Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro

One of the many books that I have picked up from the local (very urban) farm. Yet another solid 50p investment!

Being ultimately ignorant, I always assumed that Ishiguro just wrote novels like The Remains of the Day. As most literate people will be able to confirm, however, that’s not the case. Throughout the book I felt as if Hailsham was actually Homerton College in Cambridge – something that probably says a lot about my memories of the place!

I honestly can’t say that I loved the novel – I really enjoyed the parts about the relations between the clones (this felt mostly like a very dark and fundamentally humour-less campus novel), but when Ishiguro turns too science-fictionesque he starts to lose me (and my interest) a little bit. Never Let Me Go is a very well-written dystopian novel, but so are countless others (not McCarthy’s The Road – that’s a work of art!) 

A Late Divorce – Abraham B. Yehoshua

Ah, the joy of Israeli literature! Well, actually it’s not as if I loved all Israeli writers, but I do have a soft spot for Yehoshua and Oz (not to mention the fact that this was another book that I got from my grandma’s “collection”…).

Much like most of Yehoshua’s works, this book is magisterially written. The clash between the expat patriarch and pretty much all his family members is both intriguing and ironic, and the confused (and at times confusing) sexuality of one of his sons is so well and carefully presented. I must say I was happy the book wasn’t just a 250-page long stream of consciousness from a young boy, as it looked like at the beginning – I felt like I had read one The Sound and the Fury too many already. And it’s just wonderful to read about fairly normal but fairly unlikable people constantly bickering and gossiping about each other.

The ending is very much clear from the start of the last chapter – I was really hoping that the imposing presence of the man who reminded me so much of Big Chief from One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest was just a red herring, but it wasn’t…

The Cat Specialist – Mo Yan

An extremely random book that we salvaged from my grandma’s shelves (together with other cheap but worthy newsagent tomes) once she was moved to a home – I think this is possibly a collection published in this form only in Italy, but the stories themselves should be available individually and translated worldwide.

Having never really read any Chinese literature (Pearl S. Buck doesn’t count, I suppose) this felt like as good an introduction to it as any, coming from a Nobel laureate and all (although we live in the times of Bob Dylan and the EU receiving Nobel prizes…). I’m normally not a big fan of short stories, but so many of them are so tragically well-written that I was immediately sold on this collection. I know some people might find it blasphemous, but I really thought that Mo Yan shares plenty of stylistic and thematic similarities with the Italian Fenoglio.

These stories of poverty, love, and small dramas are some of the most moving I’ever read – I clearly thought about reading the whole of Mo Yan’s bibliography after this, but the heap of unread books in my flat actually takes precedence for the time being.