From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love.
As a child, Kathy–now thirty-one years old–lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to...
From the acclaimed author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, a moving new novel that subtly reimagines our world and time in a haunting story of friendship and love.
As a child, Kathy–now thirty-one years old–lived at Hailsham, a private school in the scenic English countryside where the children were sheltered from the outside world, brought up to believe that they were special and that their well-being was crucial not only for themselves but for the society they would eventually enter. Kathy had long ago put this idyllic past behind her, but when two of her Hailsham friends come back into her life, she stops resisting the pull of memory.
And so, as her friendship with Ruth is rekindled, and as the feelings that long ago fueled her adolescent crush on Tommy begin to deepen into love, Kathy recalls their years at Hailsham. She describes happy scenes of boys and girls growing up together, unperturbed–even comforted–by their isolation. But she describes other scenes as well: of discord and misunderstanding that hint at a dark secret behind Hailsham’s nurturing facade. With the dawning clarity of hindsight, the three friends are compelled to face the truth about their childhood–and about their lives now.
A tale of deceptive simplicity, Never Let Me Go slowly reveals an extraordinary emotional depth and resonance–and takes its place among Kazuo Ishiguro’s finest work.
太伤了。Never let me go. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. It’s shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever. River的比喻，刚刚翻朋友圈，恰好看到，电波里的那句“长河无...太伤了。Never let me go. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. It’s shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever. River的比喻，刚刚翻朋友圈，恰好看到，电波里的那句“长河无声奔去，唯爱与信念永存”，不同的历史背景和情景设定，地下战争与克隆人注定的命运，被迫分离，爱情。无论有没有Soul，无论能否defer，无论最终是否完满地complete，起码爱过这一次，即便错过，即便没有走过最后一段路，但也值得。如果命运必须接受，愿你们下辈子在Norfolk再见。(展开)
Personally I love this book. What I'm not comfortable with is the description given in the rating. Instead of judgemental phrase like '推荐', I prefer something more personal like 'like it' or 'love it'. Now comes to the book. I have to admit, at first I ...
(展开)
今天听到第八章…… 我忽然觉得这一段关于sex的内容真的很有意思……its so so soooooooo cute！ Looking back now, I can see we were pretty confused about this whole area around sex. That’s hardly surprising, I suppose, given we were barely sixteen. But what added to the confusion—I can see it more clearly now—was the fact that the guardians were themselves confused. On the one hand we had, say, M...(2回应)
2012-06-21 18:17:184人喜欢
今天听到第八章……
我忽然觉得这一段关于sex的内容真的很有意思……its so so soooooooo cute！
Looking back now, I can see we were pretty confused about this whole area around sex. That’s hardly surprising, I suppose, given we were barely sixteen. But what added to the confusion—I can see it more clearly now—was the fact that the guardians were themselves confused. On the one hand we had, say, Miss Emily’s talks, when she’d tell us how important it was not to be ashamed of our bodies, to “respect our physical needs,” how sex was “a very beautiful gift” as long as both people really wanted it. But when it came down to it, the guardians made it more or less impossible for any of us actually to do much without breaking rules. We couldn’t visit the boys’ dorms after nine o’clock, they couldn’t visit ours. The classrooms were all officially “out of bounds” in the evenings, as were the areas behind the sheds and the pavilion. And you didn’t want to do it in the fields even when it was warm enough, because you’d almost certainly discover afterwards you’d had an audience watching from the house passing around binoculars. In other words, for all the talk of sex being beautiful, we had the distinct impression we’d be in trouble if the guardians caught us at it. 引自 C8
I say this, but the only real case I personally knew of like that was when Jenny C. and Rob D. got interrupted in Room 14. They were doing it after lunch, right there over one of the desks, and Mr. Jack had come in to get something. According to Jenny, Mr. Jack had turned red and gone right out again, but they’d been put off and had stopped. They’d more or less dressed themselves when Mr. Jack came back, just as though for the first time, and pretended to be surprised and shocked.
“It’s very clear to me what you’ve been doing and it’s not appropriate,” he’d said, and told them both to go and see Miss Emily. But once they’d got to Miss Emily’s office, she’d told them she was on her way to an important meeting and didn’t have time to talk to them.
