Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

It's a lovely cover. As I mentioned this book has been waiting for me for some time on the bookshelf, quietly, patiently like the cover's empty boat. I'd read so much about it since it was released in 2005, bucket fulls of praise. In the end I was disappointed. Frustrated is probably a better word.

Ishiguro gives us something that might be called SH (speculative history) a variation or subgenre of SF (speculative fiction.) Phillip Roth's "The Plot Against America" also comes to mind as recent SH in which history is re-imagined, tweaked, the facts slightly altered, and the logic then fictionally played out.

SF is generally not on my reading list, but I can see the attraction of speculating on a farflung future, stretching the tendons of reality, creating imaginary worlds with all sorts of dystopic or utopic possibilities, in order to learn something about our present. But there is also something distastefully presumptive and problematic about the conceit of toying with the past for this purpose. With history, whether or not it actually happened, matters. The fact that what takes place in "England, 1999" of this novel doesn't reflect conditions of the time and place, gives the entire exercise an air of illegitimacy. I kept scratching my head, wondering why the author simply didn't just use "England 2199." But this was not my main frustration with the book.

The conditions described in the book are of a dystopic past in which a race of clones is raised for the sole purpose of having their organs harvested (called "donating.") The narrator is Kathy who is a "carer," someone who cares for donors during their convalescence before they themselves become donors. She is caring for her close friend Tommy who has made multiple donations, reminiscing about the time they spent together at Hailsham and The Cottages where they spent their childhood and adolescence with their other close friend Ruth.

Somehow, these clones can donate three and sometimes even four times before coming to "completion" (euphemism for dying,) which begs the question, are they bred with multiple organs? It's hard to imagine how the organs are harvested, and in what order, to ensure mutliple donations. In general, the system of organ harvesting, how exactly it works, how it came into being, who was behind it and how it evolved etc. is never detailed. This omission left me questioning from beginning to end, distracting me from the main story which is about the love and friendship of the trio of clones.

The fact that the main characters are questioning too is transparently part of the author's storytelling strategy. He wants us to be part of the secrecy that surrounds the young lives of the protagonists. I frankly had a hard time buying into it. The story, which goes from memory to memory, (a lot of sections start, "I should explain here...") is a drawn out affair in which the author strings the reader along, dropping hints about the background. The reader is kept more or less in the dark until the last 50 pages of the book, when one of the "guardians" clarifies the true nature of the clones' existence and the battle waged behind the scenes to save their "souls." By then, the question of whether clones have souls, which is supposed to be a crux of the book, seemed almost moot because they are portrayed as such sensitive, intelligent and articulate young people with emotionally rich lives. Quite simply I didn't believe (or, for that matter, care) that Kathy and her cohort, who by the way are well-read and creative (all part of their upbringing), would be so dim as to not realize what was actually going on, so dumb as to not understand how they are different from the general public, so blind as to accept their tragic fate, and so lame as not to try to escape, rebel, or something.

On the other hand, maybe that is precisely why they should be considered a subhuman species, because they don't seem to have any genuine and burning desire to fight for their own survival. Each of their lives is a slow excruciating smoulder which utlimately extinguishes once a letter (from some unseen, faceless institutional master) arrives telling them that it is their turn to donate until they 'complete'.

Cuba and the three Rs: Reconnecting, Reading, Relaxing.

Back from seven days in Cuba with the family. Many pleasures were enjoyed not the least of which were much-needed megadoses of Vitamin D, much-needed time reconnecting with the wife and kids (boy, it's easy to forget how enjoyable their company can be) and almost complete disconnection from the wired world. Also, managed to read two novels. I'd had Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" on the backburner for a long time, and I'd never read anything by J.M. Coetzee so I took along his latest "Diary of a Bad Year." One was disappointing, the other a delightful surprise. In the coming days, when time allows, I'll let you know which book falls into which category. By the way, that's a shot of the actual hotel.

Dylan

It's taken me about 55 years, but I've finally started appreciating Bob Dylan. So what took me so long? The answer my friend is 'blowin in the wind' whatever that means.

I think Dylan is derivative, an impostor, a fraud, and that's his best quality because he's sincere about it. He's a poseur, in the way that we're all poseurs, it just takes some of us longer to admit than others. He can't really sing, but he sings, and doesn't much care that he can't sing. He doesn't play guitar all that well (or piano, or harmonica) but doesn't much care, and keeps on playing. As for the songs themselves, the musical structure and arrangements? Well they're repetitious and rudimentary. People who've worked with him in the studio say he doesn't come in prepared with much more than a musical scaffolding in mind and the rest gets improvised. Take a song like "Like A Rolling Stone" or "The Hurricane", for example, and you realize that this is obviously the case. In 'Rolling Stone' it's Al Kooper's improvised organ lick that makes the song musically interesting and catchy, in 'Hurricane' it's Scarlet Rivera's plaintive violin. I guess you've got to give Dylan credit for relying on the real musicians to make the music work, and recognizing what works musically when they hit on it.

As for the lyrics - Dylan doesn't know what his songs are about and he's said as much publicly. When asked, he answers that the songs are about whatever you want them to be about. He just writes them, and whatever comes out, comes out. I don't think he's being cute or evasive. Read his lyrics, and the only conclusion any reasonable person can draw is that Dylan is telling the truth. He has no idea what he's writing about, or maybe he has some vague idea. The words he uses are nothing special, by design one can suppose they're ordinary, because he's writing in the folk narrative or blues idiom. Sometimes his words are more narrative, and sometimes more 'poetic'. When they are on the poetic side, what he comes up with is often opaque gobbledygook, a hodgepodge of images and metaphors vomited out, that may or may not amount to anything much. Sometimes, cause he uses so many words, like an archer shooting arrow after arrow, he hits on something that sticks, a few of those arrows even strike gold. One thing is for sure, Dylan likes words, really likes them, and his songs are full of them. He writes a lot of songs, and a lot of long ones too. So chances are he'll occasionally put words together that seem to mean something. The one amazing innate talent that Dylan unquestionably has is a memory for words. It's quite impressive that he can remember all those lyrics when he performs. 

Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in Hibbing, Minnesota. From the beginning it was all about adopting a persona, or rather several personas. He's worn more than a few of them over the years; the Woody Guthrie-esque dust bowl balladeer, the Billy The Kid-esque outlaw individualist, the gospel singing born-again Christian, persona after persona, each one in its own way embodying an aspect of the American myth. Meanwhile he was always really a middle class Jewish kid from the northern mid-west. But his most enduring trick, the trick of being derivative, reminds us that we're all derivative, we're all poseurs, and being a poseur is the very quintessence of being an American. The entire culture is derivative, and most Americans have themselves fled a past, a former country, shed a former identity to adopt a new one. The very quintessence of the American myth is that our identity is whatever we want it to be, that's what makes America great, that's what freedom actually means. It's not that you can become rich in America. It's that you can become someone else entirely. A Napoleon in rags, whatever that is.

As for whether he should've gotten the Nobel Prize for Literature, in case you're wondering? Not a chance. They should go back to giving the Nobel to authors most of us have never heard of before. Everyone's heard of Dylan. And give it to actual authors of literature, not songwriters. I mean can Kazuo Ishiguro win a Grammy?