klara and the sun book review guardian

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro review – another masterpiece

The Booker winner’s brilliant eighth novel expands on his theme of what it means to be not-quite-human, exploring love and loyalty through the eyes of an android

I n a 2015 interview with the Guardian , Kazuo Ishiguro revealed what he claimed was his “ dirty secret ”: that his novels are more alike than they might initially seem. “I tend to write the same book over and over,” he said. It seemed a particularly ludicrous statement from a writer who had just followed a clone romance ( Never Let Me Go ) with an Arthurian epic ( The Buried Giant ). With Klara and the Sun , his eighth novel, though, it feels like Ishiguro is bringing that dirty secret slightly more into the light. This is a book – a brilliant one, by the way – that feels very much of a piece with Never Let Me Go , again exploring what it means to be not-quite-human, drawing its power from the darkest shadows of the uncanny valley.

Klara is an AF – an Artificial Friend – androids bought by parents to provide companionship for their teenage children, who, for reasons that become clearer over the course of the book, are home-schooled by “screen professors” in the novel’s polluted and anxious future America. Klara is chosen by Josie, a fragile young woman who we soon learn has an illness that may kill her as it killed her sister. As with Never Let Me Go , one of the enormous pleasures of Klara and the Sun is the way Ishiguro only drip-feeds to the reader hints and suggestions about the shape of this futuristic world, the reasons for its strangeness. We are left to do much of the imagining ourselves, and this makes the novel a satisfyingly collaborative read.

Josie and her mother take solar-powered Klara from the department store where she had spent her days being moved from one stand to another, watching the sun on its path across the shop floor, to a house in the countryside. Here we become aware of one of the quirks of the novel: AFs see things differently to humans, perceiving the world as a series of squares or boxes, occasionally glitching out so that perspectives are skewed, everything given a migraine-ish slant. It’s just one of a series of ways in which Ishiguro takes us into the existence of the sentient non-human, one of the subtle touches that hint towards the deeper themes that are being explored.

We learn a little more about the nightmarish scientism of this world when we meet Rick, Josie’s neighbour, who lives with his mother in the only house for miles around. Rick is decent, devoted to Josie, an amateur designer of drones. He is, though, not one of the “lifted” – the genetically improved “high-rank” class – and therefore denied access to the life of education and advancement that, should she survive, lies ahead for Josie. It’s only towards the end of the novel that we understand the terrible lottery that parents in this world face, the risks they take in search of genetic perfection. In Josie’s sick room, she and Rick undertake an odd ritual reminiscent of the students’ paintings in Never Let Me Go . Josie draws caricatures of people and Rick writes thought bubbles for them, telling deep truths about the frantic, frazzled adults, the lonely, sickly children. These sketches soon take on a deep symbolic import, a representation of the power of art to express the unsaid.

Klara’s voice has the same beguiling simplicity that we found in Kathy H in Never Let Me Go , the same mixture of intelligence and naivety. Ishiguro has clearly thought hard about those elements of a nascent mechanical consciousness that would be more or less developed, about what faith would look like to an android mind, or love, or loyalty. It’s the contemporary resonances that hit hardest in the novel, though. Ishiguro had apparently almost finished the novel when the pandemic hit, yet on almost every page there’s a passage that feels eerily prescient of our locked-down, stressed-out, mysophobic times. Indeed, the narrative of Klara and the Sun is energised by the friction between two different types of love: one that is selfish, overprotective and anxious, and one that is generous, open and benevolent. It feels like a message for all of us as we go about our drearily circumscribed days.

Never Let Me Go and The Buried Giant were both, for all their differences in setting and subject matter, dark allegories that spoke about the danger of unchecked technological advances, the loss of innocence, the dignity of simple lives. It’s strange, but Klara and the Sun makes the links between those previous two novels more apparent, suggesting that the three books could almost be read as a trilogy. What’s beyond doubt is that Ishiguro has written another masterpiece, a work that makes us feel afresh the beauty and fragility of our humanity.

• Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Observer
• Artificial intelligence (AI)

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

Advertisement

Supported by

A Humanoid Who Cares For Humans, From the Mind of Kazuo Ishiguro

• Share full article

• Apple Books
• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

By Radhika Jones

• Published Feb. 23, 2021 Updated March 1, 2021

KLARA AND THE SUN By Kazuo Ishiguro

About halfway through “Klara and the Sun,” a woman meeting Klara for the first time blurts out the kind of quiet-part-out-loud line we rely on to get our bearings in a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. “One never knows how to greet a guest like you,” she says. “After all, are you a guest at all? Or do I treat you like a vacuum cleaner?”

