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Welcome to my Monday morning book blog. Every Monday morning I will talk about a book I've read during the previous week, sometimes from a literary viewpoint or a writer's perspective, sometimes simply what excites me about the book. I read all kinds of things — nonfiction, literary fiction, genre fiction, poetry, backs of cereal boxes-so you never know what may show up here. Feedback is welcome; email bmorrison@bmorrison.com. I may publish some responses in future blog entries, so if you don't want your comments published, please note that in your email. Join me as we start off the week thinking about books.


Recently
Inspecting Carol, by Daniel Sullivan
One Good Turn, by Kate Atkinson
Close to Home, by Peter Robinson
Killing Floor, by Lee Child
The Space Between Us, by Thrity Umrigar
The Gathering, by Anne Enright

All past articles

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro · Nov 13, 01:00 AM by B. Morrison

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 Pale View of Hills and the startling rightness of The Remains of the Day. I struggled with The Unconsoled 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.

With Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro returns to linear narrative (yes, I know there’s another book in the middle that I haven’t read yet—gotta 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.

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. Ian Rankin—one of my favorite authors—uses 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.

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—sometimes surprising ones—into what I believe and the consequences of my beliefs. Just what I want from a book.

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