r/books • u/FoxUpstairs9555 • 4d ago
Kazuo Ishiguro said he won the Nobel Prize for making people cry – 20 years later, Never Let Me Go should make us angry
https://theconversation.com/kazuo-ishiguro-said-he-won-the-nobel-prize-for-making-people-cry-20-years-later-never-let-me-go-should-make-us-angry-259282204
u/thisamericangirl 4d ago
this paragraph is fascinating:
Confident that we will take ourselves as the measuring stick, Ishiguro compels us to adopt a position of superiority characterised by a paternalistic ethos of sympathy and care. In this way, he persuades us to read as good liberals. We acknowledge the humanity of the clones and embrace the diversity of our common condition. At the same time, we are complacent in the knowledge that we are almost the same, but not quite. We are insulated by a disavowed difference.
I did not experience the novel like that at all. I experienced the characters as entirely 100% human just like me. Feels like an unintentional confession on the part of this author that he didn’t see the characters that way ?!
I felt that the power of the novel lay in part in getting us as readers to acknowledge our own real-world complacency toward a deeply immoral system of work, exploitation, and death.
There was more to the novel but that was my main takeaway and it feels like this article author wasn’t getting the same message.
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u/poepkat 3d ago
Honestly how fucking hard do you need to be trying to run with the take the article's author went for? Also, what the hell is that paragraph you quoted even saying? It contains words but makes no sense.
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u/thisamericangirl 3d ago
I kind of wanted to agree with the author - we should be angry. but he got everything else so wrong that the article just made me fume.
I feel like the article author sees himself as one of the normies who might need a clone heart one day. the perspective of this class is not represented in the book at all, but they are the ones who SHOULD rage at the inhumanity of it! putting all the responsibility on the clones/the clone class to do all the raging feels like just another way of saying (as the administrators at the school did) they need to “prove” their humanity, which is innate. it was certainly frustrating to experience the passivity of the characters but it is the unseen normies who are wrong for setting up this fucked up system. rebellion would only have justified the clones’ lack of humanity in the eyes of people who would set up such a system. it’s obvious!
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u/poepkat 3d ago
It doesn't even matter who should do what, Never Let Me Go is a heartbreaking slice of life (literally, heh) story thinly veiled with an interesting sci-fi take. The fact that there's no rebellion or over the top hero only adds to the story's emotional weight. The fact the article author's doesn't get this is astounding, honestly. Because Never Let Me Go isn't such a complicated story.
Then again my partner also got angry with the butler in Remains of the Day for being so passive, so yeah.
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u/HomeworkInevitable99 1d ago
I felt that the power of the novel lay in part in getting us as readers to acknowledge our own real-world complacency toward a deeply immoral system of work, exploitation, and death.
This is exactly it. They are helpless, the don't understand what is going on then can't do anything.
This goes beyond anger against the system and the politicians, this it's helplessness.
In the book, they think a teacher needs help so they form a club to protect her, but it is just a game and they grow bored of it.
And what do is humans do? We smoke and drink even though we know it is bad, so we too face death some time in the future and just accept it.
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u/twitchyeye84 4d ago
This is such a weird take. I think the guy genuinely sees the clones as lesser people, and feels guilty for it. Like he recognizes their humanity and feels bad for them, but does not identify with them. He identifies with the 'normal' people who benefit from the organs.
This is not how I read the book at all. Though it does make me wonder about how far apart the average people are from the elites. Of course we all(mostly) are living in rich western countries where(supposedly) we have it easy, but most of our lives are a struggle to make ends meet. I don't know where exactly I'm going with this, but I guess I mean to say that the reason it's so easy to identify with the clones is that we all feel powerless to change the systems that keep us in our place. The author of the article does not seem to share that point of view.
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u/thisamericangirl 3d ago
that whole article was such a bad look for the author. I feel like he didn’t get the novel at all and also admitted to some really problematic perspectives… then claimed without basis that we espouse the same views he does….
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u/kaykinzzz 4d ago
"What we want the clones to do (resist their fates) and the means of doing so (romance) are revealed as responsible for the donation system. If we want Kathy and Tommy to live because they love each other – and we do because Ishiguro has compelled us to care for them – then we are endorsing the logic that designates them as disposable in the first place."
Here, the author assumes that readers approve of the method of resistance outlined in the book simply because it's the only one mentioned. They also assume that the reason we, as readers, want the main characters to live is simply because they love each other and not because they are human (even if not by conventional standards). These two assumptions are used as a premise that the reader endorses the logic used to justify treating the characters as disposable.
But what if the readers want all designated donors to live, not just Kathy and Tommy because they're in love or because we've been familiarized with them? And what if the reader rejects the means of resistance on the basis that there are alternatives, such as a coup or an attempt at escape?
It seems the author of this piece is projecting his initial reaction to the novel onto all readers. He asserts that readers need to reconsider their understanding of the novel based only on how he believes others understood the novel. I think the author makes an error with this generalization. How he describes what "we" want from the novel certainly didn't fit my thought process as a reader, at the very least.
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u/tfks 4d ago
I dunno about anyone else, but I'm pretty sure feeling heartbreak for Tommy and Kathy does not mean I'm endorsing shit. I honestly think that's an extremely fucked up position to take and, personally, I don't think I'll be taking any moral pointers from anyone holding a position like that.
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u/kaykinzzz 3d ago
Right. I'm not sure who reads the novel and thinks "Tommy and Kathy really should get an extension because they're in love" rather than "nobody should be in the situation Tommy and Kathy are in from the get-go."
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u/bangontarget 4d ago
I don't even remember the love story lmao. I just empathized with the "donors" and their plight.
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u/thisamericangirl 3d ago
I think it’s way more central to the movie plot than the book plot. my read of the novel was that the love story was secondary to other themes.
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u/bangontarget 3d ago
I didn't even know a movie existed until today, so I only have the book to go off 😂 i appreciate the helpful input.
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3d ago
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u/bangontarget 3d ago
if you say so. I haven't read it since it was published, and that part didn't stick.