This is Ishiguro’s eighth novel, and Klara, who narrates it, is an Artificial Friend, a humanoid machine — short dark hair; kind eyes; distinguished by her powers of observation — who has come to act as companion for 14-year-old Josie. Like that childhood stalwart Corduroy, she’d been sitting in a store, hoping to be chosen by the right child. AFs aren’t tutors. They’re not babysitters (though they’re sometimes chaperones), nor servants (though they’re expected to take commands). They’re nominally friends, but not equals. “You said you’d never get an AF,” Josie’s friend Rick says, accusingly — which makes Klara the mark of some rite of passage they didn’t want to accede to. Her ostensible purpose is to help get Josie through the lonely and difficult years until college. They are lonely because in Josie’s world, most kids don’t go to school but study at home using “oblongs.” They are difficult because Josie suffers from an unspecified illness, about which her mother projects unspecified guilt.

“Klara and the Sun” takes place in the uncomfortably near future, and banal language is redeployed with sinister portent. Elite workers have been “substituted,” their labor now performed by A.I. Clothing and houses are described as “high-rank.” Privileged children are “lifted,” a process meant to optimize them for success. Readers of Ishiguro’s 2005 novel “Never Let Me Go” will viscerally recall the sense of foreboding all this awakens. If I am being cagey about it, it’s to preserve that effect. But for the inhabitants of the novel, the older generation of whom remember the way things were, these conditions have been normalized, to use the banal language of our own era. Here is Josie’s father, a former engineer: “Honestly? I think the substitutions were the best thing that happened to me. … I really believe they helped me to distinguish what’s important from what isn’t. And where I live now, there are many fine people who feel exactly the same way.” Through Klara, we pick up bits of overheard conversation: a mention of “fascistic leanings” here; a reference to Josie’s mysteriously departed sister there; the woman outside the playhouse who protests Klara’s presence: “First they take the jobs. Now they take the seats at the theater?”

[ “Klara and the Sun” was one of our most anticipated books of March. See the full list . ]

For four decades now, Ishiguro has written eloquently about the balancing act of remembering without succumbing irrevocably to the past. Memory and the accounting of memory, its burdens and its reconciliation, have been his subjects. With “Klara and the Sun,” I began to see how he has mastered the adjacent theme of obsolescence. What is it like to inhabit a world whose mores and ideas have passed you by? What happens to the people who must be cast aside in order for others to move forward? The climax of “The Remains of the Day” (1989), Ishiguro’s perfect, Booker Prize-winning novel, pivots on a butler’s realization that his whole life has been wasted in service of a Nazi sympathizer. (“I gave my best to Lord Darlington. I gave him the very best I had to give and now — well — I find I do not have a great deal more left to give.”) A subplot in Ishiguro’s first novel, “A Pale View of Hills” (1982), involves an older teacher in postwar Nagasaki whose former student renounces his way of thinking. “I don’t doubt you were sincere and hard working,” the former student tells him. “I’ve never questioned that for one moment. But it just so happens that your energies were spent in a misguided direction, an evil direction.” In “Never Let Me Go,” clones “complete” after fulfilling their biological purpose. In “Klara and the Sun,” obsolescence reaches its mass conclusion: Whole classes of workers have been replaced by machines, which themselves are subject to replacement. It nearly happens to Klara. In the story’s first section, a new, improved model of AF arrives and bumps her to the back of the store.

[ Read the Magazine’s profile of Ishiguro . ]

“Klara and the Sun” lands in a pandemic world, in which vaccines hold the promise of salvation but the reality of thousands of deaths a day persists, and a substantial portion of the American population deludes itself into thinking it isn’t happening. Our own children have been learning on oblongs and in isolation. The crisis of this novel revolves around whether Josie, with Klara’s help, will recover from her illness — and whether, if Josie doesn’t recover, her mother, with Klara’s help, will survive the loss. It turns out that to “lift” her daughter, to ensure Josie will thrive amid her world’s “savage meritocracies” (I’m quoting from Ishiguro’s 2017 Nobel lecture , an enlightening document as to his state of mind), her mother has knowingly risked Josie’s health, her happiness, her very life — a calculation that sounds terrible on paper until one realizes how common it already is.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

• print archive
• digital archive
• book review

[types field='book-title'][/types]  [types field='book-author'][/types]

Knopf, 2021

Contributor Bio

Hamilton cain, more online by hamilton cain.

