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Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go (2006, Vintage International)

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were …

Review of 'Never let me go' on 'LibraryThing'

On some level this is a deeply haunting book, confronting us with the people society leaves behind in a sympathetic first-person perspective. But the devices Ishiguro uses to achieve that effect also put me off the book itself. Without wanting to get too spoliery, the smallness of the narrator's world is kind of the point, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a slow paced book in a very small world, which I kept getting frustrated with.

Doing an import from previous bookwyrm instances + LibraryThing + Goodreads is a very strange kind of time warp. Past-me liked some books that today-me feels the Suck Fairy has visited, and put lots of things in to-read that I'm much less interested in today. But there are also some things that have shifted the other way.

Never Let Me Go is one of them: in hindsight, I like it much better than I did at the time. Enough so that I'm curious about re-reading it and seeing what I think. Is it that the aspects which frustrated me 6 years ago have shrunk in my recollection, or is it that the brilliant aspects of it mean more to me today?