Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Год выпуска: 2005, ISBN: 2005, Издательство: Knopf Publishing Group, Жанр: Современная проза, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Never Let Me Go: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Never Let Me Go»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

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.

Never Let Me Go — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Never Let Me Go», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

It took me a moment to realise, so that by the time I turned back to her she was breathing over her fingers and looking down, engrossed by something beside her feet. I thought maybe it was some poor creature dead in the frost, but when I came up, I saw it was a colour magazine—not one of “Steve’s magazines,” but one of those bright cheerful things that come free with newspapers. It had fallen open at this glossy double page advert, and though the paper had gone soggy and there was mud at one corner, you could see it well enough. It showed this beautifully modern open-plan office with three or four people who worked in it having some kind of joke with each other. The place looked sparkling and so did the people. Ruth was staring at this picture and, when she noticed me beside her, said: “Now that would be a proper place to work.”

Then she got self-conscious—maybe even cross that I’d caught her like that—and set off again much faster than before.

But a few evenings later, when several of us were sitting around a fire in the farmhouse, Ruth began telling us about the sort of office she’d ideally work in, and I immediately recognised it. She went into all the details—the plants, the gleaming equipment, the chairs with their swivels and castors—and it was so vivid everyone let her talk uninterrupted for ages. I was watching her closely, but it never seemed to occur to her I might make the connection—maybe she’d even forgotten herself where the image had come from. She even talked at one point about how the people in her office would all be “dynamic, go-ahead types,” and I remembered clearly those same words written in big letters across the top of the advert: “Are you the dynamic, go-ahead type?”—something like that. Of course, I didn’t say anything. In fact, listening to her, I even started wondering if maybe it was all feasible: if one day we might all of us move into a place like that and carry on our lives together.

Chrissie and Rodney were there that night, of course, hanging onto every word. And then for days afterwards, Chrissie kept trying to get Ruth to talk some more about it. I’d pass them sitting together in the corner of a room and Chrissie would be asking: “Are you sure you wouldn’t put each other off, working all together in a place like that?” just to get Ruth going on it again.

The point about Chrissie—and this applied to a lot of the veterans—was that for all her slightly patronising manner towards us when we’d first arrived, she was awestruck about our being from Hailsham. It took me a long time to realise this. Take the business about Ruth’s office: Chrissie would never herself have talked about working in any office, never mind one like that. But because Ruth was from Hailsham, somehow the whole notion came within the realms of the possible. That’s how Chrissie saw it, and I suppose Ruth did say a few things every now and then to encourage the idea that, sure enough, in some mysterious way, a separate set of rules applied to us Hailsham students. I never heard Ruth actually lie to veterans; it was more to do with not denying certain things, implying others. There were occasions when I could have brought the whole thing down over her head. But if Ruth was sometimes embarrassed, catching my eye in the middle of some story or other, she seemed confident I wouldn’t give her away. And of course, I didn’t.

So that was the background to Chrissie and Rodney’s claim to have seen Ruth’s “possible,” and you can maybe see now why I was wary about it. I wasn’t keen on Ruth going with them to Norfolk, though I couldn’t really say why. And once it became clear she was completely set on going, I told her I’d come too. At first, she didn’t seem too delighted, and there was even a hint that she wouldn’t let Tommy come with her either. In the end, though, we all went, the five of us: Chrissie, Rodney, Ruth, Tommy and me.

Chapter Thirteen

Rodney, who had a driver’s licence, had made an arrangement to borrow a car for the day from the farm-workers at Metchley a couple of miles down the road. He’d regularly got cars this way in the past, but this particular time, the arrangement broke down the day before we were due to set off. Though things got sorted out fairly easily—Rodney walked over to the farm and got a promise on another car—the interesting thing was the way Ruth responded during those few hours when it looked like the trip might have to be called off.

Until then, she’d been making out the whole thing was a bit of a joke, that if anything she was going along with it to please Chrissie. And she’d talked a lot about how we weren’t exploring our freedom nearly enough since leaving Hailsham; how anyway she’d always wanted to go to Norfolk to “find all our lost things.” In other words, she’d gone out of her way to let us know she wasn’t very serious about the prospect of finding her “possible.”

That day before we went, I remember Ruth and I had been out for a stroll, and we came into the farmhouse kitchen where Fiona and a few veterans were making a huge stew. And it was Fiona herself, not looking up from what she was doing, who told us how the farm boy had come in earlier with the message. Ruth was standing just in front of me, so I couldn’t see her face, but her whole posture froze up. Then without a word, she turned and pushed past me out of the cottage. I got a glimpse of her face then, and that’s when I realised how upset she was. Fiona started to say something like: “Oh, I didn’t know…” But I said quickly: “That’s not what Ruth’s upset about. It’s about something else, something that happened earlier on.” It wasn’t very good, but it was the best I could do on the spur of the moment.

In the end, as I said, the vehicle crisis got resolved, and early the next morning, in the pitch dark, the five of us got inside a bashed but perfectly decent Rover car. The way we sat was with Chrissie up front next to Rodney, and the three of us in the back. That was what had felt natural, and we’d got in like that without thinking about it. But after only a few minutes, once Rodney had brought us out of the dark winding lanes onto the proper roads, Ruth, who was in the middle, leaned forward, put her hands on the front seats, and began talking to the two veterans. She did this in a way that meant Tommy and I, on either side of her, couldn’t hear anything they were saying, and because she was between us, couldn’t talk to or even see each other. Sometimes, on the rare occasions she did lean back, I tried to get something going between the three of us, but Ruth wouldn’t pick up on it, and before long, she’d be crouched forwards again, her face stuck between the two front seats.

After about an hour, with day starting to break, we stopped to stretch our legs and let Rodney go for a pee. We’d pulled over beside a big empty field, so we jumped over the ditch and spent a few minutes rubbing our hands together and watching our breaths rise. At one point, I noticed Ruth had drifted away from the rest of us and was gazing across the field at the sunrise. So I went over to her and made the suggestion that, since she only wanted to talk to the veterans, she swap seats with me. That way she could go on talking at least with Chrissie, and Tommy and I could have some sort of conversation to while away the journey. I’d hardly finished before Ruth said in a whisper:

“Why do you have to be difficult? Now of all times! I don’t get it. Why do you want to make trouble?” Then she yanked me round so both our backs were to the others and they wouldn’t see if we started to argue. It was the way she did this, rather than her words, that suddenly made me see things her way; I could see that Ruth was making a big effort to present not just herself, but all of us, in the right way to Chrissie and Rodney; and here I was, threatening to undermine her and start an embarrassing scene. I saw all this, and so I touched her on the shoulder and went off back to the others. And when we returned to the car, I made sure the three of us sat exactly as before. But now, as we drove on, Ruth stayed more or less silent, sitting right back in her seat, and even when Chrissie or Rodney shouted things to us from the front, responded only in sulky monosyllables.

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Never Let Me Go»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Never Let Me Go» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «Never Let Me Go»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Never Let Me Go» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x