• I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
• To Paradise
• Bewilderment
• The Living Sea of Waking Dreams
• Hades, Argentina

Klara and the Sun

By kazuo ishiguro, reviewed by hamilton cain.

Ridley Scott’s stylish and unnerving Blade Runner was about synthetic humans known as “replicants.” In Klara and the Sun —the first novel he’s published since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017—Kazuo Ishiguro does Scott one better with a replicant narrator straddling the line between her human and mannequin selves, dependent on the “nourishing” of an anthropomorphized Sun.

Ishiguro poses the question of what it means to be fully human. As with Blade Runner , the novel is set in the near future, but with familiar details. Teenagers slurp yogurt while playing with laptop-like devices called “oblongs;” flocks of “machine birds” fly around outside, not quite visible from the “Open Plan” living rooms indoors.

The eponymous Klara is an Artificial Friend, or AF, designed to attend to the needs of teenagers; a confidante-handmaiden hybrid. As the novel opens, she’s on sale in the window of an AF shop, where her almost-human traits are cultivated by the kindly Manager. Klara’s life changes in more ways than one when a middle-aged woman purchases her for Josie, her thin, chronically ill daughter. Klara feels a pang of tenderness as she watches the two of them.

The Mother by this time was standing right behind Josie …. From a distance, I’d first thought her a younger woman, but when she was closer I could see the deep etches around her mouth, and also a kind of angry exhaustion in her eyes. I noticed too that when the Mother reached out to Josie from behind, the outstretched arm hesitated in the air, almost retracting, before coming forward to rest on her daughter’s shoulder.

When she goes to live with them in the country, Klara bonds with Josie and learns to avoid the austere Melania Housekeeper, apparently a refugee from eastern Europe. Ishiguro’s world-building here is clever: we may be in the English countryside, or in North America, or even Australia. The looseness of setting and action builds momentum. An awkward teenaged social known as an “interaction meeting,” a failed outing to a waterfall, a mysterious barn, Josie’s decline—all draw Klara into the maze of human affairs. She’s confused but seeks clarity, and in this regard seems more authentic than the people around her. In fact, there’s nothing artificial about Klara at all.

She proves a generous guide to the complex world she was never intended to grasp. We lean on her centeredness and moral candor as the events of the novel spin out of control. Her affectless tone is more affecting than the bullying of Josie’s male peers or even Josie’s sporadic outbursts. Piece by piece, Klara absorbs the peculiarities of the human heart, not unlike the way she soaks up sunlight.

Not only had I learned that “changes” were a part of Josie, and that I should be ready to accommodate them, I’d begun to understand also that this wasn’t a trait peculiar just to Josie; that people often felt the need to prepare a side of themselves to display to passers-by—as they might in a store window—and such a display needn’t be taken so seriously once the moment had passed.

Klara, then, is a philosopher for our own chaotic moment, when our lives seem less real, more vulnerable, and more reliant on technology than ever. Ishiguro’s satire would fall flat, except that we care deeply about Klara and her benevolent Sun.

Ishiguro draws on a range of literary influences in Klara and the Sun , from George Saunders’s iconic short story, “The Semplica-Girl Diaries,” to Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me , and even his own Never Let Me Go . This novel may not reach the heights of The Remains of the Day , but the meticulous fleshing out of his narrator reveals his true purpose: he’s urging us to jettison Twitter characters for real-life ones, to reject online dramas for the richer tensions beyond our screens.

Published on April 13, 2021

Like what you've read? Share it!

The Radiant Inner Life of a Robot

Kazuo Ishiguro returns to masters and servants with a story of love between a machine and the girl she belongs to.

This article was published online on March 2, 2021.

