Kazuo Ishiguro
04/2018
Dystopia Slow-burn English
"Now, Tommy, think. Why did she bring it up? She's talking about you and not creating. Then suddenly she starts up about this other stuff. What's the link? Why did she bring up donations? What's that got to do with you being creative?" I don't know. There must have been some other reason, I suppose. Maybe one thing reminded her of the other. Kath, you're getting really worked up about this yourself now." I laughed, because he was right: I'd been frowning, completely lost in my thoughts (30)
As we got older, we went on talking about the Gallery. If you wanted to praise someone's work, you'd say "That's good enough for the Gallery." And after we discovered irony, whenever we came across any laughably bad work, we'd go: "Oh yes! Straight to the Gallery with that one!" (32)
But then again, when I think about it, there's a sense in which that pcture of us on that first day, huddled together in front of the farmhouse isn't so incongruous after all. Because maybe, in a way, we didn't leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and--no matter how much we despised ourselves for it-- unable quite to let each other go. (120)
As I've said, it wasn't until a long time afterwards--long after I'd left the Cottages-- that I realised just how significant our little encounter in the churchyrd had been. I was upset at the time, yes, But I didn't believe it to be anything so different from other tiffs we'd had. It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that. But, the fact was, I suppose there were powerful tides tugging us aart by then, and it only needed something like that to finish the task. If we'd understood that back then--who knows?-- maybe we'd have kept a tighter hold of one another (197)
But I have to be honest: at that instant I wasn't really thinking about Ruth. My heart had done a little leap, because in a single stroke, with that little laugh of agreement, it felt as though Tommy and I had come close together again after all the years. (222)
And as for Marie-Claude and me, here we are, we've retreated to this house, and upstairs we have a mountain of your work. That's what have to remind us of what we did. And a mountain of debt too, thought that's not nearly so elcome. And the memories, I suppose, of all of you. And the knowledge that we've given you better lives than you would have had otherwise. (265)
I don't know what made me say it. Maybe it was because I knew the visit would hav to finish pretty soon; maybe I was getting curious to know how exactly Miss Emily and Madame felt about each other. Anyway, I said to her, lowering my voice and nodding towards the doorway: "Madame never liked us. She's always been afraid of us.In the way people are afraid of spiders and things." I waited to see if Miss Emily would get angy, no longer caring much if she did. Sure enough, she turned to me sharply, as if I'd thrown a ball of paper at her, and her eyes flashed in a way that reminded me of her Hailsham days (269)
Prose was delicate, innocent, and simple. Seen through the eyes of a perpetual child.
The story was satisfying in its closure, tame and controlled through the climax, left with a sense of darkness and strange powerlessness.
The book is a sort of slow-burn dystopia. The setting and characters are revealed slowly and tastefully. Transition between events and recounting memories is done in a child-like prose to reflect the state of mind of the narrator.