metaphoricallysam's reviews
162 reviews

Mason writes so beautifully, that sometimes I put down the book and just sigh. Also, this book did make me laugh, all the characters are ridiculously funny. I would read it again when my goldfish memory erases everything.

Han Kang is God. This book is the best thing I've read on ecofeminism. 

I love his writing style omggggg
Some of my favourite quotes:

"What was so special about this song? Well, the thing was, I didn't used to listen properly to the words; I just waited for the bit that went: 'Baby, baby, never let me go...' And what I'd imagine was a woman who'd been told she couldn't have babies, who'd really, really wanted them her whole life.then there's a sort of miracle and she has a baby, and she holds this baby very close to her and walks around singing: 'Baby, never let me go...' partly because she's so happy, but also because she's so afraid something will happen, that the baby will get I'll or be taken from her."

"But Miss Lucy was now moving her gaze over the lot of us. 'I know you don't mean any harm. But there's just too much talk like this. I hear it all the time, it's been allowed to go on, and it's not right.' I could see more drops coming off the gutter and landing on her shoulder, but she didn't seem to notice. 'If no one else will talk to you, she continued, 'then I will. The problem, as I see it, is that you've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way. But I'm not. If you're going to have decent lives, then you've got to know and know properly.' "

"No explanations, nothing, she just starts off saying something like: 'Tommy, I made a mistake, when I said what I did to you. And I should have put you right about it long before now." Then she's saying I should forget everything she told me before. That she'd done me a big disservice telling me not to worry about being creative. That the other guardiana had been right all along, and there was no excuse for my art being so rubbish..."

"When I think about my essay today, what I do is go over it in some detail: I may think of a completely new approach I could have taken, or about different writers and books I could have focused on. I might be having coffee in a service station, staring at the motorway through the big windows, and my essay will pop into my head for no reason. Then I quite enjoy sitting there, going through it all again. Just lately, I've even toyed with the idea of going back and working on it, once I'm not a carer any more and I've got the time. But in the end, I suppose I'm not really serious about it. It's just a bit of nostalgia to pass the time. I think about the essay the same way I might a rounders match at Hailsham I did particularly well in, or else an argument from long ago where I can now think of all the clever things I should have said. It's at that sort of level daydream stuff. But as I say, that's not how it was when we first got to the Cottages."

"It's funny now recalling the way it was at the beginning, because when I think of those two years at the Cottages, that scared, bewildered start doesn't seem to go with any of the rest of it. If someone mentions the Cottages today, I think of easy-going days drifting in and out of each other's rooms, the languid way the afternoon would fold into evening then into night. I think of my pile of old paperbacks, their pages gone wobbly, like they'd once belonged to the sea. I think about how I read them, lying on my front in the grass on warm afternoons, my hair - which I was growing long then always falling across my vision. I think about the mornings waking up in my room at the top of the Black Barn to the voices of students outside in the field, arguing about poetry or philosophy; or the long winters, the breakfasts in steamed-up kitchens, meandering discussions around the table about Kafka or Picasso. It was always stuff like that at breakfast; never who you'd had sex with the night before, or why Larry and Helen weren't talking to each other any more."

" 'When Rodney and I, we were up in Wales,' she said. The same time we heard about this girl in the clothes shop. We heard something else, something about Hailsham students. What they were saying was that some Hailsham students in the past, in special circumstances, had managed to get a deferral. That this was something you could do if you were a Hailsham student. You could ask for your donations to be put back by three, even four years. It wasn't easy, but just sometimes they'd let you do it. So long as you could con vince them. So long as you qualified.' "

"But she just carried on: 'We all know it. We're modelled from trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. Convicts, maybe, just so long as they aren't psychos. That's what we come from. We all know it, so why don't we say it? A woman like that? Come on. Yeah, right, Tommy. A bit of fun. Let's have a bit of fun pretending. That other woman in there, her friend, the old one in the gallery. Art students, that's what she thought we were. Do you think she'd have talked to us like that if she'd known what we really were?

What do you think she'd have said if we'd asked her? "Excuse me, but do you think your friend was ever a clone model?" She'd have thrown us out. We know it, so we might as well just say it. If you want to look for possibles, if you want to do it properly, then you look in the gutter. You look in rubbish bins. Look down the toilet, that's where you'll find where we all came from.' "


" 'I am pleased for you, Kath. It's just that, well, I wish I'd found it.' Then he did a small laugh and went on: '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.' "

"A voice went: 'all right, let him think the absolute worst. Let him think it, let him think it.' and I suppose I looked at him with resignation, with a face that said: ' Yes, it's true, what else did you expect?' and I can recall now, as fresh as anything, Tommy's own face, the anger receding for the moment, being replaced by an expression almost of wonder, like I was a rare butterfly he'd come across on a fence post."

