tone, when Simon idly imagines the crowds in Oxford Circus being ravaged by a ''post-imperial Kong'': ''These people were finger food to the god, sushi for the divinity. He disentangled them from his fur, eyed their knotted faces, and then popped them between his teeth, each of which was the size of a dentist. Mmmm . . . ! Crunchy . . . and yet chewy.''
With such reckless bravado, Self manages to turn his novel into a high-powered satirical weapon capable of blasting a wide range of targets. The circus of celebrity psychiatry, the jungle of hospital politics, the Vanity Fair of the London art scene -- all are brutally sent up in their apish reincarnations. But Self is also after bigger game. In scope, his book's obvious predecessor is ''Gulliver's Travels,'' which made similar use of anthropomorphized beasts to point up the general corruption and foolhardiness of Homo sapiens. And like Swift's book, ''Great Apes'' can be unexpectedly moving in its more ambitious moments, as in this passage, where Simon's human mind/chimp body problem takes the form of a drug-induced fever dream:
''He identified the lost infant as himself -- or to be more precise his lost body. He saw his infant's body, standing, shivering, naked of its protective coat. Little Simon, as gracile as a young bonobo; head fur blond and cropped at the back, features refined and serious. . . . Simon turned towards the lost infant, wafted across the grassy floor to get him. But as he drew nearer the infant's blue eyes widened, and his red red lips parted, and the sapling body bent in an afflatus of anguish. Then Simon heard the awful, meaningful vocalizations; so guttural -- but so just. 'Get away! Get away, Beelzebub! Foul beast! Ape man!' ''
It's in moments like this that Simon's situation -- the radical alienation he feels from his environment, his family, his own nature -- becomes more than just a clever comic device. Simon, the human-minded ape, could at times be speaking for all divided souls of the modern urban savanna, where the demands of everyday life in society often seem at odds with the inclinations of our animal selves.
Obviously, ''Great Apes'' is not a book that will delight everyone. In places, its humor caroms toward the sophomoric (not to mention the scatological), and there are times when Self's readers may feel as if they're trapped in a windowless room with a monstrously intelligent, diabolically articulate adolescent. Moreover, like some of Self's earlier work, this book ends lamely, with a reductive conclusion that seems almost intentionally to trivialize what has come before. But the value of the novel shouldn't be obscured by the inevitable skirmishes it will inspire on the battlefield of taste. With ''Great Apes,'' his most satisfying book so far, Will Self establishes himself as an alpha male in the British literary hierarchy. He deserves every thunderous ''HoooGraaa!'' we can offer him.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gary Krist is the author of two story collections, ''The Garden State'' and ''Bone by Bone.'' His first novel, ''Bad Chemistry,'' will be published this winter.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
More on Will Self
From the Archives of The New York Times
REVIEWS:
Cock & Bull (1993)
"[Will Self] possesses all those gifts a satiric writer might want....Unfortunately, in this volume, these copious gifts are all too frequently put in the service of a misogynistic and ridiculously sophomoric vision."
My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale (1994)
"Although he is British and this novel is set in England, it has family resemblances to the work not only of Nabokov, but also of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo....Will Self belongs in their company."
The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1995)
"Mr. Self was fired as a cartoonist for The New Statesman because he was "too depressing." And he does seem very fond of that word."
Here's a review I saw on the internet of Great Apes
Will Self has always had an ambivalent relationship with the novel. He doesn't write about character and admits that he finds plot 'boring', as a result his novels usually work off a single comic device or absurd concept, stretched to the limit through a vast vocabularly, endless metaphors and a scatological humour. Self's is a style that can be very visceral, funny and incisive, however, over the course of an entire novel it can become nauseous, tedious and dull. Self is better suited to short stories and journalism, forums where his flamboyant, potent prose and wild premises still have the ability to be shocking rather than tired and worn.
'Great Apes', Self's 1997 work released shortly after the scandal over the author taking heroin on John Major's private jet, combines both these aspects of his work into a great, fierce piece of satire.
Taking the Kafkaesque premise of a London artist, Simon Dykes waking from a night of bad coke and worse sex to find himself in a world where chimps have reversed roles with humans, the novel works best when describing the social hierachy of the chimps and their bizarre behaviour, using it as a device to show how similar the two species are.
Dykes finds himself in a secure unit under the supervision of emenient primate psychiatrist Zack Busner, the titular 'great ape'. Self goes to great lengths to describe Dykes' anguish and how insane he seems in contrast to the rest of the world. As the book progresses Dykes' belief in his own humanity is shown to be nothing more than the workings of delusional mind- chimps do indeed have global supremacy.
