“Never Let Me Go” sneaked up and grabbed me quite insidiously.  I read the first part of it without much attention, between other books, with a result that I had even less an idea of what was going on than the author intended.  I even thought I must be so completely out of touch with English culture that I didn’t understand all this talk of “donors” and “carers”.  Of course if I’d been paying more attention, I would have caught on earlier.  But it’s a great device, none the less, that the author employs when Miss Lucy tells the kids that they’ve been told, but not really told.  And, of course, the same is true of us, the readers.

It’s a wonderful thing about imaginative fiction that it can stray into impossible, unrealistic situations and resonate all the more deeply because of that. Someone touched on this the other day when discussing Murakami. So, when reading this novel by Ishiguro, I couldn’t help thinking of real situations in which in which humans are treated with cynical contempt, while their humanity remains as a silent accusation against those who cause and sometimes indeed benefit from their suffering.  Locally, I think of Palestinian refugee children. In India I might think of street urchins.

In real life situations, there’s the danger of bhava clouding the imagination, and drawing connections where there should not be any. When a person stands before us in suffering, it’s easy to think of other suffering persons we have known, or make him a symbol of all the suffering in the world, so that what we actually see is not the one before us, but something entirely unconnected to him.  When this happens, it becomes impossible to give such a person the particular sort of attention that might be of real help.  I think this is the difference between pity and compassion. Compassion is a state of greater alertness, perceptiveness and intelligence.

Good writers like Ishiguro avoid maudlin scenes that spin us into tears.  At no point in Never Let Me Go was I moved to tears, and yet the book quietly penetrated my soul.  I felt for the characters as if they were real, and of course they are real in a certain sense.  As for the situation, there is little room for doubt that we humans would permit similar horrors to occur.

I just went back to read the story of Kasturbai Gandhi and her rejection of beef tea. I don’t know about the beef tea, but I think I’d prefer to be put out of my misery than accept Kathy’s kidney – first or second.

I think I’m becoming mild, or balmy.  I actually like the “new look” in Gmail; can’t work up strong opinions about it like Dave Winer did yesterday. I also use fastmail.fm, at $40 a year, and that’s just fine too.  Its new beta interface took a page out of Gmail’s book and in some ways improved upon it.  I thought it would help me to break the dependence on Google, but fat chance: it’s just a frivolous luxury.

I like my new ThinkPad X120e , even though it comes with Windows 7. One day I’ll probably change it to Ubuntu, just as I’ve done with all my other computers.  But for now it’s fine.  I like that it suspends or hibernates and dependably comes back to life, unlike every Linux computer I’ve owned.

My ThinkPad has only an 11 inch screen, but it’s easier to lug around with me than my previous 13-inch. I didn’t believe it before, but an 11-inch screen – unlike a 10-inch screen – is still big enough.  The ThinkPad has a marvelous keyboard, runs for five or six hours on battery, and costs two and a half times less than an Apple product.  It’s not as light or as powerful as one of those, but it’s perfectly adequate for my needs, and I won’t be as distressed if it goes missing like those 1,500 laptops that (according to the British Airways in-flight magazine) are disappeared each day in British airports.  (I think it’s more likely to be nabbed on one of my India trips.)

To the ThinkPad I added Office 2010 so I can share documents a little more reliably.  It’s not as nice, or easy to use as LibreOffice, and starts almost as slowly, but there are a couple of advantages, like you can pin documents you use often to the Recents list.  Oh, and the right mouse button context menu (though it occasionally does the weirdest things).

I like my new IPhone.  It’s a lot simpler to use than my old Blackberry.  The phone calls are crystal clear when they aren’t disconnected after 2 seconds.  I’ll probably end up reading more books on it than my new Kobo. I also listen to music more often on it than on other devices, and I definitely won’t bother buying another camera.  On the other hand, if I had to actually buy an Iphone (and not receive one from work) I probably wouldn’t spend that amount of money.  Those old monochrome Nokias with a one-inch screen and batteries that last about 3 weeks aren’t half-bad either.

I’m making an experiment and leaving my eye glasses in my pocket or at home. That means I don’t have to spend every morning looking for them in the most absurd places.  I can see most everything I want to see without my glasses and fortunately I don’t need to drive a car every day.  I also notice that when I don’t put my eye glasses on for a part of the day, my vision is clearer without them for the rest of the day.  Maybe all these years I didn’t really need to wear glasses after all.  Primary School blackboards are the best friend of the world’s opticians and optometrists.  Maybe one day when every child owns a laptop, the eye doctors will go out of business.  Or at least stop forcing six year olds into glasses.

Reading 1Q84 took me about 3 months, at my usual easy pace of 10 pages a day. With interruptions: when I traveled to America for 10 days I left it at home, not wanting to schlep such a heavy tome in my bags.  I’m a painfully slow reader, though somehow I seem to plod through thick volumes more readily than thin ones.

Not that length really matters in a novel.  I wonder if writers ever consider how long they intend a book to be before writing: it seems to me that a novel needs to be just as long as it needs to be and not longer.  I can’t imagine 1Q84 being written as a shorter novel.

In terms of structure, it’s probably the most perfect of all the novels I’ve read by Murakami.  Sometimes I’ve felt a little bit lost in his longer ones, even irritated.

Actually I found myself growing a little irritated with him earlier today.  I wasn’t sure I trusted him.  I decided to adjourn my judgment till the end of the novel. Perhaps he was planning some bizarre ending that no one would understand?  But I needn’t have worried.  A story as bizarre as this does not require a bizarre denouement.  It requires that normalcy will be restored.

Earlier today, though, another thing, perhaps, was bothering me too.  The way that the novelist sets himself up as a God.  Everything is determined by the Master’s stroke of the pen.  The rest of us just have to go along with this.  He’s the Perceiver, and we are the Receivers – on the unlikely assumption that I understand Murakami’s terminology correctly.

There is Sruti and there is Smriti, to use another terminology.  The Sruti is “what has been seen” by the Rishis – the Vedic seers, whereas Smriti, is “what has been remembered”.  The latter was recorded by mere men (even if, like the Gita, dictated by Gods).  The novelist in this kind of novel (1Q84), where reality is not subject to ordinary rules, has more the role of the Rishi.  The reader’s role is to take the words of the novelist and recreate the story in his imagination.  But this license only extends so far, as does the range of interpretation. “Literature is not a free-for-all,” said an English literature professor once, irked by my Buddhist interpretation of Canterbury Tales.

However, I’m beginning to feel constrained by the circle of these novelists’ words.  As if I want to break free and write my own book of life. To do so, of course, I would need divine inspiration, and then it won’t technically be mine anyway, will it?

Finally, irritated or not, if I’m having these thoughts, it can only be thanks to Murakami.  Thanks to him we know that there is “only ever one reality,” though “things may not be as they seem”.  They may veil truths that can be revealed only by imagination.