Streets. Night. Once more.
After downing a super-sized doner kebap to the tunes of Death Cab of Cutie (which I am still listening to hours later), I went walking around and train-hopping rather aimlessly with a 1/4 full water bottle on one hand, a mesmerizing book on another.
As you can tell by the cover (UK version), it's called Never Let Me Go by Kayuo Ishiguro. Seeing how I was about to finish The Shipping News, I thought I'd pick up another novel. So while waiting for the Eurostar train in London, I browsed around the bookstore and eventually came across this.
This is what made me bought the book (I didnt't even read the synopsis on the back of the book, rather deliberately),
I really don't want to say much besides, GO READ IT. I have read quite a few book on this trip. From four strangers meeting on the roof top all with the goals of jumping off of it (A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby) to the narrative of a girl who was murdered and now looking down from heaven on her family as they try to cope (Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold) to a story about the possibilities of 'love without pain or misery' (The Shipping News, Annie Proulx). They have all been pretty entertaining and enlightening in their own different ways tho none has affected me this does. None has made me put the book down, only to gather my thoughts, let them sink in, reflect, and resume reading.
It's probably the real 'good' novel among those I have read in a while. Much of the impact, so far, has been from the discovery and unravelling of the narrative. The reader follows the narrator as she traces back her memory from when she was an adolescent, much like us in the figurative sense. We know but we don't really know. In my own times and spaec, I have certainly gone on much of the same sort of archaelogical journeys in search of answer and explanation for the way I am, the way things are. The fact that the context is set in such an incredibly and interestingly skewed world only marks the novel all the more, at the very least, original and thought-provoking.
I was just absorbed in my book for the most part as I sat at various random stations watching people hop on and off the trains. Eventually I decided I should head back to where my hostel is, Alexandar Platz station. When I got out, I took a slower than normal strode around the area and took a few photos. I really like those and the ones I got at the stations earlier. What a pity I can't show them.
Interestingly enough, one of my favorite experiences, tho not necessarily with the results, from my trip to Europe six years ago was of walking around town in Munich and just taking pics of the subway station. I can't really explain it enough so you'd understand how I really feel. Walking around late at night being ever so attentive to the pace, the smell inside, people's looks of weariness, the perpetual motions of the train coming and going. I just find intrigue in it all, somehow.
As you can tell by the cover (UK version), it's called Never Let Me Go by Kayuo Ishiguro. Seeing how I was about to finish The Shipping News, I thought I'd pick up another novel. So while waiting for the Eurostar train in London, I browsed around the bookstore and eventually came across this.This is what made me bought the book (I didnt't even read the synopsis on the back of the book, rather deliberately),
An oblique and elegiac meditation on mortality and lost innocence.. What Ishiguro has done so artfully in these pages is not only assemble a chilling jigsaw puyyle, but also create a distinct fictional world. - NYTimes Book Review
I really don't want to say much besides, GO READ IT. I have read quite a few book on this trip. From four strangers meeting on the roof top all with the goals of jumping off of it (A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby) to the narrative of a girl who was murdered and now looking down from heaven on her family as they try to cope (Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold) to a story about the possibilities of 'love without pain or misery' (The Shipping News, Annie Proulx). They have all been pretty entertaining and enlightening in their own different ways tho none has affected me this does. None has made me put the book down, only to gather my thoughts, let them sink in, reflect, and resume reading.
It's probably the real 'good' novel among those I have read in a while. Much of the impact, so far, has been from the discovery and unravelling of the narrative. The reader follows the narrator as she traces back her memory from when she was an adolescent, much like us in the figurative sense. We know but we don't really know. In my own times and spaec, I have certainly gone on much of the same sort of archaelogical journeys in search of answer and explanation for the way I am, the way things are. The fact that the context is set in such an incredibly and interestingly skewed world only marks the novel all the more, at the very least, original and thought-provoking.
I was just absorbed in my book for the most part as I sat at various random stations watching people hop on and off the trains. Eventually I decided I should head back to where my hostel is, Alexandar Platz station. When I got out, I took a slower than normal strode around the area and took a few photos. I really like those and the ones I got at the stations earlier. What a pity I can't show them.
Interestingly enough, one of my favorite experiences, tho not necessarily with the results, from my trip to Europe six years ago was of walking around town in Munich and just taking pics of the subway station. I can't really explain it enough so you'd understand how I really feel. Walking around late at night being ever so attentive to the pace, the smell inside, people's looks of weariness, the perpetual motions of the train coming and going. I just find intrigue in it all, somehow.
posted by Art at
2:31 PM
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