A Review of Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara and the Sun is one of the few books that really moved me this summer. Set in the near future where AFs, or Artificial Friends, keep adolescents company, the novel follows one AF’s journey from a store in an unnamed city to a young girl’s house and beyond. In fact, the novel is told entirely from the AF’s — Klara’s — perspective, giving us an intimate view of her perceptions, thoughts, and feelings.
The sensitivity and nuance of Klara’s observations may come as a surprise. But once we understand that Klara’s purpose is to serve as a companion to a child or adolescent, we realize that her emotive capacity is essential. How else could Klara get along with her human owner, express empathy, and, above all, prevent them from becoming lonely?
The book is suspenseful, and I don’t want to give away too much of it. Along with Klara, we learn about a Western near-future in which many workers are ‘substituted’ by AI and become obsolete. Adolescents who haven’t been ‘lifted’ (made smarter, somehow) are already doomed to a life on the margins.
The book struck a chord with me, I think, because it expresses something about what it means to be replaceable and disposable, and expresses it in a way that is both timely and anachronistic.
We don’t learn a great deal about the speculative near-future Klara inhabits, but it seems to be one where loneliness and isolation have become the norm. The only ‘community’ mentioned by the character turns out to be a proto-fascist encampment outside established society. There are no communities in the mainstream.
At the same time, Klara is the kind of narrator we rarely find in contemporary fiction. She may be able to document and synthesize whatever she observes, but her perspective is naive and childlike. Her altruism, her desire to serve the adolescent girl who chose her, is so great that, in the hands of another writer, it would have surely sounded cloying or disingenuous. But, like Kafka, Ishiguro manages to make his non-human narrator appear the most human of his characters.
There’s an element of satire here, as in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” but unlike in that story, an indictment of a family’s shortcoming isn’t really the point. What stands out, rather, is the narrator’s kindness and her concern for the family’s well-being; this despite the family’s callous, and, at times, disturbing behavior.
Kindness is in short supply in Ishiguro’s harshly competitive world, as it is in ours. I would add also that is scarce in contemporary fiction — at least in the novels I happen to have read. For this reason I was sad to part with Klara at the end of the book. Artificial or not, this is an empathetic and caring narrator, the likes of which we’re unlikely to encounter any time soon.
