Never Let Me Go — Dinaburg Writes

by Kazuo Ishiguro

First posted November 2017

This review didn’t talk about the book at all! Sometimes I’m really not sure what I was going for, in detail or even in broad strokes. Whatever it was I don’t think I hit it here, though I am pretty sure I simply wanted prospective readers of the book to go into it as blindly as I did. Not useful, if I’m looking back at my record as a way to jog my own memory, unfortunately,

I do appreciate how toilet-focused I was when ranking bookshops in NYC, though. It was very important, clearly, to be able to pee without having to spend money.

Never Let Me Go is quite a good book, and, true to the review, I was thinking about it now not because I keep seeing it on bookshop shelves but because it’s on some inflammatory proposed-banned book lists.

My top five bookstores in New York City are as follows:

5. Books are Magic in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. It is the bookstore of my imagination, literally, as I have described the layout of my idyll and it was Books are Magic. Bonus: BAM has a capsule vending machine filled with poems, an addendum which I never considered but now cannot live without. Fifth place because I haven’t found if their public restroom even exists. [edit from 2025—a bathroom is real and usable & when I go back to NYC this is the only bookstore I still visit. Would be #1 if I remade the list]

4. Community Bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn is a five minute walk from my apartment (which makes the subtle bathroom irrelevant but nice to know about in an emergency), has a cat, has an outdoor garden with miniature waterfall, has lovely books on mythology I can’t find at the library, and is always filled with dads trying to convince their kid to give hard sci-fi a shot—also known as my inevitable future.

Community Bookstore—in 2018! 7 years in a blink

3. McNally Jackson in SoHo, Manhattan is so vibrantly active—as a coffee bar, as vanity printing press, as glossy magazine rack—and maintains the general “be seen near things” SoHo-iness but this time, books are the objet d’art. Even the crustiest of contrarian curmudgeons can’t help avoid being swept up in the joy of books being a hot trend, I used to run there after work to catch my favorite live readings, and the bathroom requires a quarter but the cashiers will often loan you one. Wonderful all around.

2. The Strand in Union Square because it is The Strand, man, and also because they are extremely chill with their restroom policies in an area known for code-locking their toilets. [edit from 2025—might as well combine the Union Square Barnes & Noble, because that is a bathroom-needer’s dream. I don’t really like The Strand anymore, but I’m an NYC tourist, now, not a local.]

1. Finally, Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn because their ever-changing display tables will always have unique selects or local authors, their staff is across-the-board really nice and someone blurbed Signs Preceding the End of the World, which was a great book and I would never have found it without Greenlight. Unknown restroom situation—irrelevant, for once, because the store is just that good (highest praise).

Aside from all being independent booksellers, the major connection between these five mystical leylines is that I spotted Never Let me Go in each and every one of these shops in the last few months. McNally Jackson, last week, had it as one of two “impulse buy” books next to the register. I don’t know what cultural heat drew me to this book after all these year—well, I sort of do, I think it was a colleague talking about The Remains of the Day, which primed me to note Ishiguro every time I browsed a bookstore, which no matter which store I was in had Never Let Me Go in prime eyeline—but I am glad it found me.

The systemic convergence of seeing this book everywhere influenced my decision to read it, and I understand why it is prominent in places where people who love books—independent booksellers—call the shots: it is fantastic, and as culturally relevant now as it was in 2005. The only thing that made me think it wasn’t written this year was, well: I wanted to say to him, “you’re going to make yourself a laughing stock all over again. Imaginary animals? What’s up with you?” I know there were phrases for books I was assigned in college and high school that felt dated—“jounced the limb” in A Separate Peace still clings to my mind for whatever reason—and I am pretty sure “What’s up with you?” meaning “you’re acting oddly” is slightly off to kids born in the nineties. Maybe it is back again, maybe I’m wrong, but it has the same tang that “jive turkey” did to me at the turn of the millennium.

I had no idea what the plot of this book was going to be about before I read it, though even coming in blind it is possible to intuit it rather quickly and accurately:

I saw a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes. More cures for the old sicknesses. Very good. But a harsh, cruel world.

Perhaps because I am over a decade removed and have read variations on this form a dozen times—I am pretty sure even Nier Automata is pushing itself in this direction—it doesn’t feel startling or fresh. It feels perfected. The plot not having shocking twists or shattering revelations isn’t a negative because it doesn’t need them: what exists is intricate and lovely, like dust motes swirling in a beam of sunlight.

It is fiction, pure and true, in form that cannot be replicated or reproduced elsewhere or elsewise. It is the type of book that touches the heart of independent booksellers, their employees, their customers; it is in every book shop because it is the type of book for which bookshops were created.