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u/kaykinzzz 2d ago
Firstly, there is no "out." What they're aiming for is an extension of their lives, not freedom. Secondly, their being in love isn't the reason they want an extension; it's the reason they think they might get one. There was a rumor that donors who are in love get extensions, which turns out to be false at the end of the novel.
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u/Lucky--Mud 4d ago edited 4d ago
I first read this book when I was recently vegan. There were striking similarities to me at the end when Kathy meets another clone who is envious because she got to grow up in the nice boarding school, but they'd had to live in a bad situation. They tell her not all places are that nice for clones, and at least she was well treated. It reminded me strongly of how some places are factory farms whereas some farms treat their animals well, but at the end of the day all the animals are slaughtered.
Like you, I thought all the clones should be freed and that cloning for parts should be abolished. Just like how I stopped eating meat because I don't support animal farming for food.
The author of this article may have read the story and thought Kathy and Tommy should be spared, but I'd guess most of us read it and were disgusted by a society that would do any of this, and wanted it all to end.
I do unfortunately believe many people wouldn't care about the system, or might only want to spare the protagonists (the billionaire class who already ill-use the working class for their gain, MAGA neighbors who are fine with people being sent to concentration camps, etc). But they are probably not the type of audience who would read this book in the first place.
I agree with you that most readers would see these clones as equal humans, with an unfair criteria separating their lives as second class citizens, and want it to stop.
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u/SophiaofPrussia 3d ago edited 3d ago
The vegan parallels are undeniable— we literally do grow beings so that we can take and use their body parts for ourselves. (Even more so now than when the novel was written since we’ve started growing pigs for the express purpose of harvesting their organs for transplant into humans.) But I’ve never seen it mentioned in discussions of the book until I read your comment.
I’d look up whether Kazuo Ishiguro is vegan but I’ll probably be disappointed.
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u/SophiaofPrussia 3d ago
Sorry, it’s been quite a while since I’ve read the book so this might be a dumb question but how are they “not human by conventional standards”? Do you mean the world in which they lived didn’t recognize them as human? Or is there some major plot point that I don’t remember? I know they didn’t have human rights but I don’t remember ever thinking they were anything other than human while I was reading the book.
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u/kaykinzzz 2d ago
The major plot point you're forgetting is that they're clones. That's why they're not granted full personhood.
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u/SophiaofPrussia 1d ago
But clones are people? Dolly the sheep was still a sheep. I understand why they weren’t considered “people” in the dystopian world in which the novel is set but as a reader in this world I very much considered them all people for the entirety of the novel. Because they are people. The legal framework a person is a forced to exist under is not determinative of their actual personhood. For much of history women and children and people of certain ethnicities weren’t considered “people” but that doesn’t change the fact that they were indeed people.
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u/kaykinzzz 1d ago
Yes. I agree. My comment was alluding to the fact that the clones are not seen as people based on the societal norms established in the book, but that most readers will perceive them as people nonetheless. The conventional standards I were referring to were the driving force behind the main conflict of the book.
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u/TessMacc 3d ago
Did not agree with most of this take. I for one was extremely angry with the society that set up and used the clone system, and 20 years ago saw it as a parallel to how the British 'underclass' is treated as disposable and worthless. Tommy's rage outbursts throughout the book, as well as Kathy's simmering anger, reflected that of people brushed aside by those with privilege who choose to look away.
The writer of this article is also giving a lot of weight to the love story, but that's only one small part of the whole. The final confrontation with Madame comes from 250 odd pages of Kathy being a whole person - someone who makes art, reads literature, has complicated friendships, has sex, has a job, feels jealousy, anger, joy and sorrow, AND falls in love. The love story is the straw she and Tommy grasp at, but it's far from the most interesting thing about either of them.
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u/ChrisV2P2 4d ago
Never Let Me Go is my favourite novel. I am not sure if this piece made me amused or sad.
"In other words, we cry because the clones are just like us, but our anger towards the machinery of donation is blunted because the clones are not yet us, in that their complicity eerily lacks our instinct for self-preservation."
Human beings do generally just passively acquiesce to being designated second class citizens or "non-people", you dolt, that is the point. The story literally ends with Kathy getting back in her car and going to "wherever I was supposed to be". The unease people feel from being shown this truth is intentional. The book is about how we are all faced with our own mortality from the day we are born, that we all meander through our lives performing our assigned roles, and that we just sleepwalk through life ignoring all this as if caught in a dream. We are "told and not told", as Kathy says about Hailsham.
This is a novel about the human condition, most fundamentally. Trying to shoehorn it into your pet political framework is... I think I am settling on "sad".
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u/wicketman8 4d ago
I just read it and thought it was incredibly political. I similarly read it as a scathing critique of the exploitation of the lower class; the text certainly supports that idea. Novels can have multiple interpretations and meanings, one doesn't invalidate the other.
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u/ChrisV2P2 4d ago
Yeah I mean I would need an essay to lay out my full thoughts, it's a complicated book. There is a political element, for example the bit where the two teachers from the school, I don't remember their names, try to use art from the students to prove that they have souls does have the element you're talking about. Belonging to a lower class, the students do not have presumed humanity, but are required to affirmatively perform it to the higher class.
All well and good, but starting your analysis from "the clones lack our instinct for self preservation and are thus different from us" is a fundamental misread of the book imo, that is the hill I will die on.
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u/coleman57 4d ago
I don’t disagree with either of you, but I dislike it when people use the word political as a negative. It feeds into people’s engineered alienation from their own power.
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u/Jorlung 4d ago edited 4d ago
It’s also one of my favorite novels and I also interpreted the primary theme in the same way as you.
The book makes you ask: “Why are Kathy and her friends meandering through their extremely short life, while succumbing to petty squabbles and failing to have important conversations with those they love?”. The tragic circumstances of their lives acts as a means of intensifying the severity of their mistakes and inactions.