G irl AF Klara , an Artificial Friend sold as a children’s companion, lives in a store. On lucky days, Klara gets to spend time in the store window, where she can see and be seen and soak up the solar energy on which she runs. Not needing human food, Klara hungers and thirsts for the Sun (she capitalizes it) and what he (she also personifies it) allows her to see. She tracks his passage along the floorboards and the buildings across the street and drinks in the scenes he illuminates. Klara registers details that most people miss and interprets them with an accuracy astonishing for an android out of the box. A passing Boy AF lags a few steps behind his child, and his weary gait makes her wonder what it would be like “to know that your child didn’t want you.” She keeps watch over a beggar and his dog, who lie so still in a doorway that they look like garbage bags. They must have died, she thinks. “I felt sadness then,” she says, “despite it being a good thing that they’d died together, holding each other and trying to help one another.”

Klara is the narrator and hero of Klara and the Sun , Kazuo Ishiguro’s eighth novel. Ishiguro is known for skipping from one genre to the next , although he subordinates whatever genre he chooses to his own concerns and gives his narrators character-appropriate versions of his singular, lightly formal diction. I guess you could call this novel science fiction. It certainly makes a contribution to the centuries-old disputation over whether machines have the potential to feel. This debate has picked up speed as the artificially intelligent agents built by actual engineers close in on the ones made up by writers and TV, film, and theater directors, the latest round in the game of tag between science and science fiction that has been going on at least since Frankenstein . Klara is Alexa, super-enhanced. She’s the product that roboticists in a field called affective computing (also known as artificial emotional intelligence) have spent the past two decades trying to invent. Engineers have written software that can detect fine shades of feeling in human voices and faces, but so far they have failed to contrive machines that can simulate emotions convincingly.

From the November 2018 issue: Alexa, should we trust you?

What makes Klara an imaginary entity, at least until reality catches up with her, is that her feelings are not simulated. They’re real. We know this because she experiences pathos, a quality still seemingly impervious to computational analysis—although as a naive young robot, she does have to break it down before she can understand it. A disheveled old man stands on the far side of the street, waving and calling to an old woman on the near side. The woman goes stock-still, then crosses tentatively to him, and they cling to each other. Klara can tell that the man’s tightly shut eyes convey contradictory emotions. “They seem so happy,” she says to the store manager, or as Klara fondly calls this kindly woman, Manager. “But it’s strange because they also seem upset.”

“Oh, Klara,” Manager says. “You never miss a thing, do you?” Perhaps the man and woman hadn’t seen each other in a long time, she says. “Do you mean, Manager, that they lost each other?” Klara asks. Girl AF Rosa, Klara’s best friend, is bewildered. What are they talking about? But Klara considers it her duty to empathize. If she doesn’t, she thinks, “I’d never be able to help my child as well as I should.” And so she gives herself the task of imagining loss. If she lost and then found Rosa, would she feel the same joy mixed with pain?

She would and she will, and not just with respect to Rosa. The nonhuman Klara is more human than most humans. She has, you might say, a superhuman humanity. She’s also Ishiguro’s most luminous character, literally a creature of light, dependent on the Sun. Her very name means “brightness.” But mainly, Klara is incandescently good. She’s like the kind, wise beasts endowed with speech at the dawn of creation in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia. Or, with her capacity for selfless love, like a character in a Hans Christian Andersen story.

To be clear, Klara is no shrinking mermaid. Her voice is very much her own. It may strike the ear as childlike, but she speaks in prose poetry. As the Sun goes on his “journey,” the sky assumes the hues of the mood in the house that Klara winds up in. It’s “the color of the lemons in the fruit bowl,” or “the gray of the slate chopping boards,” or the mottled shades of vomit or diarrhea or streaks of blood. The Sun peers through the floor-to-ceiling windows in a living room and pours his nourishment on the children sprawled there. When he sinks behind a barn, Klara asks if that’s where the stairs to the underworld are. Klara has gaps in her vocabulary, so she invents names and adjectives that speak unwitting truths. Outfits aren’t stylish; they’re “high-ranking.” Humans stare into “oblongs,” an aptly leaden term for our stupefying devices. Klara’s descriptive passages have a strange and lovely geometry. Her visual system processes stimuli by “partitioning” them, that is, mapping them onto a two-dimensional grid before resolving them into objects in three-dimensional space. At moments of high emotion, her partitioning becomes disjointed and expressive, a robot cubism.

