The Giver (Lois Lowry, 1993)

When defining the "classic", one often must apply an arbitrary cutoff date. A book simply cannot be a classic if it hasn't endured a minimally prescribed test of time. My postgrad ongoing classics reading has taken me as far back as 1813's Pride and Prejudice, and, until now, as late as 1989's The Joy Luck Club. I have generally viewed 1990 as a respectable barrier. With The Giver, this barrier has been toppled. Put in perspective as well that the volume of Novels for Students this book appeared in was probably from around 1998, so at the tender age of five this novel was already required reading in schools. While I have kept a mental list of classics I missed because my school was trying to be edgy and different (it was the early 1990's), I can legitimately say I never read The Giver in high school because I had practically graduated by the time it was published.

The Giver has been hailed as one of the first YA dystopias, a now-flourishing genre about hi-tech gladiator-style last-man-standing melees, the moon screwing up the Earth, and people dying from runaway fountain-of-youth treatments. And those are just the ones I've read. The Giver, in a clever move all of its own, present a utopian world so extreme it is actually a horrifying dystopia. In fact, the stunning lack of perception by the characters goes beyond the moral and straight to the physical. I can't say more without wrapping this whole post in spoiler alerts, but Lois Lowry's narrative is confined by what her protagonist can observe. This is why Hollywood didn't pump out a movie before the ink dried on this book. Basically, a scene-for-scene adaption would be totally stupid since Lowry is using the reader's own vision of the world of The Giver, while a movie provides a common visual for all who watch it. Since the movie wasn't universally panned, I suppose they found a way to address this, but not to everyone's satisfaction. I guess I'll just to need to watch (and judge) for myself.

As for my own thoughts on the book, like many, I was confounded by the ending, but unless you are the hero of TNT drama, you probably aren't going to be able to fix an entire broken world. Probably the best feature of the book is the narration itself. We learn as we read just how handicapped Jonas really is because of the utopia/dystopia that has formed him. Undoubtedly the book's intended audience in young adults, so the worldviews are more black and white than equivalent literature for adult readers. If you are under 30, you've probably already read this book already. For the over-30 crowd, enjoy the opportunity to read a young classic without it being force-fed to you.