never let me go

I went shopping after work; I was not satisfied, which was my own fault because I ate dinner at Panda Express in the mall that I went to before trying on clothes, and this meant that I was too full to properly fit into pants (which is what I was there to buy), and so I just left frustrated. I cheered myself up by trying out the new inks that arrived today; two colors are similar to each other, but both are lovely, luscious shades of magenta, and so that's okay. The third is more of a teal, also lovely, and I'm thrilled with all of them, so I predict much writing-with-fountain-pens in my future.

Afterwards, I wanted to read a book, and I really just wanted to read a romance novel or something else that I had already read. But, my reading patterns have stagnated; it's almost like I don't want to read anything new because I don't want to risk being forced to think about things that I haven't already thought about. The books that I've been reading lately can't surprise me, and so they're intensely comforting, but I need to shake myself out of my comfort zone, if only so that I can get on with my life. Also, some of the stuff that I've been reading for my creative writing class says that you can't be a writer without also being a reader, which makes sense. Reading was such an integral part of my childhood, all the way through high school, that it's strange that I've fallen away from it in adulthood.

In an effort to reclaim that, I went to the shelf of books that I keep meaning to read and picked up 'Never Let Me Go' by Kazuo Ishiguro. I had asked for and received it from my parents for Christmas last year, but had never gotten around to reading it. I think that I avoid picking up new books partially because when I am reading something, I have an absolute compulsion to finish it. This inevitably results in me staying up until four a.m. in an attempt to get through the thing, then staggering blindly through my work routine the next day, either recovering from the previous night's bender or looking forward to another one if the book was too long to finish in one go. This book was ~240 pages and I read it in three hours, which was pretty good considering that I was silently crying for the last sixty or so pages.

The book was really haunting; without giving too much away, it's essentially a love triangle in which the three participants are all clones who have been raised in order to be used for organ donation. Just to clarify, they're not clones of each other, so there's nothing weird going on there--it's like a standard coming-of-age story with the twist that everyone involved is meant to have their organs harvested at some point in the not-so-distant future. It was, therefore, completely devastating; it felt like it didn't matter if most clones died before they were thirty, because there probably wasn't much of a chance that they would have done anything interesting anyway. And, most of the chances for real, albeit fleeting, happiness were lost through misunderstandings and simple human failures. So in the end it didn't matter whether they were clones or not; the fact that they were all destined to be harvested was just a convenient plot device for Ishiguro to point out the frailty and doom of human existence.

That's not to say that the characters weren't important; by the end of the book, I cared about them quite a bit. It just ceased to matter that they were clones, or that something barbaric was being done to them in an alternate universe where cloning for organ replacement was somehow acceptable; instead, the barbarism was overshadowed by how truly awful humans usually are to each other, and how unlikely it is to find something healthier, and how we often put up with bad behavior from those around us because we don't know any better, or don't believe that we are capable of winning more for ourselves.

Anyway, I don't think the world's quite as bleak as all that; but, the book did make me wish that I was out living my life, exploring the windswept wilds of Mongolia, or eating dim sum in Hong Kong, or following ancient Incan roads through the Andes, or just sitting someplace writing all of the mystical visions that come into my head. Instead, I'm sitting in my comfortable bed, trying to decide between a 32" or 42" tv (yesterday's bonus makes it tempting to upgrade), and thinking about my 'career' and my 'long-term goals' and all that other corporate stuff that suddenly seems like the equivalent of passing time before I donate all my organs. My driver's license lists me as an organ donor, after all, so it's not that far-fetched (albeit a bit melodramatic) to feel that I'm just aimlessly kicking about until I get hit by a car and someone needs my kidneys. Ugh.

Okay, enough of that--but I highly recommend the book if you're looking for something beautiful and stirring and heartbreaking. The writing was some of the best I've read in a long time, the story was gripping, and the premise was intriguing. What more can you ask from a book? Now it's time for me to go to sleep, and hopefully I will dream of something other than clones.