Never Leave Me

I bought Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Never Leave Me' at Athens airport. I immediately found the book chilling. The atmosphere reminded me of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale". I found myself gasping all the way through at the sheer skill of the work; this kind of writing is on a plane of its own. I admire and respect it.

If it was a wall, it would be a beautiful, if somewhat stark, white wall, and I would like to stick some nice coloured plates in it to make it less austere.


Monologue from Diary of an Analysand :-

"I am trying to be as honest as I can. I did not know that I was supposed to do what everybody else was doing. I misunderstood the instructions. I thought I was supposed to do exactly the opposite – something that nobody else was doing. There was a voice in my head telling me to do the opposite of what I was being told to do. I knew I would get there in the end, and in any case, I did not trust the voice that was giving the instructions. As far as I could see, the voice was erroneous. It was telling the wrong things. I knew different. I knew that my voice was more important, had to be obeyed, not the outside voice of so-called authority, but the inner conviction that I was not like everybody else. Those rules did not apply to me. How could they apply to me, when I had not been consulted when they were being devised? No, I would find my own way, thank you, and get on with things from a different point of view. I was not subject to the laws of nature the way everybody else was. I know not why. I know not how it happened. I was born that way, born this way, born. I was born to be myself and experience the excruciating thrill of becoming an entity that never bent to a rule, never admitted defeat, never gave in. Sometimes had to pay lip service to the world, there was no other way to survive, and survival was all-important. To get to where I was going, I had to first survive. Otherwise there was no point, no going, no becoming. Survival, first. And that meant giving the outward signs of obedience, pretending to execute the orders, but they were all questionable, all questioned. I could not recognise the well-foundedness of anything I was told to do because of this extremely strong conviction that I had to follow my own rules, dance to the beat of my own drum, even if my dance was awkward or pathetic, at times. I never doubted that I would get the hang of it, and emerge the swan. There was just no question about it. It had to be the way it was, the way I was, as if in the beginning some instance had ordered me to do something so extremely unfair, so totally unjust that it called into question the legitimacy of all future orders, and prevented me from ever following them."

Of my own making or not, yesterday I found out that I am, indeed, living in a Kafka novel.
While I was on holiday my son played up at school, turning up late and skipping classes. The school called in the Children's Judge on the grounds of educational incompetence.