Never Let Me Go | Blade Runner: Never Let Me Go

"Kazuo Ishiguro, a renowned British novelist, was born November 8, 1954, in Nagasaki, Japan, to parents Shizuko Michida and Shizuo Ishiguro. On May 9, 1986, he married Lorna Anne MacDougall. Their daughter, Naomi, was born in 1992 ... "

"Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, and most recently The Buried Giant, and oh, also our newest Nobel Laureate in Literature, turns 63 today. I have long admired Ishiguro’s work, which seems almost effortless, presenting its multi-faceted subjects with cold-water clarity while nimbly experimenting with genre, style, and subject ... "

"Kazuo Ishiguro has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and, as a long-term scholar and fan of Ishiguro, I feel compelled to join the celebration. The Swedish academy aptly described Ishiguro’s works as possessing “great emotional force” which “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world” ... "

"It’s tempting to talk of writing—the art of it, the craft of it, the lifestyle of it—as a kind of romance. Writers of serious literature (according to, at least, many writers of serious literature) do not simply type stark words onto blank pages ... "

"Many people have to work long hours. When it comes to the writing of novels, however, the consensus seems to be that after four hours or so of continuous writing, diminishing returns set in ... "

" ... All Ishiguro's fiction exhibits similar characteristics. His style is subtle and understated, superficially clear but with troubled depths, as remarkable for what it does not say as for what it does. Critic Gabriel Brownstein observes that, in the course of an Ishiguro novel, "the weight of the unsaid grows heavier and heavier." Fellow novelist Penelope Lively describes this style as "sparse, precise and plain" ... "

" ... Ishiguro's novels are preoccupied by memories, their potential to digress and distort, to forget and to silence, and, above all, to haunt ... "

"Kazuo Ishiguro: I'm not much of a science fiction reader. I like James Cameron's type of science fiction in movies [Blade Runner], but I'm not really interested in reimagining the whole world and writing the details of everyday life—what cars will look like, what government will look like—80 years from now. In my fiction writing, I tend to start with a context, to ask a question: How does our childhood carry into our adult life? How do we slowly ruin our lives, become unhappy? ... "

"The man who wrote The Remains of the Day in the pitch-perfect voice of an English butler is himself very polite ... "

"Loss, memory, regret. Writer Kazuo Ishiguro explores these issues beautifully in all six of his novels. The most famous, "The Remains of the Day," is set in England just before the Second World War. His most recent work, "Never Let Me Go," is set in contemporary England with a disturbing twist. Kazuo Ishiguro spoke to DAY TO DAY's Karen Grigsby Bates for our Wednesday Book Report ... "

"At its core Never Let Me Go is a love story. Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel traces the twists and turns of romance between Kathy H. and Tommy D. from our first encounter with them at Hailsham, a well-manicured boarding school lost in the English countryside, to their final goodbye outside a dilapidated hospital, more than two decades later ... "

" ... Looking at Ishiguro's oeuvre, a series of clear and coherent themes emerge. Barry Lewis of Sunderland University has written a critical study of Ishiguro's work and notes that "notions of identity and how an individual sustains a sense of self as historical circumstances cast a new light on events is something he returns to time and again. It links to the sense of how memory might be used as a tool to keep your dignity and maintain a sense of self." Ishiguro's latest novel, Never Let Me Go, is published next month and again reflects some of these preoccupations ... "

"This is a sad, complex, haunting novel which raises huge questions about family, memory, exploitation and ‘othering’ ... "

" ... Unlike many other writers who distrust and avoid interviews, Ishiguro has been willing to submit to a surprisingly large number for a writer whose literary output has been restricted to six novels. Such willingness to discuss his novels may suggest that he himself senses the need to confront (mis)readings of his work ... "

"Never Let Me Go draws a subtle analogy between the lives of the clones and the racially marginalized, exposing the tensions in contemporary science over the question of race ... "

"Kazuo Ishiguro's novel about human clones raised for organs, is most often critiqued as science fiction or dystopian literature by the scholarly community. Yet focusing on the institutional implementation of cloning obscures a more critically fertile theme: sentiment. As demonstrated in this article, the novel has deeper affinities with sentimental and abolitionist literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than with speculative fiction ... "

"Now, the story he wants to talk about is his new novel, Never Let Me Go. Scratch that: He'd actually rather talk about anything else because when he sits down to describe the plot, he says -- again with the laughter -- that it sounds "like a very unpleasant book," a book that only weirdoes would take on vacation with them ... "

"One of the signature effects of Kazuo Ishiguro's fiction is a moment when a character behaves with sudden, inexplicable, and astonishing cruelty - not to a stranger, but to an intimate ... "

"In this article, I will investigate the concept of "othering" originally as part of a post-colonial theory. This concept is interested in many academic areas, including a literary study. In Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "Never Let Me Go" is about human clones raised for organs. The clones are excluded and discriminated to be "the other" from the normal people. The manifestations of othering in "Never Let Me Go" can be presented in the forms of linguistic features, indoctrination, objectification, and assimilation ... "