In keeping with the novel’s fairy-tale logic, a girl named Josie stops in front of the window, and where other children see a fancy toy, she recognizes a kindred spirit. She begs her mother to buy Klara, but her mother resists. Klara is a B2 model, fast growing obsolete. A shipment of B3s has already arrived at the store. B2s are known for empathy, Manager says. Still, wouldn’t Josie prefer the latest model? the mother asks. The answer is no, and Klara happily joins the family.

Klara’s sojourn in Josie’s home gives the novel room to explore Ishiguro’s abiding preoccupations. One of these is service—what it does to the souls of those who give it and those who receive it, how power deforms and powerlessness cripples. In The Remains of the Day , for instance , Stevens, a butler in one of England’s great houses, worships his former master in the face of damning truths about the man’s character. Stevens grows so adept at quashing doubts about the value of a life spent in his master’s employ that he seems too numb to recognize love when it is offered to him, or to realize that he loves in return.

An adjacent leitmotif in Ishiguro’s fiction subjects the parent-child relationship to scrutiny. What are children for? Do their begetters care for them, or expect to be cared for by them, or both at once? The answers are clear in Never Let Me Go , a novel about clones given a quasi-normal childhood in a shabby-genteel boarding school cum gulag, then killed for their organs. Klara and the Sun resists conclusions. Parents are at once domineering and dependent. They want to believe they are devoted, but wind up monstrous instead. Children are grateful and forgiving, even though they know, perhaps without knowing that they know, that they’re on their own. Josie is lucky to have Klara, who acts like a parent as well as a beloved friend. But who will take care of Klara when and if she’s no longer needed?

Ishiguro’s theme of themes, however, is love. The redemptive power of true love comes under direct discussion here and in Never Let Me Go , but crops up in his other novels too. Does such love exist? Can it really save us?

From the May 2005 issue: A review of Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’

Critics often note Ishiguro’s use of dramatic irony, which allows readers to know more than his characters do. And it can seem as if his narrators fail to grasp the enormity of the injustices whose details they so meticulously describe. But I don’t believe that his characters suffer from limited consciousness. I think they have dignity. Confronted by a complete indifference to their humanity, they choose stoicism over complaint. We think we grieve for them more than they grieve for themselves, but more heartbreaking is the possibility that they’re not sure we differ enough from their overlords to understand their true sorrow. And maybe we don’t, and maybe we can’t. Maybe that’s the real irony, the way Ishiguro sticks in the shiv.

Girl AF Klara is both the embodiment of the dehumanized server and its refutation. On the one hand, she’s a thing, an appliance. “Are you a guest at all? Or do I treat you like a vacuum cleaner?” asks a woman whose home she enters. On the other hand, Klara overlooks nothing, feels everything, and, like her predecessors among Ishiguro’s protagonists, leaves us to guess at the breadth of her understanding. Her thoughts are both transparent and opaque. She either withholds or is simply not engineered to pass judgment on humans. After all, she is categorically other. Her personality is algorithmic, not neurological.

She does perceive that something bad is happening to Josie. The girl is wasting away. It turns out that she is suffering from the side effects of being “lifted,” a Panglossian term for genetic editing, done to boost intelligence, or at least academic performance. Among the many pleasures of Klara and the Sun is the savagery of its satire of the modern meritocracy. Inside Josie’s bubble of privilege, being lifted is the norm. Parents who can afford to do it do, because unlifted children have a less than 2 percent chance of getting into a decent university. The lifted study at home. Old-fashioned schools aren’t advanced enough; at 13, Josie does mathematical physics and other college-level subjects with a rotating cast of “oblong tutors.” Josie’s neighbor and best friend, Rick, who has shown signs of genius in his home engineering experiments, has not been lifted, which means he will not be encouraged to cultivate his talent and is already a pariah. At one point, Josie persuades Rick to accompany her to the “interaction meeting” that homeschooled children are required to attend to develop their social skills, of which they have few. Unsurprisingly, the augmented children bully the non-augmented one. Meanwhile, out in the hall, their mothers discuss the servant problem (“The best housekeepers still come from Europe”) and cluck about Rick’s parents. Why didn’t they do it? Did they lose their nerve?