Mental illness and the problems of medicine are common Self themes and the book does raise interesting questions about the nature of madness and drug abuse, but here they feel thinly developed, as if Self is writing for his own amusement. For every funny line or comic invention there are vast amounts of unecessary and flabby writing, either concerning psychiatry, sex or divorce, that just come across as dull. Self has an incredible mind, at his best recalling, all at once, Martin Amis, Celine, Kafka and Carroll, but here he comes across more as a man writing really just to waste time, as if the novel was a bit of filler between magazine assignments and taking drugs. The satirical comment Self hoped to make, on modern art, on coke, on humanity, on whatever, never fully translates or is fully concluded. Self started writing, kept going and then finished, whether what he wrote was of real substance wasn't obviously of much concern to him.
'Great Apes', Self's 1997 work released shortly after the scandal over the author taking heroin on John Major's private jet, combines both these aspects of his work into a great, fierce piece of satire.
Taking the Kafkaesque premise of a London artist, Simon Dykes waking from a night of bad coke and worse sex to find himself in a world where chimps have reversed roles with humans, the novel works best when describing the social hierachy of the chimps and their bizarre behaviour, using it as a device to show how similar the two species are.
Dykes finds himself in a secure unit under the supervision of emenient primate psychiatrist Zack Busner, the titular 'great ape'. Self goes to great lengths to describe Dykes' anguish and how insane he seems in contrast to the rest of the world. As the book progresses Dykes' belief in his own humanity is shown to be nothing more than the workings of delusional mind- chimps do indeed have global supremacy.
Mental illness and the problems of medicine are common Self themes and the book does raise interesting questions about the nature of madness and drug abuse, but here they feel thinly developed, as if Self is writing for his own amusement. For every funny line or comic invention there are vast amounts of unecessary and flabby writing, either concerning psychiatry, sex or divorce, that just come across as dull. Self has an incredible mind, at his best recalling, all at once, Martin Amis, Celine, Kafka and Carroll, but here he comes across more as a man writing really just to waste time, as if the novel was a bit of filler between magazine assignments and taking drugs. The satirical comment Self hoped to make, on modern art, on coke, on humanity, on whatever, never fully translates or is fully concluded. Self started writing, kept going and then finished, whether what he wrote was of real substance wasn't obviously of much concern to him.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Never Let me Go Reviews
Book Summary and Media Reviews
Never Let Me Go: Summary and book reviews of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, plus an excerpt from Never Let Me Go and a biography of Kazuo Ishiguro.
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Hardcover: Apr 2005
Paperback: Mar 2006
Publication information Book Jacket & Reviews
Excerpt
Reader Reviews
Author Biography
Author Interview
Reading Guide
Read-Alikes
This Book's Themes
BookBrowse Says....
Critics' Opinion: Very Good
Readers' Rating:
(7 reader reviews)
Add to my Reading List Buy this book:
From the Jacket
A BookBrowse Favorite Book
From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly re-imagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love.
As a child, Kathy–now thirty-one years old–lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.
And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed–even comforted–by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham's nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood–and about their lives now.
A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance–and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro's finest work.
Media Reviews
Booklist - Allison Block
In this luminous offering, he nimbly navigates the landscape of emotion--the inevitable link between present and past and the fine line between compassion and cruelty, pleasure and pain.
Library Journal - Henry L. Carrigan (starred review)
Ishiguro's elegant prose and masterly ways with characterization make for a lovely tale of memory, self-understanding, and love.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives-without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have "tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn't matter." ... A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
So exquisitely observed that even the most workaday objects and interactions are infused with a luminous, humming otherworldliness. The dystopian story it tells, meanwhile, gives it a different kind of electric charge. . . . An epic ethical horror story, told in devastatingly poignant miniature. . . . Ishiguro spins a stinging cautionary tale of science outpacing ethics.
The Guardian (UK) - M John Harrison
This extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel isn't about cloning, or being a clone, at all. It's about why we don't explode, why we don't just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.
The Independent (UK) - Geoff Dyer
The problem for the reviewer, appropriately enough, is that by revealing more of what the book is about he risks going too far and unravelling its meticulously woven fabric of hints and guesses. So I'll leave it there. Suffice it to say that this very weird book is as intricate, subtly unsettling and moving as any Ishiguro has written.
The Sunday Times (UK) - Peter Kemp
Not since The Remains of the Day has Ishiguro written about wasted lives with such finely gauged forlornness. That he contrives to do so in a narrative crawling with creepy frissons is remarkable. Not the least out-of-the-ordinary feature of this novel, with its piercing questions about humanity and humaneness, is the way it affectingly moves past gothic shudders to a wrenchingly desolate ending.
The Telegraph (UK) - Caroline Moore
Never Let Me Go will probably disappoint readers for whom the solution of a mystery is all-in-all, or those who want the gratification of full-on horror. But in its evocation of a pervasive menace and despair almost but not quite lost in translation - made up of the shadows of things not said, glimpsed out of the corner of one's eye - the novel is masterly.
