Translated material
Dolly people
The sixth novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, a Briton of Japanese origin, Booker winner, student of Malcolm Bradbury. “Never Let Me Go” reached the finals of the prestigious The Man Booker Prize in 2005, but lost in the last round to John Banville’s work. He lost for one simple reason - the jury members admitted that Ishiguro’s novel, for all its merits, left an extremely unpleasant aftertaste.
However, aftertaste is not quite the right word. It should be borne in mind: if you decide to read the novel to the end, then truly unpleasant physical sensations will haunt you for a long time. “Never Let Me Go” has one more feature, perhaps encoded in the title: once you get past the first ten pages, it’s impossible to get out; You get bogged down in the plot, even outside intervention doesn’t help.
This is not the first time that Kazuo Ishiguro takes a traditional genre as a basis (this time the classic educational novel) in order to, after trampling on it thoroughly, leave its horns and legs behind. He calmly dissects the British tradition with truly Japanese cruelty. The plot unfolds simultaneously in two time planes. Thirty-year-old Katie S., an employee of a certain rehabilitation center, recalls her childhood spent in the prestigious Hailsham boarding school.
The story develops primarily in the flashback space - in drawing, poetry and physical education lessons. Teenage tantrums, clashes with teachers, girl quarrels - for quite a long time everything resembles a full-fledged school romance. Watching how the heroine’s relationship with the boy Tommy develops, you forget about the strange rhetoric of the initial chapter - some kind of “donors”, “notches”, “completions” and other incomprehensible things. But pretty soon clouds of an unidentified consistency creep into this pink children's world.
Ishiguro masterfully creates an atmosphere of total illusion, which is only occasionally discharged to reveal the contours of a deeply hidden reality. First, you notice the children’s lack of “family” memories, which invariably accompany a normal children’s story. Closer to puberty, educators “give a rooster”: they shyly hide their eyes and start talking about some special purpose. One gets the feeling that this school world is suspended in some kind of airless space - no relatives, no loved ones, no tangible connection with the “big” world. And since at the same time some kind of operations and rehabilitation are increasingly mentioned, unpleasant guesses arise, which you diligently brush aside, concentrating on such insignificant subjects as drawing an elephant or the disappearance of a pencil case. And the closer it gets to graduating classes, the fewer saving clues, so closer to the middle of the novel it becomes clear what I already more or less guessed: all the children in this boarding school are laboratory clones who will become donors, that is, voluntarily give up their internal organs for a good cause.
By this moment, when you instinctively want to throw away the terrible little book and thoroughly wash your hands, you find yourself in a trap prepared in advance by the author. You sympathize with the heroes with whom you “went through” all the stages of their growing up, regardless of whether they are clones or talking rabbits. In addition, Ishiguro further builds intrigue around the resulting love triangle and the myth existing among the clones that people mercifully give a couple in love a “respite” (they do not immediately send them to the operating table, but a little later). It remains to figure out how to get this certificate of the “authenticity” of love - which is what the heroes actually do for the rest of the time allotted to them.
The plot about the poor “Dolly men” could be classified as speculative and even disgusting, if not for this strange melodramatic twist. The loving clones of Ishiguro, holding hands, wander around the world (some of them had their kidneys, liver and spleen removed by that time) and are looking for an answer to the question: why did people give them such a wonderful upbringing with lessons in drawing, poetry and physical education, if they only prepared them to die on time and efficiently. They suspect the existence of such a thing as a soul, and, moreover, are ready to prove the presence of this weightless substance. And at this moment, Ishiguro’s novel outgrows the framework of flat “social fiction” and degenerates into something more than a banal parable about “service, duty and moral responsibility.” However, you should not reveal the secret of the ending, since it is skillfully hidden from prying eyes.
Truman Capote. Summer cruise. Translation from English Ksenia Tveryanovich. -- St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2007.
The publication of Truman Capote's first youth novel was preceded by a detective story, which in itself is the reason for writing the book. "The Summer Cruise" was listed as a "lost work" for sixty years; his manuscript unexpectedly surfaced at a Sotheby's auction in 2004 and logically led to a trail of suspicions and assumptions. So the first edition of the novel is accompanied by an impressive afterword by Capote's lawyer Alan W. Schwartz, who tries to convince the reader (and himself) both of the authenticity of the novel and of the legality of its publication "without the author's consent."
“Summer Cruise”, even without moral and legal inconsistencies, which are not that interesting, leaves an ambivalent impression. The novel (or rather, a story) begins with a completely glamorous and in all respects pleasant everyday description of the morals of the New York aristocracy. Seventeen-year-old Grady McNeil skillfully escorts her disgusted ancestors on a multi-month cruise, so that in their absence she can do everything that young ladies who have gotten rid of excessive family care usually do.
The only plot-shaping aspect of this story is that the person for whom all this fuss is being started is not at all a proper young man of “his circle,” but a resident of Brooklyn working in a parking lot, burdened by the Jewish religion, bad upbringing and family problems. Wrong social orientation leads the young lady first to the altar, then to an unwanted pregnancy, and then even to tragedy.
The plot of “Cruise” is predictable and innocent, like all the stories of twenty-year-old debutants. And only the scalpel-like accuracy in assessing emotions and the “childish” motivation of the characters’ actions reveal the hand of a future master in this “chiffon” exercise. And here’s what else comes to mind: nevertheless, the middle of the twentieth century, with its cute conventions and strict social stratification, gave aspiring writers much more options for developing the most banal plot in the world: “a boy meets a girl.”