Josie’s and Rick’s parents leave Klara to perform the emotional labor they aren’t up to. Rick’s mother suffers from a mysterious condition, possibly alcoholism, that requires him to take care of her. Josie’s father is not around. He and her mother have divorced; he has been “substituted”—another euphemism, meaning “lost his job”—and has abandoned the upper-middle class to join what sounds like an anarchist community. Josie’s mother pursues her career and devotes her remaining energy to a blinding self-pity. She feels guilt about what she’s done to Josie and resents having to feel it; she’s already working on a scheme that will lessen her grief should Josie die. (This involves a more malign form of robotics.)

We can tell that she makes Klara uncomfortable, because every time Klara senses that things are not as they should be, she starts partitioning like mad. At one point, Klara and “the Mother,” as Klara calls her—the definite article keeps the woman at arm’s length—undertake an expedition to a waterfall, leaving Josie behind because she’s too weak to go. Being alone with the Mother is disconcerting enough, but when they arrive at their destination, the Mother leans in close to make a disturbing request. Suddenly her face breaks into eight large boxes, while the waterfall recedes into a grid at the edge of Klara’s vision. Each box of eyes expresses a different emotion. “In one, for instance, her eyes were laughing cruelly, but in the next they were filled with sadness,” Klara reports.

Klara’s optical responses to right and wrong are the affective computer’s version of an innate morality—her unnatural natural law. They’re also another way that Ishiguro turns robot stereotypes on their head. Many hands have been wrung (including mine) about nanny bots and animatronic pets or pals, which will be, or so we prognosticators have fretted, soulless and servile. They’ll spoil the children. But Klara does nothing of the sort. She’ll carry out orders if they’re reasonable and issued politely, but she does not respond to rude commands, and she is anything but spineless. No one instructs her to try to find a cure for Josie; she does that on her own. Everyone except Klara and Rick seems resigned to the girl’s decline. The problem is that the plan of action Klara comes up with is so bizarre that the reader may suspect her software is glitching.

Oddly enough, given its subject matter, Klara and the Sun doesn’t induce the shuddery, uncanny-valley sensation that makes Never Let Me Go such a satisfying horror story. For one thing, although Klara never describes her own appearance, we deduce from the fact that humans immediately know she’s an AF that she isn’t humanoid enough to be creepy. (Clones, by contrast, pass for human, because they are human.) Moreover, this novel’s alternate universe isn’t all that alternate. Yes, lifting has made the body more cyborgian while androids have become more anthropoid, but we’ve been experiencing that role reversal for some time now. Otherwise, the setting parallels our own: It has the same extreme inequalities of wealth and opportunity, the same despoiled environment, the same deteriorating urban space. Even the sacrifice of children to parental fears about loss of status seems sadly familiar.

And Klara and the Sun doesn’t strive for uncanniness. 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. The custom of performing possibly lethal prosthetic procedures on one’s own offspring bears a family resemblance to immolating them on behalf of the god Moloch.

We can perceive monstrosity (or fail to perceive it), but Klara can see monsters. Crossing a field on the way to the waterfall with the Mother, Klara spots a bull, and grows so alarmed that she cries out. Not that she hadn’t seen photos of bulls before, but this creature

gave, all at once, so many signals of anger and the wish to destroy. Its face, its horns, its cold eyes watching me all brought fear into my mind, but I felt something more, something stranger and deeper. At that moment it felt to me some great error had been made that the creature should be allowed to stand in the Sun’s pattern at all, that this bull belonged somewhere deep in the ground far within the mud and darkness, and its presence on the grass could only have awful consequences.

Klara is allowed to stand in the pattern of the Sun. Ishiguro has anointed her, a high-tech consumer product, the improbable priestess of something very like an ancient nature cult. Gifted with a rare capacity for reverence, she tries always to remember to thank the Sun for sustaining her. Her faith in him is total. When Klara needs help, she goes to the barn where she believes he sets, and there she has the AI equivalent of visions. Old images of the store jostle against the barn’s interior walls. So do new ones: Rosa lies on the ground in distress. Klara fears that her petition may have angered the Sun, but then the glow of the sunset takes on “an almost gentle aspect.” A piece of furniture from the store, the Glass Display Trolley, rises before her, as if assumed into the sky. The robot has spoken with her god, and he has answered: “I could tell that the Sun was smiling towards me kindly as he went down for his rest.”