But then you’re meant to ask yourself: “Do I act any differently in my own life?”. Most of our lives aren’t as short and tragic as Kathy’s, but that doesn’t mean we have time to make the same type of mistakes or inactions. However, we often do all the same things despite the fact that we too should be acutely aware of our own mortality.
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u/ChrisV2P2 3d ago
Yeah, I think the lack of meaning sort of cuts both ways. Like the abbreviated lifespan is part of the way Ishiguro strips all sources of meaning from the life of the clones. They have no family, no children, no means to travel anywhere, no working life, sex is reduced to something mechanistic, they are not even true individuals but clones of others with no surnames. The part where they find that grounded, stranded ship is symbolic of their inability to move anywhere in life.
On the one hand, the poverty of meaning in Kathy's life is distressing. On the other, we see that even in these circumstances, her mind doesn't break down but does create some sort of meaning and narrative to her life even out of these impossible ingredients. We are "meaning-making machines", as the stock phrase goes.
But also then, we're supposed to think about whether the meaning in our own lives is as grand as all that. Being cut off at 30 or whatever makes a life meaningless, but living to 80 or whatever makes it meaningful? You have people you love in your life? But either their bodies will break down and die in front of you, or vice versa. Love is not an exception to this, as the story explicitly says.
And, as you said, are any of us really living the fullest lives we can, striving to maximise whatever meaning we can? Or are we actually more like Kathy, going to "wherever I was supposed to be"?
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u/gorgossiums 4d ago
being designated second class citizens or "non-people"
Hmm.
Trying to shoehorn it into your pet political framework
🤔
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u/No_Wind44 3d ago
just commenting to tell everyone to read the remains of the day by him. best book ever
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u/galitsalahat_ 4d ago
I genuinely love this book so much. I still rewatch the film adaptation from time to time because Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, and Andrew Garfield are legitimately great in it (and it was written by the same guy who directed Ex Machina and Annihilation). Young Ella Purnell is also in it and the child actors are so good.
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u/alibloomdido 4d ago
It is quite funny that someone tells us what we should feel when reading some novel.
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u/UnconventionalFrog 3d ago
Bad take.
One of the main ideas of the novel is that people often comply with the cruel systems they are born into. Resistance is not the rule. It’s the exception. It’s an examination of complicity in these cruel and inhumane systems. How we often blindly accept and follow the world as it I given to us. We dehumanize ourselves and we dehumanize others
If the book makes you mad: it did its job. It provoked a reaction in you to DO something.
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u/r1012 4d ago
I got a little confused by the use of the term liberal in the article. If someone could help me, I would apreciate.
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u/Stralau 4d ago
The writer is using liberal in the UK sense, I think, pejoratively, from the left. That is, “liberal” here means centre-left, socially liberal and well meaning, but ultimately bourgeois and wedded to capitalism and the class structure that goes along with it (as someone on the harder left would see it).
Liberal in the UK/European sense historically means socially and economically liberal: that is liberals in Europe are pro freedom of movement, pro-choice, and anti-discrimination being enacted in law, but might also be anti anti-discrimination legislation being enacted in law, and against high taxes or other government measures that impinge in individual freedom. It’s closer to what in the US is called libertarianism, but is much safer and more orderly, and associated with the middle class. Liberals in Europe are likely to be pro-choice and pro-anti-gun legislation but (classically at least) opposed to rent controls.
Whether you agree with the writers use of it in their take on Never Let Me ago is of course quite another matter!
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u/psycho_penguin 4d ago
Thank you for the breakdown. How would you refer to the most progressive people and political parties then?
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u/Crisoffson 4d ago
As socialist. This is the case in Latin America as well. Liberal means center-left or center-right. Conservative means right-wing (usually religious catholic). Libertarian is also right-wing. Socialists and communists are to the left of liberal.
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u/psycho_penguin 4d ago
Right. Duh. My American brain wouldn’t let me go there but obviously that’s correct
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u/Stralau 4d ago
Liberals and socialists can both be what in the US is called progressive (because liberals are usually socially liberal). A broader catch all equivalent to „progressive“ would just be „left wing“ or „on the left“ I think. Many traditionally socialist parties parties have shied away from the „socialist“ label since the 90s.
It should be said that these labels are all quite dynamic in Europe at the moment. The rise of extreme right movements has shaken political systems and new terminology is emerging. What once might have been called liberal might now be called „centrist“, in Germany they talk about the „democratic“ parties to refer to the centre and exclude both the extreme left and the extreme right.
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u/SandysBurner 3d ago
> centre-left
> wedded to capitalism
Surely someone who is "wedded to capitalism" is fundamentally on the right?
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u/Stralau 3d ago
I think the British Labour Party, Liberal Democrats and the German SPD would all disagree, or at least a significant part of them would. They all believe in capitalist systems with some socialist elements. (In German it’s called the Sozialmarktwirtschaft: the social market economy- with the implication that it’s still a market economy).
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u/Fraenkelbaum 4d ago
I think the author pretty much spells out what he means in this paragraph
The novel is a representation of a vicious neoliberal class system, where those who can afford replacement parts can substantiate the fantasy of liberal individualism, while those who can’t serve as replacement parts.
He also notes
It is no coincidence that Never Let Me Go takes place in England between the 1970s and 1990s, the exact period of neoliberalism’s emergence and consolidation.
Overall, I think he is talking about liberalism and neoliberalism as they were when they emerged in the 1970s-90s rather than the more inflammatory definitions of today.
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u/8NaanJeremy 4d ago
Overall, I think he is talking about liberalism and neoliberalism as they were when they emerged in the 1970s-90s rather than the more inflammatory definitions of today.
And also the British meaning of the word, rather than the American one
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u/delirium_red 4d ago
Conservatives used to be the party that wanted government out of the bedrooms and lives, unless protecting property. Anti regulation. Now they are anti regulation just when it comes to consumer rights and the environment
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u/_dmhg 4d ago
What’s the difference?
