Klara and the Sun Review
Read my review of Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. This literary and speculative fiction novel was published in March 2021 and was our July book club pick.
Title: Klara and the Sun
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Pages: 320
Published: March 2021
Genre: Speculative fiction, literary fiction
Themes: Faith, Rationality, The Self, Love, Loneliness
Klara and the Sun tells a story from the perspective of an artificial intelligence named Klara as she helps a sickly child named Josie to reach adulthood. This novel—by Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro—is set a speculative future in which children have companions in the form of artificial friends (AF’s). Many jobs have already been substituted by AI, heavy pollution is prevalent, and there is a social ranking system. Children are tutored privately at home on computers and some have the advantage of being ‘lifted’, which can give children a better life, but also runs the risk of causing illness. An AF’s main purpose is to ward off the loneliness of her child, but Klara will go to great lengths to do not only that but attempt to save Josie’s life.
Although Klara and the Sun was a relatively quick read in terms of length, I consumed it over the course of a few weeks because it has a bit of a slow simmer. Ishiguro writes in his typical, soft-spoken style, revealing vague details about the world letting your imagination create the world with him. For Ishiguro, it’s always about the characters, and in this novel, his protagonist happens to be an artificial intelligence or AF that possesses exceptional skills of observation.
“I believe I have many feelings. The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me.” - Klara
The book sets up some really interesting questions for us to consider. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to have a self? Do only humans possess a self? While none of these questions are strictly answered, by the end of the novel I felt that Klara was real, someone to empathize with. She had her own inner world and her own feelings. The biggest strength of this novel is how well Ishiguro established a unique protagonist that senses the world in a different way.
The book did let me down in its lack of expansion on some of the ideas it worked so hard to set up. I would like to know at least a little more about the world or how AF’s came to be, even if the book is not meant to be hard science fiction. The ending felt a bit abrupt and even left me a bit melancholy.
I would recommend this book if you’re interested in reading something from a unique, non-human perspective. I also think this book does a great job of presenting an idea of what an emotional and spiritual artificial intelligence might look like. Overall Klara and the Sun is an enjoyable read that will start lots of great discussions about how to live.
For a more in-depth examination of the book read my literary analysis here.
For similar books, I recommend Never Let Me Go by the same author and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series.