Category: books

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Never Let Me Go opens with the narrator introducing herself (My name is Kathy H. and I am 31 years old), and who then talks, bewilderingly, about her job as a carer. She has been a carer for years, she says, and she is proud of her job, and she is proud the donors she cares for are calm. She then moves on to talk about a boarding school she attended when she was young. From the description of events you can tell that it is not an ordinary boarding school, and Kathy H. is only telling us a tiny sliver of the truth at a time, doling it out like candy. She doesn’t do this deliberately. She tells a story like a child. She sounds naive at times; she jumps from one topic to another before returning to the original discussion. She is matter-of-fact. She doesn’t wax poetic, even when what she is telling us is horrible. She doesn’t regard it as horror. She regards it as her life, and that’s that.

Ishiguro eases you into the big secret, leaving clues here and there, but I already knew it before reading the first line, (no) thanks to the film adaptation trailers and ads. Some critics, who didn’t know the true circumstances of Kathy H. before reading the book, read it as a horror novel. I read it as a very sad story. Here is a girl living this life, and she tells us about the time her friend threw a tantrum, about her cassette tape, about her friends’ petty rumors. You want to shake her and say Stop talking! None of it matters! But is that true?

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Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In Far From The Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, Andrew Solomon “tells the stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children but also find profound meaning in doing so.” He writes about families “coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender.”

I fell in love with Solomon’s insight right from the first page. He also raises a lot of intriguing questions that I have to admit in my innocence I never asked myself. For example: is being Deaf a disability or an identity? If it were a disability, then that means we believe there is something wrong with a deaf person, that he must hear, and that we must do all we can to give every Deaf child a Cochlear implant and teach him how to speak and live in a world with sound. But if you believe it is not a disability but an identity, then wouldn’t giving a child a Cochlear implant be tantamount to erasing a culture (for example, Deaf Theater) and language (for example, ASL)? Wouldn’t it be, in effect, an act of genocide? The same question is asked about autism and Down syndrome: if each were an identity, then does that mean we should stop looking for a cure and instead focus on celebrating different expressions of personhood? But even stripping them of the disability label has repercussions – they will lose state support and the financial protection given to PWDs.

Identity is complex. We cannot blame or praise just one factor, be it genetics, or environment, or education. How do you raise a child you give birth to but who is different from you? In the book are stories of courageous men and women, but also stories of horror (like that story of a schizophrenic who was driven out of town by his mother and sister, and shot by his sister on the side of the road).

This beautifully written book was an eye-opening read for me.

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Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

When I started reading Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, I thought it would be similar to Tana French’s Broken Harbour – an exploration of a marriage that is starting to buckle under the pressures of the economic recession, followed by tragedy. In Broken Harbour, the tragedy is murder; in Gone Girl, a sudden disappearance, even a possible abduction.

Nick Dunne is a journalist living blissfully in New York with his beautiful wife, Amy. They seem to have it all: a warm place, cozy jobs, love. Then they lose their jobs during the recession, and are forced to move to Nick’s dying hometown in Missouri. Amy is not happy there. One day, a neighbor calls Nick at the bar where he works and says his door is wide open. He goes home and finds signs of struggle inside their home. Amy is gone.

I came into the story thinking it would be a slow, quiet dissection of a failing marriage. Listen to this: I peeked over the side to see if she was in our rowboat, where I had found her one day, tethered to the dock, rocking in the water, her face to the sun, eyes closed, and as I’d peered down into the dazzling reflections of the river, at her beautiful, still face, she’d suddenly opened her blue eyes and said nothing, and I’d said nothing back and gone into the house alone.

But it turned into something sinister – and bizarre. There is the steady accumulation of characters, at times too outlandish to be considered believable: two psychologist parents basing their book series on their only daughter, an uber-rich man who builds a greenhouse filled with nothing but tulips, a woman often described as smelling “vaginal”. Then the twists came, and –

It’s hard to talk about the novel without spoiling the big plot points, but let me just say that Gone Girl could have been great. Could have been. The first half of the book is brilliant. It could have been a commentary on married life, the recession, suburban unhappiness, modern ennui, the danger in the lies we tell each other, but Flynn decided to transport the story into the realm of the truly abnormal and ridiculous. Maybe for the sake of shock value, but it’s not particularly shocking. Once you get over the first big twist, you realize you’ve seen it all before. And it drags on and on, from one over-the-top subplot to another, down to its hateful end, and by then I have stopped caring. It’s not even insightful. I want to know the why, not the how, and the only answer we get to the why is a cop-out.

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