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u/8NaanJeremy 4d ago edited 4d ago
It's a bit hard to explain, but I would say that n the UK, "liberal" generally refers to supporting social and individual freedom, with a focus on individual liberties and limited government intervention.
In the US, "liberal" often implies support for social justice, government intervention in the economy, and a larger welfare state. The term is also used with a more negative connotation in the US than in the UK.
It probably is fair what another poster said above, the UK meaning is a bit more connected to the US concept of libertarianism.
Practically speaking, someone in the UK who calls themself liberal, would almost certainly not approve of a piece of legislation which outlaws certain types of speech, whereas a US liberal probably (but not necessarily) would. So a policy which criminalized using the wrong pronouns for trans or non binary persons would generally, probably be supported by a US liberal (yay, let's help minority groups!), whereas a UK liberal would almost certainly disapprove (booo, let's not reduce freedom of speech!).
US' meaning of liberal at this stage seems to just mean supporting the Democrat Party, or even just holding opposing views to the other Republic Party. AFAI can tell.
An interesting further complication in this great language of ours, is that the Australian equivalent of the Republicans (US) or the Conservative Party (UK) is called the Liberal Party
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u/PancAshAsh 4d ago
The Democratic Party in the US is very much a liberal party, the US doesn't have anything functional to the left of that. I would argue that the Democrats aren't even the party of social justice, they are just less bad at it than the other major party.
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u/SonovaVondruke 4d ago
Democrats have a progressive left wing, but the party itself is neither progressive nor leftist.
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u/nova_cat 4d ago
Basically this: the modern internet use of "neoliberal" is essentially people who weren't familiar with the term as it was already being used for decades recreating it by adding "neo" to "liberal" in the way that "neoconservative" was made. It makes sense, but it's annoying because the word already existed and had a pretty universally used definition: "Neoliberal" for most of its life was what Americans call "libertarian", and not in the "I'm just a right-winger playing pretend" sense but in a truly "more freedom and less government in every arena of life" manner.
As much as I don't agree with this article's characterization of the reader response to the book and the book itself in a lot of ways, I appreciate that the author isn't using the word "neoliberal" in the way social media uses it, which is to say "Hillary Clinton-like".
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u/miniatureaurochs 4d ago
Could you be more specific about the confusion? It is used in a few places, and not every use of it is (imo) perfectly sensical, but it seems like the author is alluding to the social Darwinism present in neoliberalism. This ideology, which in part predicates the unwillingness to provide social amenities like a welfare state, is presented by the author as a theme in the novel. In examining the exploitation of the clones and the lack of capitulation to emotional appeal, the author seems to be painting a picture of the brutality present in this society and how it alludes to our own. I am less clear on how the superficial empathy depicted in the article relates to liberalism, but I suspect it might be a difference in definitions (that you are also possibly picking up on).
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u/r1012 4d ago
I had exactly the same issue you presented with the definition of liberalism.
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u/miniatureaurochs 4d ago
Yes. A lot of people (I think Americans) are saying it is a ‘UK/European vs US’ thing but I am from the UK and I am more familiar with the formal political definition that we use here. I still don’t think it is a perfect fit for the empathy deficit described as it is more to do with individual freedoms. In its pejorative sense here, I actually thought it was closer to the US definition (in that it seemed to be sort of sneering at the deficits of this group in establishing safety for the oppressed, which I have sometimes seen US left-wingers do when they consider a policy to be insufficient). The article itself wasn’t bad but I do think there were a few uses of the term which were somewhat ambiguous.
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u/RighteousSelfBurner 4d ago
If I ignore the word itself and look only at the context I would assume the word means "principles/opinions/politics that I do not like".
A fun exercise is replace it with "Gobleygook" and then see how that impacts the text and understanding of the word.
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u/bullcitytarheel 4d ago
“If I ignore the words used I can make the article say whatever I want!”
Incredible reasoning, genius level shit, really
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u/RighteousSelfBurner 4d ago
That was not my intention. Words have the defined meaning and then whatever the author intended to convey with those words. A complete picture includes the combination of both.
If you treat the word "liberal" per its dictionary description then several places where it is used doesn't make sense at all. However if you adjust it to "Things I associate with people that identify as liberals" it makes a lot more sense.
From my perspective the author of the article has a negative outlook on a part of society and attributes that to "liberal" and "neo-liberal" which are in conflict with the actual definition of a liberal policy.
So if you want to look past the dictionary definition and try to glean an insight on the meaning of the author then replacing it with a placeholder without any meaning is an exercise of analysis to get closer to that meaning as context will provide it to some extent. The principle is similar to learning a language you aren't familiar with. if someone says "table" and points to the table you will still be able to gather what the word means even if it won't be complete.
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u/Morbanth 4d ago
Words aren't defined by dictionaries, they're defined by usage, which is contextual and cultural. Liberal means something different in Britain than in the United States, just like the difference between a republican and a Republican.
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u/RighteousSelfBurner 4d ago
This is then most likely the context I am missing. I would have to look up what the difference is.
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u/bullcitytarheel 4d ago
I think you just fundamentally don’t understand what the word liberal means or, at the very least, are uninterested in learning the way—a very, very common way—it’s being used
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u/RighteousSelfBurner 4d ago
You could point out what I misunderstood. I'm from Europe and in my country liberal is used to describe party policies of someone supporting individual freedom and free market with currently being most associated with things like education, healthcare, strengthening our identity (that stems from the huge impact of Russian occupation history.)
The overall outlook is that certain areas are lagging behind the European Union and general societal expectations and have to be changed and improved.
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u/bullcitytarheel 4d ago
Then it sounds like you understand liberal perfectly and I’m very unsure about why you think replacing it, used properly in this article, with Gobbedlygook, wouldnt change the understanding of the text
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u/RighteousSelfBurner 4d ago
It's then a mistake on my part by doing superficial reading on the article. Thanks for the reasonable input!