“But you know you shouldn’t have been doing whatever you were doing, and I don’t expect you’ll do it again,” she’d said, before rushing out with her folders. 引自 C8
于是大家有了各种猜想，各种理论：有人认为监护人想要学生们做爱，只是学生们不应该在错误的时间进行。HANNAH认为让他们充分地做爱是监护人的职责，否则学生们的器官就不能很好地运作，不能成为合格的捐赠者。有人说监护人毕竟是“普通人”，虽然他们知道学生们不能生育，但是还是会担心。ANNETTE说学生们和对方做爱让监护人感到不舒服，因为监护人自己也想和学生做爱……（这一段太可爱太可爱了……）
KATH认为RUTH的理论更加接近于真实情况：RUTH认为监护人们对学生所讲述的有关于性的东西，都是为了他们离开学校之后做准备。监护人们希望学生们在离开校园之后能够have sex properly，不染上疾病，但显然不想让他们在学校里做爱，因为他们害怕惹上麻烦。
他们对待GAY SEX的态度，以及RUTH对此的理论也很有趣：
Gay sex, incidentally, was something we were even more confused about. For some reason, we called it “umbrella sex”; if you fancied someone your own sex, you were “an umbrella.” I don’t know how it was where you were, but at Hailsham we definitely weren’t at all kind towards any signs of gay stuff. The boys especially could do the cruellest things. According to Ruth this was because quite a few of them had done things with each other when they’d been younger, before they’d realised what they were doing. So now they were ridiculously tense about it. I don’t know if she was right, but for sure, accusing someone of “getting all umbrella” could easily end in a fight.引自 C8
For all that, I’d been holding it off for ages, repeating to myself Miss Emily’s advice—“If you can’t find someone with whom you truly wish to share this experience, then don’t!” But around the spring of the year I’m talking about now, I started to think I wouldn’t mind having sex with a boy. Not just to see what it was like, but also because it occurred to me I needed to get familiar with sex, and it would be just as well to practise first with a boy I didn’t care about too much. Then later on, if I was with someone special, I’d have more chance of doing everything right. What I mean is, if Miss Emily was correct and sex was this really big deal between people, then I didn’t want to be doing it for the first time when it was really important how well it went.
……
So I’d chosen Harry, and I only delayed those couple of months because I wanted to make sure I’d be all right physically. Miss Emily had told us it could be painful and a big failure if you didn’t get wet enough and this was my one real worry. It wasn’t being ripped apart down there, which we often joked about, and was the secret fear of quite a few girls. I kept thinking, as long as I got wet quick enough, there’d be no problem, and I did it a lot on my own just to make sure. 引自 C8
KATH还是很紧张，不断地重读书中关于性的段落：
I realise this may sound like I was getting obsessive, but I remember I also spent a lot of time re-reading passages from books where people had sex, going over the lines again and again, trying to tease out clues. The trouble was, the books we had at Hailsham weren’t at all helpful. We had a lot of nineteenth-century stuff by Thomas Hardy and people like that, which was more or less useless. Some modern books, by people like Edna O’Brien and Margaret Drabble, had some sex in them, but it wasn’t ever very clear what was happening because the authors always assumed you’d already had a lot of sex before and there was no need to go into details. 引自 C8
这一句实在是太可爱太好笑了
it wasn’t ever very clear what was happening because the authors always assumed you’d already had a lot of sex before and there was no need to go into details.引自 C8
当然书让RUTH很失望，可是电影也没帮上什么忙：
We’d got a video player in the billiards room a couple of years earlier, and by that spring had built up quite a good collection of movies. A lot of them had sex in them, but most scenes would end just as the sex was starting up, or else you’d only see their faces and their backs. And when there was a useful scene, it was difficult to see it more than fleetingly because there were usually twenty others in the room watching with you. We’d evolved this system where we called for particular favourite scenes to be played again—like, for instance, the moment the American jumps over the barbed wire on his bike in The Great Escape. There’d be a chant of: “Rewind! Rewind!” until someone got the remote and we’d see the portion again, sometimes three, four times. But I could hardly, by myself, start shouting for rewinds just to see sex scenes again.引自 C8
So I kept delaying week by week, while I went on preparing, until the summer came and I decided I was as ready as I’d ever be. By then, I was even feeling reasonably confident about it, and began dropping hints to Harry. Everything was going fine and according to plan, when Ruth and Tommy split up and it all got confused. 引自 C8
And it started to dawn on me, I suppose, that a lot of things I’d always assumed I’d plenty of time to get round to doing, I might now have to act on pretty soon or else let them go forever.
2021-10-30 19:57:05
And it started to dawn on me, I suppose, that a lot of things I’d always assumed I’d plenty of time to get round to doing, I might now have to act on pretty soon or else let them go forever.
"Back then, when you lost it, I used to think about it, in my head, what it would be like, if I found it and brought it to you. What you'd say, your face, all of that." "Poor creatures." "It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever."
2011-02-15 16:54:29
"Back then, when you lost it, I used to think about it, in my head, what it would be like, if I found it and brought it to you. What you'd say, your face, all of that."
