Klara and the Sun - Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara and the Sun is my kind of novel, set in an undisclosed year in some near future in which the world resembles ours but is somehow changed; it forces us to look at the path we’re on and assess if it is indeed the right one. If you’ve read Ishiguro’s work, you’ll be familiar with the themes he’s exploring in Klara and the Sun, his first novel since winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017, and this latest novel shares certain thematic and structural similarities with Never Let Me Go and even, to a degree, The Remains of the Day.
In Klara and the Sun's opening pages, we are introduced to Klara, an AF (Artificial Friend) – a robot, for want of a better word – of incredible intelligence whose power source is the sun. We meet Klara as she is waiting to be chosen by customers passing in the window. Klara is very observant, and it’s her “job” to learn about humanity from her observations to be a better friend to the teenager who purchases her. As Josie chooses Klara, we learn the purpose of AFs is to provide company to young adults, and we learn more about the structure of the future world Ishiguro has built.
Ishiguro is a master of prose. It is always the powerful simplicity of his sentences that astound me; imbued with so much meaning, in such an understated, elegant way–he really is a pleasure to read. He also writes dystopia so well as his focus is always on the characters and their experiences of the world around them, rather than focussing on world-building or the info-dumping that is common with the genre. Not that Klara and the Sun is an out-and-out dystopia, but there are common tropes of the genre to be found here.
Without saying too much about the tightly structured plot, and the wonderful characters Ishiguro has created, it’s hard to review much detail. Still, I will say that this is a beautiful novel about what it means to love, from the perspective of a character that I truly warmed to.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5
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