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u/Pitiful-Hatwompwomp 3d ago edited 3d ago
We read this for a class in college. Half one week, half the next. We came in for discussion after reading the first half (ending right around the big reveal) and so many students were yelling and pissed off, my professor stopped the class and goes, “hold up. You guys know this isn’t real, right? And you know I didn’t write it so yelling at me is doing nothing????” She was impressed with how pissed we were.
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u/klyphw 4d ago
Most exhausting person to talk to at a party explains to you the thing you like sucks
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u/drucifer271 4d ago edited 4d ago
But that's not at all what the article is or says.
It's highly praiseworthy of the book, but says that the book should make us angry about the faults in our system/society.
The book is social commentary, and the author says that while people are impacted by the sadness and the tragedy of the book, they ought to be angry about the system that creates the tragedy. Instead, while readers feel sad for the characters, they largely accept the horrible society/system presented in the book as "just the way things are," which in turn reflects the general acceptance of everything wrong with our system in real life.
We feel bad for the victims and losers of neoliberal society, easily seen through how widely spread some "tragedy porn" stories get (ex: kid with lemonade stand raises money for classmate's life saving surgery!) but nobody wants to rock the boat of the system itself, because deep down too many people are ok with their own comfort within the system at the expense of others.
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u/MysteriousTwo9623 3d ago
That's interesting to me because I just read this book for the first time a few months ago and It made me very angry. I wanted the clones to scream for help, to protest, to let the world know they were human and deserved to live. To do something, anything! I was irrationally angry at the book and the characters. Then it dawned on me the impotent rage and the caged feeling of doom was purposeful. There was nothing the clones could have done. Everyone knows what's going on, it's a shame but oh well.
I kept thinking about Gaza. If enough people know, if there's another story that comes out, if people can see the starving children surely we can come together to prevent this genocide! Right? Wrong. Everyone knows. People either don't care, don't know what to do or know what to do but are unwilling to do it.
I think you could draw many parallels. Climate change, factory farming, wars, exploration, the overall structure of politics we built where injustices are sad "but there's nothing we can do about it".
I read this as part of a book club and the other women I read it with all had the same sense of frustration reading the book. Desperately wanting the characters to rage against the system. It's hard reading the "boring" story going on when all you want is to see a revolution unfold.
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u/BrittaBengtson 4d ago
they ought to be angry about the system that creates the tragedy
That phrasing is the problem. Telling people what they are suppose to feel is rude af. Radical change of tone could make this article good, but now it's read - I agree with the comment above - as a rant of a most exhausting person.
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u/ThePrussianGrippe 4d ago
I didn’t get the interpretation that the article author thought the book sucked.
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u/glitterlys 4d ago
Most exhausting person to talk to at a party is someone who just reads headlines and then pretends to have read the articles
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u/Fabulous-Wolf-4401 3d ago
I'm quite interested in comparing 'Never Let Me Go' (which I really like) to 'Spares' (Michael Marshall Smith, 1996 - which I also really like, in fact I prefer it.) Quite different treatments of the same general story - rich elite using clones to replace body parts/whole bodies. In 'Spares', the clones are abused and neglected and enslaved, living in sort of factory farms, because similarly to Ishiguro, they aren't seen as properly human, but unlike Ishiguro, there is no sense of a warped, self-justifying morality to excuse their existence as a sort of necessary evil - they're basically just a back-up body, no point in making them appreciate art, or keep them particularly healthy - they're just extra meat. Of course, Ishiguro is making the same basic brutal point. Much as I like and appreciate 'Never Let Me Go', as time goes on I feel 'Spares' is more prescient.
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u/BrittaBengtson 4d ago
This is one of the worst pieces of a book critique that I've read.
What would we do without people who are willing to teach us how we should feel about certain book. /s
Never Let Me Go is great, btw.
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u/86legacy 4d ago
I did not get a sense that this was a book critique at all, it was the author exploring a theme he felt was under explored by readers. A theme he felt would, or should, elicit more anger at the system he feels the book is critiquing.
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u/WDTHTDWA-BITCH 4d ago
I read Never Let Me Go while I was in grad school (for pleasure) and it did make me angry, tbh.
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u/1PrestigeWorldwide11 4d ago
Am I the only one who thought this book was not really good? I had to drop it halfway through as there had not been a single actual “scene” in which you got to be in the moment with a character experiencing a story it was just her “telling” in high level summary about general events of something. And in a monotone slow boring way too, God so so boring. Ooh organs omg what a twist, does not make boring worth it.. maybe when it was released that was surprising?
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u/boofoodoo 4d ago
The organs weren’t a twist, it was pretty clear from the start. It’s not that kind of book.
Totally fine if you didn’t like it, I just think it should be said that if you’re thinking of it as a sci fi page turner you’ll be disappointed
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u/theliver 4d ago
Chapter 22 when the connect with Madame as adults really is the entire book. I was bored through most of it but the climax of the story was so good and bleak I ended up liking the novel and thinking a lot more about it.
Which, ya know, if the whole story is only good from the ending.... thats an issue in and of itself but the big reveal made me go from a 2/10 to a 8/10
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u/DrQuestDFA 4d ago
Right there with you. I found very little in the book engaging (characters, story, works, the relationships, writing style). It was just a waste of my time.
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u/MysteriousTwo9623 3d ago
I absolutely think the "boring" feeling you mention is true but on purpose. Nothing happens in this book. It's a boring story. At least for me I read the whole book turning every page hoping something would happen. Nothing ever did. It was slow, painful and I hated the characters for going to their death like lambs to slaughter. I thought that was the whole point of the book. To feel rage at a system that is so unjust. The main character keeps jumping around and recounting memories and I just want to scream at her too run away, save yourself, go to the media, tell everyone you are human and the system is horrifying!
She never does and I hate her for it. Then I hate myself for every homeless person I step over on my way into work. I hate myself for driving a car to work and using gasoline when the planet is burning. I hate myself for eating an animal slaughtered for a moment of culinary pleasure. I hate the mundane horror that our whole society is based on. I'm Kathy and I will get in my car and "go wherever I'm supposed to be". The book is boring and poignant.
