Klara and the Sun

Paperback

Published March 1, 2021 by FABER ET FABER.

ISBN:
978-0-571-36488-6
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3 stars (13 reviews)

Klara and the Sun is the eighth novel by the Nobel Prize-winning British writer Kazuo Ishiguro, published on 2 March 2021. It is a dystopian science fiction story. Set in the U.S. in an unspecified future, the book is told from the point of view of Klara, a solar-powered AF (Artificial Friend), who is chosen by Josie, a sickly child, to be her companion. The novel was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize.

9 editions

Missed Opportunities

2 stars

The premise is beautiful, it hints at deep reflections about being human, but it didn't work for me. The dialogues were super weird and unnatural, they really bothered me. I missed more exploration of the technology behind the Artificial Friends (AF) and how they worked. Was Klara all mechanical? Was she an android? I wasn't convinced that AF's would find mystical significance in the Sun. The story hints at several themes but never really goes deep: environmental pollution, empathy, robots taking over human jobs, loneliness, gene editing, social class privilege. The plot is super simple and predictable, and the ending was very bleh. Probably not my thing.

A very readable journey

4 stars

A very readable journey into a possible future. A very interesting narrator, an artificially intelligent humanoid with good observational abilities but limited reasoning, which ultimately allows her to draw some curious and false conclusions.

Minor things about the proposed future slightly irk, for example we seem to have autonomous artificial friends, but driving is still something done by humans. Walking around is likely more difficult to automate than driving around, though companionship does not appear to be as difficult as we might have thought/hoped. That said, the future inhabitants all have something called an 'oblong', which seems to be roughly a futuristic smart phone. Do we then really need the artificial friends to be humanoid in look? Why can the artificial friend not simply be interfaced with through the oblong? Lastly, it seems that the artificial friends can perform chores if asked, why then does the main family still have …

Surprisingly underwhelming

3 stars

  • I listened to this as an audiobook, my first checked out from Libby.
  • I liked the narrator's voice and felt it was generally quite well to meet the range of voices for the characters.
  • The book took too long to build up and the ending was too abstract and fell apart.
  • I also generally didn't like or understand why the characters were selected with the traits they had.
  • Some of the dialogue felt well played, while others felt jarring
  • In the end, my favorite part is Klara's relationship with the sun, which goes for the most part unexplored with other characters. This book has vague environmentalist themes.
  • many of the tropes that show up in this book I feel, have been better expressed in other works I've read.
  • I think this book would be fine for a middle schooler as it goes generally without much complexity with its readability. Though …

An amazing book; can I have more stars to give it?

5 stars

This is one of those very rare books that reminds me of what books are at some level all about. That makes me want to go about and knock about two stars off of 99% of my prior book ratings, to make room to properly differentiate this one.

It's hard to say too much that's concrete, without giving it away. I was closer to tears at the end of this than I can remember with any book for a long time. Not easy maudlin tears, but deep oh-my-god tears about what a universe this is.

The people are very fully people; the viewpoint character is not a person, but ... well, that would be a spoiler also. But the viewpoint it gives her allows Ishiguro to say some amazing and touching and true and thought-provoking things without coming out and saying them (because nothing he could come out and say …

Worthwhile but not one of my recent favs

3 stars

Content warning Ending mention