Lectured by Ajen

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Lectured by A-jen
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About the author

• Kazuo Ishiguro ?? ??
• (born November 8, 1954) is a
• British novelist. Born in Nagasaki, Japan, his
  family moved to England in 1960. Ishiguro
  obtained his Bachelor's degree from University of
  Kent in 1978 and his Master's from the University
  of East Anglia's creative writing course in 1980.

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Literary characteristics

• The chronology of his plotting is elaborate and
  the narration is highly subjective.
• first-person narrative style and the narrators
  often exhibit human failings. Ishiguro's
  technique is to allow these characters to reveal
  their flaws implicitly during the narrative.

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Literary characteristics

• creates a sense of pathos by allowing the reader
  to see the narrator's flaws while being drawn
  into sympathy with him.
• ends many of his novels on a note of melancholic
  resignation
• Refined ability to capture the details and
  atmosphere of a period.

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Literary Prizes

• He was featured in the first two Granta Best of
  Young British Novelists 1983 and 1993.
• He won the Whitbread Prize in 1986 for his second
  novel, An Artist of the Floating World.
• He won the Booker Prize in 1989 for his third
  novel, The Remains of the Day. An Artist of the
  Floating World, When We Were Orphans and his most
  recent book, Never Let Me Go, were both
  short-listed for the Booker Prize, with the
  latter being named the runner-up.
• In 1998, he was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des
  Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.
• On Time magazine's 2005 list of the 100 greatest
  English language books since the magazine formed
  in 1923, Never Let Me Go was the most recently
  published book on the list.

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Works

• (1981) Three short stories in Introduction 7
  Stories by New Writers)
• (1982) A Pale View of Hills)
• (1984) A Profile of Arthur J. Mason (Original
  Screenplay)
• (1986) An Artist of the Floating World
• (1987) The Gourmet (Original Screenplay for the
  BBC the script was later published in Granta 43)
  
• (1989) The Remains of the Day
• (1995) The Unconsoled
• (2000) When We Were Orphans
• (2003) The Saddest Music in the World (Original
  Screenplay)
• (2005) Never Let Me Go
• (2005) The White Countess (Original Screenplay)

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Honors for Never Let Me Go

• short-listed for the Booker Prize, for the 2006
  Arthur C. Clarke Award and for the 2005 National
  Book Critics Circle Award.
• Time magazine named it the best fiction novel of
  2005 and included the novel in its TIME 100 Best
  English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.
• ALA Alex Award in 2006

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Setting

• The story takes place in a dystopian Britain, in
  which human beings are cloned to provide donor
  organs for transplants. (dystopian)
• As Kathy, a 31-year-old carer living in England
  in the late 1990s, looks back at her school days
  at Hailsham, a picturesque establishmentnestling
  amid quiet countryside, an unsettling strangeness
  emanates from her reminiscences. (anti-pastoral
  tradition)

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Style

• he now selects a scenario that wouldn't be out of
  place in science fiction, and, against the odds,
  suffuses it with human warmth and distress.
• Innocuous words "carer", "students",
  "donations", "complete" take on deepeningly
  sinister overtones. Gradually, through Kathy's
  rosy-tinted retrospect, the contours of a
  horrific situation loom.

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Reviews

• Not since The Remains of the Day has Ishiguro
  written about wasted lives with such finely
  gauged forlornness (like that novel, this one
  harrowingly concludes with someone weeping on a
  sea shore). That he contrives to do so in a
  narrative crawling with creepy frissons is
  remarkable. Not the least out-of-the-ordinary
  feature of this novel, with its piercing
  questions about humanity and humaneness, is the
  way it affectingly moves past gothic shudders to
  a wrenchingly desolate ending.
• Review in the Sunday Times

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Reviews
'Never Let Me Go' When They Were Orphans
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Reviews

• Brave New World. KAZUO ISHIGURO'S NOVEL REALLY
  IS CHILLING. Margaret Atwood
• It is brutal, especially for a writer celebrated
  as a poet of the unspoken. But it takes a while
  for us to get a handle on it. Since it's the
  nature of Ishiguro narrators to postpone a full
  reckoning of their place in the world, all we
  know in the early going is that we don't quite
  know what's going on. (Washington Post)

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• Never Let Me Go is the third book in what could
  be called Kazuo Ishiguro's Bewilderment Trilogy.
  Like its predecessors, The Unconsoled (1995) and
  When We Were Orphans (2000), it is riddled with
  mystery.

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