"Poor creatures."
"It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever."
Then suddenly, with the skeleton in an obscene heap on the desktop, she turned away and began telling us how we had to be careful who we had sex with. Not just because of the diseases, but because, she said, "sex affects emotions in ways you'd never expect." We had to be extremely careful about having sex in the outside world, especially with people who weren't students, because out there sex m...
2018-05-18 23:22:25
Then suddenly, with the skeleton in an obscene heap on the desktop, she turned away and began telling us how we had to be careful who we had sex with. Not just because of the diseases, but because, she said, "sex affects emotions in ways you'd never expect." We had to be extremely careful about having sex in the outside world, especially with people who weren't students, because out there sex means all sort of things. Out there people were even fighting and killing each other over who had sex with whom. And the reason it meant so much - so much more than, say, dancing or table-tennis - was because the people out there were different from us students: they could have babies from sex. That was why it was so important to them, this question of who did it with whom. And even though, as we knew, it is completely impossible for any of us to have babies, out there, we have to bahave like them. We had to respect the rules and treat sex as something pretty special.引自 CHAPTER SEVEN
Miss Emily的说法，虽然没有什么联系，但读这段的时候我经常想到这几天的“恐同”现象。很多时候很多人都说同性恋恶心什么的，我是真的不能理解，读了这段以后觉得可能正式因为同性恋爱这种impossibility to have babies (biologically) 让很多人觉得自己坚守的rules被打乱了。突然sex就像dancing或者table-tennis一样随意，大家只是为了pleasure行事，这的确是对rules的巨大挑战。
There was no way to reverse the process. How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days? There was no going back. However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, m...
2018-06-02 11:58:16
There was no way to reverse the process. How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days? There was no going back. However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neurone disease, heart disease. So for a long time you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren't really like us. That you were less than human, so it didn't matter.引自 Chapter Twenty-Two
And it started to dawn on me, I suppose, that a lot of things I’d always assumed I’d plenty of time to get round to doing, I might now have to act on pretty soon or else let them go forever.
2021-10-30 19:57:05
And it started to dawn on me, I suppose, that a lot of things I’d always assumed I’d plenty of time to get round to doing, I might now have to act on pretty soon or else let them go forever.
NAOMI
Vintage Books2010版
October
Vintage2006版
X_Nesbo
上海译文出版社2018版
万里船
译林出版社2011版
符灵
上海译文出版社2018版
0 有用 Zephyr 2009-11-11 10:42:04
Really gets into motion in the last third of the story. Touching.
4 有用 llina 2011-01-14 10:23:38
Touching. Karey Mulligan fits it perfectly
4 有用 高槻Queen 2017-11-11 11:46:04
人生理想是做一个Kathy一样的人
2 有用 小鱼脆饼 2015-05-13 14:41:01
最催泪是Madame说的话，小女孩紧紧怀抱着一个美好的旧世界，说baby baby never let me go~ 但时间洪流摧毁一切，donors的生命脆弱如一次性纸杯……part1在适应跳跃反复的时间点叙述，part2总是忍不住拍案骂Ruth bitch，part3无限唏嘘……
2 有用 asako 2013-05-07 12:41:59
宇多田光的桜流し特别配这本书，应该做同名电影的主题曲，就像用英文演唱的《草帽歌》是《人证》的主题曲那样。笔致细腻克制，但是大段的心理描写和细节、气氛的渲染比较磨人耐性，无怪乎村上春树那么喜欢这本书
0 有用 路迦Loka 2022-06-20 12:20:32
小说真的写的内敛到内伤。
0 有用 2008geng 2022-06-17 23:21:11
Please never let me go 翻译为，面对苦难发出的无力请求
0 有用 Julia 2022-06-09 15:59:29
太伤了。Never let me go. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. It’s shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever. River的比喻，刚刚翻朋友圈，恰好看到，电波里的那句“长河无... 太伤了。Never let me go. They’ve got to let go, drift apart. It’s shame, Kath, because we’ve loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can’t stay together forever. River的比喻，刚刚翻朋友圈，恰好看到，电波里的那句“长河无声奔去，唯爱与信念永存”，不同的历史背景和情景设定，地下战争与克隆人注定的命运，被迫分离，爱情。无论有没有Soul，无论能否defer，无论最终是否完满地complete，起码爱过这一次，即便错过，即便没有走过最后一段路，但也值得。如果命运必须接受，愿你们下辈子在Norfolk再见。 (展开)
0 有用 trashinmyvein 2022-05-31 14:29:09
sometimes you just don't have the perspective...
0 有用 失败练习中 2022-05-25 13:44:53
好喜欢这个故事这种给人讲回忆的组织方式