11.19.08

On Book Reviews and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 7:07 am by Miracle ♪♫

“Judge not a book… by its reviews,” is a metaphor I created to bear out my attitude regarding the event of hearing initial gossip about a person I have not been acquainted with personally. It eventually became my perspective towards books regardless of whether the commentaries were positive or negative.

Some are in the habit of Googling reviews and critiques of a book they are about to read. While this may also be advantageous, I prefer not to betray a book’s contents prematurely so I may approach it with unbiased expectations and avoid conventional spoilers. This is perhaps one of the reasons why I am not able to write book reviews adeptly and tend to become a tad obscure or revealing and never quite competent on my reviewing attempts.

Friends’ reviews are welcome however; I do not indulge in them for the sake of finding out about a book per se, but to know more about the reviewer. Nevertheless, there are those affirmative blatant reviews on book covers that I cannot possibly bypass… and I can only try to remain unaffected by them.

So when Time’s description of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as a “tour de force” and a “page-turner” – two clichés plastered on hundreds of book jackets – blazed on its cover, it was only natural to mutter “we’ll see about that”, because despite Ishiguro’s prodigious reputation (he is best known for Remains of the Day), Never Let Me Go did not seem to be a very convincing title. But from its first page to the last, I could only nod in agreement at the precision of Time’s review.

On what primarily seems to be a utopian setting where creativity is highly valued turns out to be a dystopia as the story unfolds. The novel reflects on man’s very existence and is a naked punctuation on mortality. While it may come as a scrutiny of art, emotions, friendship, forgiveness, and life itself, it is a harrowing tale for those who do not have hope of an afterlife.

If one should wonder about this book’s narrative, imagine the espresso freak that I am, and yet while I read this, a coffee break was not even a welcome interruption… and hours after putting it down, I am still haunted.

Never Let Me Go was short-listed from the 2005 Booker Prize, it was Time’s best fiction novel of 2005 and is among their 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s literary awards include the Whitbread Prize in 1986 for An Artist of the Floating World, the Booker Prize in 1989 for The Remains of the Day, and the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 1998.

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