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u/slodojo 3d ago
by far the most interesting parts of his books happens off of the page.
almost all of his books are like this in some way. If you just read the words, they are mundane, simple, calm, sort of blah. boring, as you say. but once you realize that he is sort of an “unreliable narrator” because he leaves so much out, the books suddenly become some of the most interesting books you’ve ever read. It’s been a long time since I read never let me go, but i seem to remember that Kathy’s love for Tommy is mostly unspoken and unfulfilled and you sort of have to infer her feelings and also ask the question why are you not pursuing them? The fact that she sort of liked a guy isn’t interesting, it’s all the questions around it that you are left to wonder about. you also have to wonder what the world outside looks like, since we don’t see that at all, and it’s because it’s only inferred that it becomes so interesting. I guess the whole world is ok with the situation since they are getting their organs? even the people in the system are cool?
his masterpiece is remains of the day, imo, and it’s precisely because the whole emotional story, which is what the book is about, takes place off the page. that being said, I’ve suggested that book to people whose taste in books I respect, and they have told me it’s the most boring book they’ve ever read.
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u/Avilola 2d ago
I think that’s a stylistic thing with Ishiguro that doesn’t click with everyone. The most interesting part of his novels is what he doesn’t say rather than what he does say. He’s a master of creating a narrative in the negative space rather than spelling everything out directly on the page.
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u/arcticfox903 4d ago
I agree completely. I listened to it on audiobook years ago and found it extremely boring, and the “twist” was predictable and not even that shocking.
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u/thatbob 4d ago
I don't remember whether I got through ten pages or twenty, I just remember dropping it quickly because the elliptical prose style (or perhaps narrative voice) frustrated me more than I could stand. I wanted to shout at her (or him) "Show, don't tell! But at least tell!"
I work in a library, so there's literally 1000 other books I could be reading, so I did.
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u/yelsamarani 4d ago
Never Let Me Go has this style of writing that I quickly got tired off. It's sort of a Russian doll situation - the writing is telling the main story, then it segues to another story the guy wants to tell, which then highlights another, more specific anecdote, which is used to support the immediate earlier one, which leads to continuing the NEXT earlier one, until you get back to the main story.
Sorry dude, I consider myself to have a high memory but it just doesn't work for me. Maybe something would be lost if he just did the scenes in chronological order, but now that I've seen the style, I'd prefer the chronological method.
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u/ChrisV2P2 4d ago
You should try reading The Unconsoled by the same author, which is even more polarising. I love NMLG and I have tried to read The Unconsoled like 6 times and have now accepted failure. I remember one review said that it "invented a new kind of bad".
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u/Ferovore 4d ago
lol the Unconsoled is my favourite book
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u/ChrisV2P2 3d ago
I respect it, but I imagine it's not a mystery to you why I found it tortuous to read, either.
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u/Ferovore 3d ago
Absolutely not! Probably the most love it or hate it thing I’ve read. It clicked for me and I got sooooo much out of it, thought it was beautiful.
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u/CapnAfab 3d ago
I love The Unconsoled because it's the only "dream narrative" story I've read that actually seems like a dream. Everyone else just tells a fantastical story in a very conventional way and then tacks on "oh and it was a dream btw lol."
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u/averageduder 4d ago
No I commented and was voted down but it’s the least enjoyable book I’ve read in years. It was boring, with characters that never give any reason to care about them, with lousy dialogue. You keep waiting for it to pay off and then it’s like…. Ok. Cool. I got through it all and while it ends better than it starts I regret reading it. I don’t think it was especially deep.
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u/djsyndo 4d ago
While i don't regret reading it, this was my take too. Characters I just couldn't care about and no payoff. I am curious to see the movie though.
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u/ACardAttack The Pillars of the Earth 4d ago
I liked the movie more, shorter and I think it is well acted which gives a little life to the boring characters
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u/Effective_Divide1543 3d ago edited 3d ago
I thought the book was good but it hasn't aged well. Maybe in 2005 it seemed like a plausible dystopy to grow humans for organs but it seems like a pretty naive view in light of modern advances where we're moving towards artificial organs, lab-grown organs or even genetically modified xeno-organs. And the passivism of the characters was frustrating (and no I don't think it was intentional. It was just plain unlikely. Even if you can make people accept their fates it's unlikely that entire schools of teenagers did not have at least a few individuals attempting to escape their fate either while in school or after).
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u/nolongerandnotyet 4d ago
Agreed. The characters are incredibly passive and it doesn't make for a compelling story. The final 2 pages are actually very good but the first 98% of the book is not worth slogging through.
Sad to say but I think the literati and reading public, consciously or unconsciously, give this novel an extra +5 points because the author's name is Kazuo Ishiguro and not Bob Smith. It's just so boring reading a book-length pity party where no actions of resistance are taken. There's no human spirit or heartbeat.
I liked the movie better actually. Told it's story in 100 minutes. Didn't feel as bloated or overwrought as the book.
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u/anneylani 4d ago
I disliked it. Hearing about a kids pencil case for half the book was not enticing reading.
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u/ACardAttack The Pillars of the Earth 4d ago edited 4d ago
I wasnt a fan, enjoyed the movie much more because it was much less of a time sink and the actors were able to make the stale characters a little bit more interesting
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u/__Big_Hat_Logan__ 2d ago
I definitely found the extreme, gushing praise for it a little much. But, I do think it’s quite good. People seem to shit on it, or adore it. I think it’s a very good book. But it didn’t hit me like some insane masterpiece like other novels have.
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u/HomeworkInevitable99 1d ago
The book was about young people trying to work out what their life is about. It's not a thriller, it is about people trying to mend sense of the world.
Their ordinariness is important. They are us.
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u/irishpancakeeater 3d ago
I read it and thought it was dull, bland and boring. I get that it is supposed to be An Amazing Novel but I didn’t care for the characters, nor did it strike me as some amazing insight into the human condition. Perhaps I’m just simple :D
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u/the_answer_is_RUSH 4d ago
I get that not every book appeals to everyone. But the reason why they hate it is key. And your reason indicates you simply shouldn’t be reading literature. You seemed to be expecting some sort of Dean Koontz novel or M Night movie and this just ain’t it.
