Never Let Me Go, The End of Racism
17) Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Everything I want to say about this book requires me to discuss spoilers. It's phenomenal, but it's premised on a twist I don't want to ruin.
The fundamental tension of Never Let Me Go is that the book is trying to convince you that clones are human in the philosophical sense, while at the same time trying to convince you that humanity is inhuman.
That is, the clones are isolated, abused, manipulated, ignored... All of this is developed by suggesting that normal humans don't care about the clones physical and emotional well-being because they care more about their own health than they do about other people. Because of this, they're willing to condemn these clones to meaningless, doomed lives in order to protect themselves.
After reading Ishiguro's tale of the struggle of these clones to figure out how to do right, in a way that completely, until the end, assumes their humanity as a given... how can we believe that normal humans would be that insensitive? How can we accept that people could be born, herded like cattle, and then harvested for organs without mass outcry, after the reader has spent a lifetime with the humanity of those clones?
It's a logical flaw that mars Ishiguro's argument. But it doesn't mar the fiction, because humanity is illogical, and we know that humanity often works against both its best interests and its better impulses.
Ishiguro's world is casually grotesque and macabre. It is unreal, and its setting in a top British public school, with the echoes of the fairyland with a dark secret that typically populates novels of such schools, is a perfect way to make the reader uneasy without questioning the plausibility of his fantasy. The reader knows the unreality of the setting and expects some calamitous twist... but they don't expect a twist that challenges the humanity of the heroes. They don't expect such a confrontation with the careless, unthinking cruelty of the human race.
18)The End of Racism by Dinesh D'Souza
It's a 500 page book that proposes to reexamine the entire history of racism and show how misconceptions about racism have led to the current... fragile... state of American race relations. Needless to say, it would have felt crammed and rushed in a book five times as long. The back is filled with footnotes leading in a zillion different directions, but the connections between the footnotes and the text are often fairly hazy.
Quite transparently, it's designed as flamebait. And I mean this in both the good and bad senses of the term. On the one hand, it aims to stir up shit. And when it was published, fifteen years ago, I gather it did quite a good job of that. On the other hand, it aims to challenge assumptions in a way that will clear the air and allow a new, fresher discussion of racism in American society. I don't think it's always successful, but it does do some of that. In D'Souza's relentless pursuit of controversial ideas related to race, he does leave you shaking your head a lot. I lost track of the number of times I said, "What the hell were you thinking when you wrote that?"
The book is not, to borrow a term that appears a lot in LJ discussions of race, a 'safe space'. If it doesn't make you angry, regardless of your political orientation, you're not reading it right. If you don't disagree with many of his assertions, regardless of your political orientation, your worldview is probably not very strongly defined. If you aren't offended, D'Souza has failed. I doubt very strongly that D'Souza agrees with everything he claims in this book.
I'm fairly certain that D'Souza's claim that as a dark-skinned Indian immigrant he is teflon-protected when discussing race issues is offered facetiously, but it's still a troubling statement that probably requires deeper examination than he offers. It is one of many deep structural problems with the book.
I could not comfortably recommend this book to anyone. Nonetheless, it's a thought-provoking text, and it highlights tensions between conflicting American ideals that don't have easy solutions.
Everything I want to say about this book requires me to discuss spoilers. It's phenomenal, but it's premised on a twist I don't want to ruin.
The fundamental tension of Never Let Me Go is that the book is trying to convince you that clones are human in the philosophical sense, while at the same time trying to convince you that humanity is inhuman.
That is, the clones are isolated, abused, manipulated, ignored... All of this is developed by suggesting that normal humans don't care about the clones physical and emotional well-being because they care more about their own health than they do about other people. Because of this, they're willing to condemn these clones to meaningless, doomed lives in order to protect themselves.
After reading Ishiguro's tale of the struggle of these clones to figure out how to do right, in a way that completely, until the end, assumes their humanity as a given... how can we believe that normal humans would be that insensitive? How can we accept that people could be born, herded like cattle, and then harvested for organs without mass outcry, after the reader has spent a lifetime with the humanity of those clones?
It's a logical flaw that mars Ishiguro's argument. But it doesn't mar the fiction, because humanity is illogical, and we know that humanity often works against both its best interests and its better impulses.
Ishiguro's world is casually grotesque and macabre. It is unreal, and its setting in a top British public school, with the echoes of the fairyland with a dark secret that typically populates novels of such schools, is a perfect way to make the reader uneasy without questioning the plausibility of his fantasy. The reader knows the unreality of the setting and expects some calamitous twist... but they don't expect a twist that challenges the humanity of the heroes. They don't expect such a confrontation with the careless, unthinking cruelty of the human race.
18)The End of Racism by Dinesh D'Souza
It's a 500 page book that proposes to reexamine the entire history of racism and show how misconceptions about racism have led to the current... fragile... state of American race relations. Needless to say, it would have felt crammed and rushed in a book five times as long. The back is filled with footnotes leading in a zillion different directions, but the connections between the footnotes and the text are often fairly hazy.
Quite transparently, it's designed as flamebait. And I mean this in both the good and bad senses of the term. On the one hand, it aims to stir up shit. And when it was published, fifteen years ago, I gather it did quite a good job of that. On the other hand, it aims to challenge assumptions in a way that will clear the air and allow a new, fresher discussion of racism in American society. I don't think it's always successful, but it does do some of that. In D'Souza's relentless pursuit of controversial ideas related to race, he does leave you shaking your head a lot. I lost track of the number of times I said, "What the hell were you thinking when you wrote that?"
The book is not, to borrow a term that appears a lot in LJ discussions of race, a 'safe space'. If it doesn't make you angry, regardless of your political orientation, you're not reading it right. If you don't disagree with many of his assertions, regardless of your political orientation, your worldview is probably not very strongly defined. If you aren't offended, D'Souza has failed. I doubt very strongly that D'Souza agrees with everything he claims in this book.
I'm fairly certain that D'Souza's claim that as a dark-skinned Indian immigrant he is teflon-protected when discussing race issues is offered facetiously, but it's still a troubling statement that probably requires deeper examination than he offers. It is one of many deep structural problems with the book.
I could not comfortably recommend this book to anyone. Nonetheless, it's a thought-provoking text, and it highlights tensions between conflicting American ideals that don't have easy solutions.