TWO SUGGESTIONS III

What the world will be like in a few years’ time? Let’s say in 40 or 50 years. If there is something that literature has always been searching from the beginning that is the sense of life. A second aspect could be the human soul. The third element tries to cause different sensations and feelings in the reader. Those three features precisely appear together in two interesting novels of the English panorama published in a fresh and original way in the last years: 'Never let me go' by Kazuo Ishiguro and 'The road' by Cormac Mcarthy.

These works show two different and opposite views of the future of humanity. While Ishiguro raises a renewal through cloning, McCarthy augurs a total destruction of the planet. Both novels are powerful stories with well drawn characters. Both leave a bitter taste in the reader’s mouth: the first because the cloned characters are perhaps too human; the second because it tries to find a shelter in a devastated landscape that the characters are not able to get. However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Because of their compelling arguments, those novels don’t finish at the moment of reading the final line, but much beyond; they last in the mind of the reader for many days. After reading those stories, we can’t stop thinking about the characters. The stories give us a kind of vertigo.

The novel by Ishiguro arises from a question like the one in 'Die Verwandlung' (The conversion) by Kafka: what would happen if one day somebody started to make clones in order to give organs to humanity? The novel by McCarthy asks about the world after a man-made disaster: what would happen if only a handful of men survived?.

If you want to know the answers to these questions, just look for them in those two novels, already two essential works of today’s literature.