Klara And the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

“Until recently, I didn’t think that humans could choose loneliness. That there were sometimes forces more powerful than the wish to avoid loneliness.”

““Hope”, he said. “Damn thing never leaves you alone.””

“In the morning when the Sun returns. It’s possible for us to hope.”

In this dystopian, speculative novel, we see the world through the lens of Klara, an Artificial Friend specially designed to take care of teenagers. Her child-like curiosity about the world and its inhabitants makes us wonder about what makes us human and unique. Set in a world intentionally vague (it could be anytime, anywhere) Ishiguro invites us to think about Artificial Intelligence, gene-editing, mass redundancies, loneliness, faith, and hope.

Klara begins her days in a store with another android, Rosa, her friend, and Manager, a kind of mother figure. Through the window she observes how the humans interact and tries to learn their ways, always paying attention to the comings and goings of the Sun, a god-like figure for a solar-powered android like her.

Eventually, a woman buys her to take care of her sickly (thanks to genetic editing) daughter, Josie. It is among the members of this family that Klara learns the complexities of human emotions. Ironically, it’s her, the android, the one who seems the most human thanks to her empathy and her faith in the power of love to save us.

LRB

Critical perspective:

Klara and the Sun will be very familiar to fans of Ishiguro’s work, as he’s once again using a fabulistic, science-fiction lens to look at existential questions humanity has pondered for millennia. The nove lexplores what it means to be human through how we connect with others and come to understand ourselves. The questions are as compelling as they have always been, but occasionally this fabulistic framing becomes a crutch, as Ishiguro’s hand at times weighs a bit too heavy on the scale.

Klara, the novel’s eponymous main character and narrator is an AF, or “artificial friend”. AFs are solar-powered humanoid robots, designed to offer companionship to the children of parents who purchase them. The world of the novel seems to be a slightly more futuristic one than our own, though it’s characters seem as prone to isolation and loneliness as the people in our world, hence the AFs.

Klara’s perspective is critical for the novel, but this lens often feels like a weakness. Many scenes in the book involve Klara describing something she’s seen or heard, and then immediately musing about the events to other characters. While this is standard-fare for the modern novel, Klara often goes even further, detecting and relaying the emotions of the characters as they happen. After witnessing two elderly people embrace outside the store, Klara has this conversation with the manager:

“Those people seem so pleased to see each other,” Manager said. And I realized she’d been watching them as closely as I had. 

“Yes, they seem so happy,” I said. “But it’s strange because they also seem upset.”

“Oh, Klara,” Manager said quietly. “You never miss a thing, do you?” 

The novel is rife with similar scenes, and often I found the effect to be a bit heavy-handed, as Klara’s narration inherently leans heavily to the “tell” side of show and tell.

“Show don’t tell” is a flawed technique, and I certainly won’t be someone to extol its doctrine as the only way. However, one of the most beautiful things about art is the unique connection each individual has with a work, their interpretation of the piece, and how it relates to their own thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Leaning more into “telling” doesn’t shut this down, but in providing a singular interpretation—especially from a largely truthful narrator such as Klara—it does at least narrow down the massive perception an audience may have of a piece of work into a limited range.

There’s a balancing act going on in Klara and the Sun, between the subtext and the text. While Ishiguro has no qualms about being extremely forthcoming about the emotions characters are experiencing, he has managed to build a sense of intrigue under the surface. We’re never quite given the full picture behind the state of the world, nor Josie’s illness, or the death of her sister Sal, though again gene editing is implied to be the cause. These mysteries are deeply compelling, and they keep the pages turning.

In a way, Klara is reminiscent of Ishiguro’s earlier narrator character Mr. Stevens, from Remains of the Day. While Klara doesn’t serve the family in the same sense that Mr. Stevens does, her position within the family is something of a step below, and she considers it her mission in life to be as good of a friend to Josie as she can.

When the book manages to get out of it’s own way, the effect is stark, like layers of papers with patterns cut into them, forming a collage. The book opens up when given the space to breathe. But this makes it all the more frustrating in the doors Ishiguro closes, in the stilted dialogue between characters, in the unsurprising plot. Here, Ishiguro seems to be acting on his theory of storytelling more than ever before, which he described in his Nobel Lecture, saying, “This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?” I just wish at times the question wasn’t so direct.