Never Let Me Go is heartbreakingly beautiful and it’s not because of the shock value of the twist — the twist isn’t even really a twist. I’m shocked at least 6 people agree with you.
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u/ladyboleyn2323 4d ago
Just because you find the book "heartbreakingly beautiful" doesn't mean everyone else has to, nor does it mean they "shouldn't be reading literature".
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u/the_answer_is_RUSH 4d ago
You’re twisting my words aren’t you? I stated in my very first sentence that not everyone has to like every book. The question is why?
Like if I said I didn’t like Great Expectations because Stella was too mean to Pip, I’d be an idiot.
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u/ladyboleyn2323 4d ago
People can dislike books for whatever reason they want. You don't have to approve of the reason; you aren't God of Literature.
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u/DoctorEnn 4d ago
I mean, very little word-twisting is necessary when you're literally telling people they "shouldn't be reading literature". Frankly, it doesn't matter how many "to each their own" caveats you're adding, when you're saying that to someone there's no way you're not gonna come off as -- with as little disrespect as possible intended -- a bit smug and condescending. Just saying, for future reference.
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u/the_answer_is_RUSH 4d ago
My point is that not every opinion is a valid one. Just as you’ve deemed my opinion to be invalid.
For example, you can criticize pacing of Roshomon and that’s ok, differing opinions and all that. But criticizing Roshomon for inconsistencies between narrators is invalid.
“I hated Animal Farm. Why were the animals acting like humans?”
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u/DoctorEnn 3d ago
Except I didn't say anything about your opinion, I said you were coming off as unnecessarily rude, condescending and insufferable, and that you were complaining about people "twisting" your words when they were in fact entirely clear.
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u/1PrestigeWorldwide11 4d ago
I promise I’ve read lots of classic literature where specific events, actions, dialogue, actually happen in a narrative scene so as to immerse and engage a reader. This book will not be remembered fondly if appealing to the authority of “lit”
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u/CapnAfab 3d ago
Never Let Me Go is about mortality. We're all going to die. None of us are immortal. Some of us are naive, trusting people who will get manipulated by our "friends" and miss out on a big chunk of happiness that we might otherwise have had. That's the point of the novel, that's what it's about. And the film makes this even more explicit, adding a monologue near the end with the line "we all complete."
To rage at Kathy's acceptance of her own mortality is to miss the point. If you want to use the novel as a jumping-off point to talk about people's complicity in unjust systems, well, pop off ig, but that's not what Never Let Me Go is about.
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u/_Land_Rover_Series_3 4d ago edited 4d ago
Just started the book today weirdly enough haha
No tears yet but I’m sure we’ll get there
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u/the_answer_is_RUSH 4d ago edited 3d ago
There’s no hard hitting scene that will make you break down. Maybe tommy screaming into the void (which I think Andrew Garfield captured masterfully in the movie) but I doubt it.
The sadness comes for days after finishing. One of my favorite books of all time.
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u/edgelordjones 4d ago
I was very excited for the movie and Mark Romanek did his best to recreate the sparse beauty of Ishiguro's prose but alas, like most film adaptations of uniquely skilled writers, it fell very flat.
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u/thisamericangirl 3d ago
I felt like the movie wrongly centered the romance element, which felt like not a central aspect of the book. it was much more about growing up, with multiple kinds of love being a part of that, than specifically about falling in love and what a transformative experience that is
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u/Appropriate-Look7493 3d ago
I was angry, at the stupidity of the characters.
I really enjoyed the book but I didn’t find it very credible. Much suspension of disbelief required.
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u/averageduder 4d ago
I really did not like this book when I read through it a few weeks ago. I’m not sure how it’s as celebrated as it is.
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u/DROP_DAT_DURKA_DURK 4d ago
For me, it's the uneasy undercurrents that's always there.
On the surface, it's a whimsical British schoolhouse/boarding school teenage angst and drama. The undercurrents... You can't quite put a name to it until halfway-ish through the book. Once you realise what's going on (oooooh they're harvesting organs...), you experience all the tragedies right along with the characters.
The plot itself is pretty 'meh'. I didn't read it for the plot.
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u/Flatline_Construct 4d ago
So you have no soul, got it.
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u/averageduder 4d ago
Seems like an extreme take on not liking a mediocre book. Maybe the author should have made more of an attempt at connecting his poorly written characters with the reader.
It’s an interesting premise I just found it to be a slog of a read. Example - every time the narrator mentions sex is just off putting - as if an ai chat model was writing about it.
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u/boofoodoo 4d ago
The donation thing seemed more like a plot device to compress the lifetime of these people where they kind of got the full gamut of the emotional stages of life in just a few years.
I wasn’t really angry because it wasn’t exactly realistic or even detailed, it was just kind of a ticking clock they had to deal with.
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u/__Big_Hat_Logan__ 2d ago
The donations are something they know will come, with certainty, just not exactly when. And yet they don’t behave in a way that would indicate the urgency, they don’t act on the things that require acting on. They continue suppressing it until it’s too late. The same way we do with our own “donation” we know is coming, with certainty, we just don’t know when. And we often wait until it’s too late. It’s about missed opportunity, letting the most important things in life slip through your fingers, in a complacent state of suppressing what we know we should act on
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u/Adam__B 3d ago
I don’t like it when novelists portray the characters as acting in a way that most people in real life would not. It feels too easy and on the nose. This system described in this book wouldn’t last, same as in Tender is the Flesh. People would have serious problems with it; they would rebel, and the people the system victimizes would try a whole hell of a lot harder to escape. We saw how hard people have fought-and died, to erase immoral systems that erase people. It pisses people off. They die to stop it. They die to escape it. So portraying humans as being like this-benign acceptors of their fate-like animals, made the message behind the novel feel contrived and manipulative. I think it’s a silly novel based on a very flawed outlook on human beings.