"Lying awake that night after what Roger had told me, I kept seeing how it was like someone coming along with a pairef seeing those balloons again. I thought about Hailsham clos- shears and snipping the balloon strings just where they entwined above the man's fist. Once that happened, there'd be no real sense in which those balloons belonged with each other any more. When he was telling me the news about Hailsham, Roger had made a remark, saying he supposed it wouldn't make so much difference to the likes of us any more. And in certain ways, he might have been right. But it was unnerving, to think things weren't still going on back there, just as always; that people like Miss Geraldine, say, weren't leading groups of Juniors around the North Playing Field."

"And now with time to reflect, I realised why I was so bothered by what had happened in the car. It wasn't simply that we'd ganged up on Ruth: it was the way she'd just taken it. In the old days, it was inconceivable she'd have let something like that happen without striking back. As this point sunk in, I paused on the path, waited for Ruth and Tommy to catch up, and put my arm around Ruth's shoulders."

"I stayed beside her like that for as long as they let me, three hours, maybe longer. And as I say, for almost all of that time, she was far away inside herself. But just once, as she was twisting herself in a way that seemed scarily unnatural, and I was on the verge of calling the nurses for more painkillers, just for a few seconds, no more, she looked straight at me and she knew exactly who I was. It was one of those little islands of lucidity donors sometimes get to in the midst of their ghastly battles, and she looked at me, just for that moment, and although she didn't speak, I knew what her look meant. So I said to her: 'It's okay, I'm going to do it, Ruth. I'm going to become Tommy's carer as soon as I can' I said it under my breath, because I didn't think she'd hear the words anyway, even if I shouted them. But my hope was that with our gazes locked as they were for those few sec- onds, she'd read my expression exactly as I'd read hers. Then the moment was over, and she was away again. Of course, I'll never know for sure, but I think she did under- stand. And even if she didn't, what occurs to me now is that she probably knew all along, even before I did, that I'd become Tommy's carer, and that we'd 'give it a try', just as she'd told us to in the car that day."

" 'Well, you weren't far wrong about that. We took away your art because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.' "

" 'And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.' "

" 'I was thinking,' I said, 'about back then, at Hailsham, when you used to go bonkers like that, and we couldn't understand it. We couldn't understand how you could ever get like that. And I was just having this idea, just a thought really. I was thinking maybe the reason you used to get like that was because at some level you always knew.'

Tommy thought about this, then shook his head. 'Don't think so, Kath. No, it was always just me. Me being an idiot. That's all it ever was.' Then after a moment, he did a small laugh and said: 'But that's a funny idea. Maybe I did know, somewhere deep down. Something the rest of you didn't.' "

 " 'You say you're not a mind-reader,' I said. 'But maybe you were that day. Maybe that's why you started to cry when you saw me. Because whatever the song was really about, in my head, when I was dancing, I had my own version. You see, I imagined it was about this woman who'd been told she couldn't have babies. But then she'd had one, and she was so pleased, and she was holding it ever so tightly to her breast, really afraid something might separate them, and she's going baby, baby, never let me go. That's not what the song's about at all, but that's what I had in my head that time. Maybe you read my mind, and that's why you found it so sad. I didn't think it was so sad at the time, but now, when I think back, it does feel a bit sad.' "

"I tried to run to him, but the mud sucked my feet down.

The mud was impeding him too, because one time, when he kicked out, he slipped and fell out of view into the black- ness. But his jumbled swear-words continued uninterrupt- ed, and I was able to reach him just as he was getting to his feet again. I caught a glimpse of his face in the moonlight, caked in mud and distorted with fury, then I reached for his flailing arms and held on tight. He tried to shake me off, but I kept holding on, until he stopped shouting and I felt the fight go out of him. Then I realised he too had his arms around me. And so we stood together like that, at the top of that field, for what seemed like ages, not saying anything, just holding each other, while the wind kept blowing and blowing at us, tugging our clothes, and for a moment, it seemed like we were holding onto each other because that was the only way to stop us being swept away into the night."

