NEVER LET ME GO

Kazuo Ishiguro

BIOGRAPHYBorn in Nagasaki Japan in 1954

Moved to Great Britain in 1960 – father was

oceanographer

Educated at a grammar school for boys in Surrey, England

Worked as a Grouse Beater on Balmoral Castle grounds for Queen Mother

B.A. from University of Kent, Canterbury in

English and philosophy

Worked as a residential social worker after

graduating.

Studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia

Full-time writer since 1982

KAZUO ISHIGURO

'I am a writer who wishes to write international novels. What is an 'international' novel? I believe it to be one, quite simply, that contains a vision of life that is of importance to people of varied backgrounds around the world. It may concern characters who jet across continents, but may just as easily be set firmly in one small locality.'

NOVELS

Novels:

A Pale View of Hills

An Artist of the Floating World

The Remains of the Day

The Unconsoled

When We Were Orphans

Never Let Me Go

AWARDS & OTHER

He also wrote 2 screenplays, some published short stories in magazines, and recently published book of short stories.

His works are translated into over 30 languages.

Has won numerous awards for his writing over his 30-year career: including: the Booker Prize for Fiction (x4); the Whitbread Book of the Year or Novel Award (x3); and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction (x2).

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE

Ishiguro's narratives center on memories and their potential to digress and distort, to forget and to silence the past, and above all to haunt the present. The protagonists of his fiction seek to overcome loss (the personal loss of family members and lovers; the losses resulting from war) by making sense of the past through acts of remembrance (Proctor).

BOOK REVIEWS

M. JOHN HARRISONTHE GUARDIAN

This extraordinary and, in the end, rather frighteningly clever novel isn't about cloning, or being a clone, at all. It's about why we don't explode, why we don't just wake up one day and go sobbing and crying down the street, kicking everything to pieces out of the raw, infuriating, completely personal sense of our lives never having been what they could have been.

JO WALTONTOR

I think these are books that could only be written by someone utterly steeped in a culture who has nevertheless always been something of an outsider in it. The donors in Never Let Me Go grumble and accept and go on in a scarily recognizable way

TOPICS AND THEMES

Cloning

Acceptance of cultural norms and expectations

Betrayal

Acceptance

Family

IDEAS FOR TEACHING

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Use the formal debate style of argument and counter-argument to discuss the viability of cloning humans and the repercussions of this act.

Read the following article in this format to create a group writing assignment and then perform the debate live in class.

Discuss cloning and scientific advancement in light of the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Use these books to discuss the benefits and detriments

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Brainstorm the cultural norms of our society. What makes something a cultural norm? Compare them to understood cultural norms of other societies or to societies presented in other literature.

Read short stories in which the cultural norms and expectations are different from our own. Watch selected scenes from Sliders or Star Trek to see human adaptations to different expectations.

Why do we follow the expected norms? How is this helpful/harmful to our society?

Read portions of Southwest Educational Development Laboratory’s article on school norms and expectations. Discuss the importance of school expectations and the student role in school climate.

KAZUO ISHIGURO

"When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.”

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Find and read several reviews of the the novel. Compare the reviews and their critical approaches to the novel.

Write your own review looking at how Ishiguro’s characters portray the themes of betrayal, acceptance, and family.

RESOURCES

Proctor, Dr. James. “Kazuo Ishiguro.” Contemporary Writers. British Council. 2009. http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth52

Kerr, Sarah. “Never Let Me Go: When They Were Orphans.” The New York Times. April 17, 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/books/review/17KERRL.html

Harrison, M. John. “Clone Alone.” The Guardian. February 26, 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/feb/26/bookerprize2005.bookerprize

RESOURCES CONT.

Walton, Jo. “The Upspoken and the Unspeakable: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.” Tor. Com. May 5, 2009. http://www.tor.com/blogs/2009/05/the-upspoken-and-the-unspeakable-kazuo-ishiguros-never-let-me-go

“Reproductive Cloning” Center for Genetics and Society. May 15, 2006. http://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article.php?id=282

Oracle: ThinkQuest. Cloning Pros and Cons. Projects By Students For Students. 1998. http://library.thinkquest.org/24355/data/reactions/proconmain.html

Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. School Context: Bridge or Barrier to Change. 1992. July 28, 2011. http://www.sedl.org/change/school/culture.html