"Never Let Me Go" (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro

It is remarkable, that Kazuo Ishiguro manages to generates torrents of haunting introspection on human existentialism in the reader by using simple architecture and minimal, unadorned, "basic" English that is completely devoid of vocabularies to the point of recycling the same words over and over again (I challenge you to count the number of times he uses the words "complacency" and "anxious" in his novels). "Never Let Me Go" is a particularly painful read if you, like the characters, grew up in an English boarding school. For that reason, most of the first half feel completely uneventful as it describes what is pretty much ordinary, typical slices of life and teenagers coming to terms with themselves. (It feels nostalgic, too, since the department store Woolworths and record tapes make appearances) This unsolicited familiarity makes the extraordinary revelation that follows too close for comfort. I won't spoil the story, but have you ever wondered if your education, your life, your sheer existence are all part of a plan to fulfill the lives of some "higher" beings? Imagine you are the tools of some scheme from which you get no benefits. You live and die for others and that's it. In the limited amount of freedom you have, you can feel all sorts of emotions but nobody cares as you are not meant to have emotions and emotions contribute nothing. You can form bonds with other but that does not matter either since people go separate ways eventually anyway. Such robotic setup is modern life in a nutshell, some argue. This title subtly raises questions on human symbiosis along these lines and, musing retrospectively, underlines the importance of arts and humanities education and learning how to live beyond logic and reason - a gentle and tragic plea, rather than full-blown criticism, that is. Too true, as we do need to re-examine the ways we live as human beings in the modern world, but the rhetoric comes across as being too gentle and too subtle. Moving for some personalities, ineffective for others, and somewhere in between for increasingly cynical and detached old men in the smartphone era like yours truly. Good weekend read.