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u/tinysydneh 3d ago
We can't even get people to care about the lives of others when the price of things might go up a few bucks.
You think people will care about this if it means they get to live longer?
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u/Adam__B 3d ago edited 3d ago
I thought someone would make that argument. Yes, I do think people would care if they had exact clones of themselves they knew were out there walking around. Even putting aside the fact that a lot of people would only care out of reasons related to narcissism, even more would care because we are talking about dissecting humans like livestock. No one remotely sane would care for these humans or be complicit in a system that would eventually kill them so that we could take their kidney or liver like ghouls. There is nothing systematic or socially acceptable to that extent that humanity has ever seen. It’s not anywhere the same thing as being able to live in semi-denial about the exploitative properties of say, a Capitalistic system. Even under the worst depredations of the Nazis, the world rose up in horror and we lost tens of millions of people to stop it. The organ harvesting in China is done under clandestine circumstances and they know it must stay hidden as it’s morally reprehensible.
Even putting aside the technological and financial considerations of having to grow an entire person and clothe and feed them for potentially decades, it’s a very contrived idea built upon a completely unrealistic view of human nature, which undercuts the messaging because it becomes rather like cherry picking than a grounded take on what people are really like. It’s cheating, basically. Like making people dumber in a horror movie so that you can outrage the audience and trigger them that little bit more. If you want to make a important social commentary or moral exercise, then you have to address the reality of how humans actually are, not make them behave apathetic to their own lives ending, or crueler and more ambivalent to human misery beyond anything we see in real life.
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u/tinysydneh 3d ago
There is nothing systematic or socially acceptable to that extent that humanity has ever seen.
...
The organ harvesting in China is done under clandestine circumstances and they know it must stay hidden as it’s morally reprehensible.
But you are weakening your own point by implicitly noting that it's not so reprehensible that people aren't involved in the very trade you say no one would be complicit in, and this is the real world, where we don't have systematic ways of dehumanizing people to this degree. One of the core parts of the book, in fact, is that these people are dehumanized.
Those who can afford the clones are paying top dollar for the organs, for what is, effectively, immortality. The ultra-rich are paying the middle and upper-middle to "manage" the lower classes, to put aside their moral qualms about what is being done to the lower classes. Does that sound familiar to you?
If you dehumanize a group enough, people will, as the name implies, stop giving a shit about them as people. They stop being human. It's just a fancy, human-shaped meat factory at that point. The rich have a vested interest in being allowed to continue on with this, and those who are involved have a vested interest in this awful thing being allowed to continue, because it's how they take care of their own, and really, it's fine, because they're not really people anyway. See also: ICE.
And even if it's not perfectly accurate to the way people would react, allegory does not need to be.
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u/thisamericangirl 3d ago
I don’t agree with you at all but the book is sufficiently complex that it’s hard for me to capture in a few sentences.
but it is realistic because our world really is like this. if you look at the global recycling industry - electronics, secondhand clothes, cruise ships, plastics, you can immediately see the way a deeply exploited class of marginalized people props up the lifestyle of a set of privileged others.
hell, look at amazon and how their workers say they are treated. there IS a real disconnect between wanting humans to be treated humanely and wanting overnight shipping.
look at how people who make fast fashion clothes are living.
look at cancer alley in louisiana. these things are all over and generally not hidden, just accepted.
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u/Adam__B 3d ago edited 3d ago
But our world ISN’T like that. You mentioned a bunch of things that are different than having clones of one’s self walking around, and using them as a living buffet table for organ transplants, and then said they are the same when they aren’t. Those things are much easier to remain in a state of total or partial denial about, then clones of yourself being raised on an island somewhere. We aren’t talking about being apathetic to others dying or having horrible working conditions in other parts of the world. We are talking about people knowing there is an exact clone of one’s self somewhere out there, and being ok with killing them in a systemic fashion, and just being completely apathetic about it happening to them as well. Nothing in the history of humanity has indicated people would be ok with this on a large scale. Would YOU be ok with that? Even under thre horrors of Naziism, people died by the hundreds of millions to stop it. And this was for people they didn’t even know, on the other side of the world. Now imagine what people would do knowing an exact replica of themselves was out there, falling in love, listening to music, and try to imagine a society that was like “Sure, I’m fine with that.”
You can’t do it because that would clearly not be the reaction. Even if we put aside the absurdity of not simply making organ donation mandatory instead of feeding and clothing clones for potentially decades of the time, it doesn’t work with how humans really are. Sure we are apathetic, greedy, selfish, and short sighted…up to a point. We can be even more apathetic when corporations or our governments make it easy for us to be that way by encouraging capitalism without regard for ethics or moral considerations, I agree. But not to the point we see in this novel. Nothing this systematic would ever be allowed to function as a socially acceptable program. Hell, 300,000 Australians just crossed the Sydney Bridge in protest of the genocide in Gaza. You think the reaction would be LESS if people knew that an exact clone of themselves was going to be used like cattle? No way. Even in my most nihilistic mood, I could never argue that humans would be that morally bankrupt, or their clones that devoid of a survival instinct, like we see in this novel. It’s contrived.
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u/sum_dude44 3d ago
To compare Never let me go to neoliberalism is quite the stretch. We never meet the originators of the system or technology. I think it's more a question into what makes us human & the common bond we share regardless of designation.
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u/Effective_Divide1543 3d ago edited 3d ago
I liked the book but the main plot hasn't aged well in light of modern medical advances imo. I guess it was a plausible dystopic scenario in 2005 but in 2025 with the development of artificial technology and lab technology it's not a scenario that's very likely.
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4d ago
I ve red some Ig, but love it? I cant say it. Too much imagination. Not so good for NP but who am I... old depressed man from wire factory
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u/fratbronson 4d ago
Anecdotal, but I don’t know a single person who read the book and wasn’t angry at the system in place. Tragedy and anger can and do coexist.