The Difficult Balance of Text and Subtext in “Klara and the Sun” - Chicago Review of Books

“Ishiguro’s prose is soft and quiet. (...) He allows the story to unfold slowly and organically, revealing enough on every page to continue piquing the reader’s curiosity. The novel is an intriguing take on how artificial intelligence might play a role in our futures . . . a poignant meditation on love and loneliness.” —Maggie Sprayregen, The Associated Press

“Moving and beautiful. . . . An unequivocal return to form, a meditation in the subtlest shades on the subject of whether our species will be able to live with everything it has created. . . . [A] feverish read, [a] one-sitter. . . . Few writers who’ve ever lived have been able to create moods of transience, loss and existential self-doubt as Ishiguro has—not art about the feelings, but the feelings themselves.” —The Los Angeles Times

Klara and the Sun: A GMA Book Club Pick | Penguin Random House Higher Education

About the author:

Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-born British novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. He has been nominated for the 'Booker Prize' multiple times, winning it for 'The Remains of the Day' in 1989. He was only five when his parents moved to England, but had vivid images of an imaginary Japan around which he often builds his stories. His parents also took the responsibility of making young Kazuo aware of his Japanese roots. While he has little familiarity with Japanese fiction, he was slightly influenced by the writings of Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, and to a greater extent by films by Yasujirō Ozu and Mikio Naruse. Most of his novels are set in the backdrop of World War II, and are marked by his almost lyrical description of regret fused with optimism. All his novels, except 'The Buried Giant', are narrated in the first-person style, and his protagonists often exhibit human failings. He has been very vocal about the political turmoil in the recent times, expressing his fears for Britain after Brexit, and in his Noble acceptance speech, he said that he hopes to create a "positive atmosphere at a very uncertain time" through his works.

Kazuo Ishiguro Biography - Facts, Childhood, Family Life & Achievements of British Writer

Kazuo Ishiguro – Biographical - NobelPrize.org

Reviews by our book club members:

“Could we just be happy with a sunray coming through our window, or enjoying a wonderful sunset? Or do we moreover need the others’ or someone’s consideration, or even love. Have we become machines in a materialistic world or these machines will be the ones making people more human?

These are some of the questions we may personally wonder once we met Klara and all the humans -genetically altered, or not- around her. She is a specially sensitive AF (artificial friend) machine learning human behaviour and noticing how society is not caring about nature or feelings. And, at the very end, she finishes in a deposit, as many old people in resting or nursing homes.”

CJ

Praise: 

“One of the most affecting and profound novels Ishiguro has written. . . . I’ll go for broke and call Klara and the Sun a masterpiece that will make you think about life, mortality, the saving grace of love: in short, the all of it.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR

“A delicate, haunting story, steeped in sorrow and hope.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“What stays with you in ‘Klara and the Sun’ is the haunting narrative voice—a genuinely innocent, egoless perspective on the strange behavior of humans obsessed and wounded by power, status and fear.” —Booker Prize committee

“It aspires to enchantment, or to put it another way, reenchantment, the restoration of magic to a disenchanted world. Ishiguro drapes realism like a thin cloth over a primordial cosmos. Every so often, the cloth slips, revealing the old gods, the terrible beasts, the warring forces of light and darkness.” —Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic

“As with Ishiguro’s other works, the rich inner reflections of his protagonists offer big takeaways, and Klara’s quiet but astute observations of human nature land with profound gravity. . . . This dazzling genre-bending work is a delight.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“There is something so steady and beautiful about the way Klara is always approaching connection, like a Zeno’s arrow of the heart. People will absolutely love this book, in part because it enacts the way we learn how to love. Klara and the Sun is wise like a child who decides, just for a little while, to love their doll. ‘What can children know about genuine love?’ Klara asks. The answer, of course, is everything.” —Anne Enright, The Guardian

“Flawless. . . . This is a novel for fans of Never Let Me Go, with which it shares a DNA of emotional openness, the quality of letting us see ourselves from the outside, and a vision of humanity which—while not exactly optimistic—is tender, touching and true.” —John Self, The Times

Klara and the Sun: A GMA Book Club Pick | Penguin Random House Higher Education

Interviews:

• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro review – what it is to be human | Kazuo Ishiguro | The Guardian
• Kazuo Ishiguro on His New Novel 'Klara and the Sun' | TIME
• Kazuo Ishiguro: A Nobel Novelist Searches for Hope | The Agenda

In BP Ávila:

• In the catalogue: click here.
• In eBiblio: click here.