"Then he said: 'I keep thinking about this river somewhere with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart. That's how I think it is with us. It's a shame, Kath, because we've loved each other all our lives. But in the end, we can't stay together forever.' "

It was like reading the journals of my future self. I related so much with Natsuko it's not even funny. Everything she says, it felt like either I had thought about it or had argued about it. The pain and suffering of women, patriarchy, the complexity of motherhood, how children are not toys for pastime, children of donors, discovering one's origins etc. It also made me feel unbearably sad and lonely, I don't know for what reason. Maybe the pain and longing she feels for her childhood and the people who died around her. Maybe the regret over lost time. But weirdly, it inspired a renewed passion in me to live. To breathe, to explore, to eat, to read. This book was a masterpiece and I loved all the characters and how fleshed out they were. A must read for people of all genders.

Favourite quotes that I can come back to:

"Before I was even born, I already had everything I needed to have a baby of my own. In some ways, I was even more prepared than I am now. Set up to give birth, before I was even born..."

"That's right," I smiled, nodding. "Hey, it's kinda like we're inside a giant grape."

"Maybe no real change wasn't such a bad thing."

"Sometimes when young men and women are about to go through radiotherapy or chemo, they freeze their sperm or eggs so they can use them later. To give them the option of having kids, once they're better. That's what Noriko did. But then she died, leaving just her eggs. I can't imagine how hard it was for her mother. She was an extremely thoughtful person. She thanked all the doctors and nurses, but when it was just the two of us, she started crying and told me: 'Maybe if I used those eggs, I could have Noriko again."

"Imagine you're at the edge of a forest, right before dawn. There's no one else around, just you. It's still dark, and you have no idea what you're doing there. For whatever reason, you make up your mind to walk straight into the forest. After a little while, you come to a small house. Slowly, you open the door. Inside, you find ten sleeping children. All the children are fast asleep. Now, in that moment, in that small house, there's no joy, no pain, no happiness, no sadness. There's nothing, because all the children are asleep. So what do you do? Wake them up or let them sleep? The choice is yours. If you wake them up, nine children will be happy that you did. They'll smile and thank you. But one won't. You know this, before you wake them up. You know that one child will feel nothing but pain from the moment they open their eyes until they finally die. Every second of that child's life will be more horrible than death itself. You know this in advance. You don't know which child it's going to be, but you know that's going to happen to one of them."

"Aizawa was alive, or at least I thought he was, but if we never saw each other again, if I had seen him for the last time ever, in what sense was he alive?"

"He used to tell me, 'People are strange, Jun. They know nothing lasts forever, but still find time to laugh and cry and get upset, creating things and breaking things apart. But son, these things make life worth living. So don't let anything get you down.' I was just a kid, but I think I knew what he was trying to say."

"What if whenever you're like, whoa, am I gonna die, some substance gets secreted in your brain? Maybe that's what it's like when you're old." 

I went into this book blindly, not knowing what it was about and only having a vague idea of it being sad. The whole book is so beautifully composed it makes me feel so ignorant of the histories of countries that have suffered. I had known of dictatorship in SK but I hadn't known how bad it was, how traumatic for the families and survivors. It is so easy to define such atrocities in clean numbers, so sanitary and so devoid of emotion. Such things happen, we say and shrug, as if hundreds of thousands didn't lose their children, their fathers, their mothers, their siblings. As if they didn't have to carry the bodies of their high school children to early graves, as if they didn't search for their missing loved ones like madmen, still hoping for a sign, still praying for their lives. 

Some quotes that I loved and will keep thinking about for a long time from now:

"How had the seasons kept on turning for me, when time had stopped forever for him that May?"

"At the time, death seemed as though it would be something refreshing, like slipping on that new school uniform."

"Surrender,have you got that? Go out with your hands up. There's no way they'll harm a kid with his hands up."

"After you died I couldn't hold a funeral, 
So these eyes that once beheld you became a shrine,
These ears that once heard your voice became a shrine,
These lungs that once inhaled your breath became a shrine."

"If I could hide in dreams.
Or perhaps in memories."

Finished this in one setting. Such drama, omg, was literally holding my breath during the train scene.

I'm sorry why does he wanna fuck every woman that crosses his path like????

It was so sad. And idk why I found it so sad but everyone was so sad. I especially resonated with La Trobe bc idk, she felt so conflicting at all times, and also her being for the girls makes 100% sense. I also felt angry at mrs manresa because all she could do was be a pick me, but even that anger turned into sadness by the end. Also the style literally felt like I was reading poems at times which could only be deliberate, then I realised this is what they call lyrical. I don't like poems because I never understand what the poet is getting at, but I wouldn't mind lyrical prose.