Never Let Me Go: Summary and book reviews of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, plus an excerpt from Never Let Me Go and a biography of Kazuo Ishiguro.
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Hardcover: Apr 2005
Paperback: Mar 2006
Publication information Book Jacket & Reviews
Excerpt
Reader Reviews
Author Biography
Author Interview
Reading Guide
Read-Alikes
This Book's Themes
BookBrowse Says....
Critics' Opinion: Very Good
Readers' Rating:
(7 reader reviews)
Add to my Reading List Buy this book:
From the Jacket
A BookBrowse Favorite Book
From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly re-imagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love.
As a child, Kathy–now thirty-one years old–lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.
And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed–even comforted–by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham's nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood–and about their lives now.
A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance–and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro's finest work.
Media Reviews
Booklist - Allison Block
In this luminous offering, he nimbly navigates the landscape of emotion--the inevitable link between present and past and the fine line between compassion and cruelty, pleasure and pain.
Library Journal - Henry L. Carrigan (starred review)
Ishiguro's elegant prose and masterly ways with characterization make for a lovely tale of memory, self-understanding, and love.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives-without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have "tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn't matter." ... A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
So exquisitely observed that even the most workaday objects and interactions are infused with a luminous, humming otherworldliness. The dystopian story it tells, meanwhile, gives it a different kind of electric charge. . . . An epic ethical horror story, told in devastatingly poignant miniature. . . . Ishiguro spins a stinging cautionary tale of science outpacing ethics.
The Guardian (UK) - M John Harrison
This extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel isn't about cloning, or being a clone, at all. It's about why we don't explode, why we don't just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.
The Independent (UK) - Geoff Dyer
The problem for the reviewer, appropriately enough, is that by revealing more of what the book is about he risks going too far and unravelling its meticulously woven fabric of hints and guesses. So I'll leave it there. Suffice it to say that this very weird book is as intricate, subtly unsettling and moving as any Ishiguro has written.
The Sunday Times (UK) - Peter Kemp
Not since The Remains of the Day has Ishiguro written about wasted lives with such finely gauged forlornness. That he contrives to do so in a narrative crawling with creepy frissons is remarkable. Not the least out-of-the-ordinary feature of this novel, with its piercing questions about humanity and humaneness, is the way it affectingly moves past gothic shudders to a wrenchingly desolate ending.
The Telegraph (UK) - Caroline Moore
Never Let Me Go will probably disappoint readers for whom the solution of a mystery is all-in-all, or those who want the gratification of full-on horror. But in its evocation of a pervasive menace and despair almost but not quite lost in translation - made up of the shadows of things not said, glimpsed out of the corner of one's eye - the novel is masterly.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
August, September, October & November Meetings
Hi Everyone in the Book Club & potential new members
The Book club will meet at the usual venue at the hotel.
Under discussion for the next few months will be:
August
Last King of Scotland
Giles Foden
September
Never Let Me go
Kazuo Ishiguro
October
Grasshopper
Barbara Vine
November
A Piano in the Pyrenees
Tony Hawkes
Reviews of the Book and information about the author are available on the St Yrieix Book club Blog. http://vernonboy.blogspot.com
Please let Pat Dixon know of your coffee/lunch requirements a few days before the meeting.
Pat Dixon ~ 0553552185
Vernon Goddard ~ 0555099490
All welcome ~ but if you are a new member, please contact us to let us know you’re joining. _________________
Gorseinonboy................
The Book club will meet at the usual venue at the hotel.
Under discussion for the next few months will be:
August
Last King of Scotland
Giles Foden
September
Never Let Me go
Kazuo Ishiguro
October
Grasshopper
Barbara Vine
November
A Piano in the Pyrenees
Tony Hawkes
Reviews of the Book and information about the author are available on the St Yrieix Book club Blog. http://vernonboy.blogspot.com
Please let Pat Dixon know of your coffee/lunch requirements a few days before the meeting.
Pat Dixon ~ 0553552185
Vernon Goddard ~ 0555099490
All welcome ~ but if you are a new member, please contact us to let us know you’re joining. _________________
Gorseinonboy................
Friday, July 18, 2008
Book Club Choices for the rest of the year ~ 2008
July
Firelight and Woodsmoke
Claude Michelet
August
Last King of Scotland
Giles Foden
September
Never Let Me go
Kazuo Ishiguro
October
Grasshopper
Barbara Vine
November
A Piano in the Pyrenees
Tony Hawkes
Firelight and Woodsmoke
Claude Michelet
August
Last King of Scotland
Giles Foden
September
Never Let Me go
Kazuo Ishiguro
October
Grasshopper
Barbara Vine
November
A Piano in the Pyrenees
Tony Hawkes
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