All fiction is an exercise in world-building, but science fiction lays new foundations, and that means shattering the old ones. It partakes of creation, but also of destruction. Klara trails a radiance that calls to mind the radiance also shed by Victor Frankenstein’s creature. He is another intelligent newborn in awe of God’s resplendence, until a vengeful rage at his abusive creator overcomes him. In Klara and the Sun , Ishiguro leaves us suspended over a rift in the presumptive order of things. Whose consciousness is limited, ours or a machine’s? Whose love is more true? If we ever do give robots the power to feel the beauty and anguish of the world we bring them into, will they murder us for it or lead us toward the light?

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

BOSTON'S PREMIER ONLINE ARTS MAGAZINE

Spring 2024 Appeal - Keep the Fuse lit!

Book Review: “Klara and the Sun” — Dystopia Yes, But There’s Hope

Klara and the Sun is a dystopian novel worth recommending: it is a thought-provoking  joy to read

Klara and The Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. Knopf,  303 pages. $28.

What is the biggest challenge we are faced with? Is it the climate crisis? Reducing the growing disparity between the rich and the poor? President Biden appears to be poised to begin to tackle these two horrific problems. Author Kazuo Ishiguro, however, has referred to climate change as “just an energy problem.” In the Nobel laureate’s new novel, Klara and the Sun , he invites us to consider two other developing challenges: artificial intelligence and gene editing, both of which he believes are “out of our control.” The disparity between the rich and the poor also figures in his novel as well.

You may remember candidate Andrew Yang in the last presidential primary debates raising the issue of all the jobs that would be lost to automation. His answer was the establishment of a universal basic income for workers who will be replaced by robotics and artificial intelligence (although, to my mind, that doesn’t really solve the problem). In a recent report, the World Economic Forum concluded that “a new generation of smart machines, fueled by rabid advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, could potentially replace a large proportion of existing jobs.” About 85 million jobs by 2025!

And what’s the downside of gene editing? Scientists have already helped some cancer patients using CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats). They’ve cured mice of AIDS through the use of CRISPR. And in 2018 a scientist in China used the technique on babies in embryo to protect them from contracting AIDS. He is serving a three-year prison sentence. But that punishment is not going to stop the coming demand for gene editing because people with the means to pay are going to have the health, the intelligence, and the appearance of their children enhanced.

Klara and the Sun is set in the foreseeable future. The novel is written in the first person from the point of view of Klara, who is an AF or artificial friend to Josie, an adolescent girl and member of an upper class whose children are “lifted” by gene editing. Josie needs a “friend” because she leads an isolated life in the country with her “high-ranking” mother and a housekeeper. She is educated through online tutors. Josie is also pampered because gene-editing has left her physically disabled with what sounds like muscular dystrophy.

In an interview in The Guardian , Ishiguro says he was thinking of writing Klara and the Sun as a children’s book. The story’s direct, uncomplicated style reflects that original inclination. Klara’s narrative point of view is that of a bright, caring adolescent who discovers the world through loving observation; she learns about people through careful interaction. Klara is programmed to be a friend; her disposition is similar to that of the boy in Steven Spielberg’s film AI. But in that movie the artificial male is much nicer than the humans, just as in the original Blade Runner the replicants are considerably more humane than the frightened men who are hunting them down. Ishiguro’s characters are, on the other hand, all sympathetic. And the common thread they share with Klara is an appealing sense of hope. So, even though the future that Ishiguro imagines is dystopian, the people, whether they are high-ranking or the others who have been left behind in the technological revolution, are likable. Klara, for example, is willing to put herself at risk in order to help her owner, Josie. And she remains optimistic, despite a number of setbacks.

Ishiguro was born in Japan. His father, a scientist, moved the family to London when the writer was five years old. He is the author of eight books, including 2005’s similarly dystopian-themed Never Let Me Go now. In both of these novels he brings adroit characterization and plotting to what has been (unfairly) dismissed as “genre fiction” (sci-fi). He knows how to generate suspense — what happens throughout the story is surprising, though in retrospect it all seems inevitable. He also creates complex figures with vibrant inner lives. Klara and the Sun is a thought-provoking joy to read.

Ed Meek is the author of High Tide (poems) and Luck (short stories).

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Recent posts, jazz album review: david murray’s “francesca” — antic and intense, book review: “big fiction” — is the author hive-mind or queen bee, film review: “kinds of kindness” – yorgos is as good as mine, jazz commentary: celebrating bassist william parker’s lifetime of achievement, weekly feature: poetry at the arts fuse.

Review: Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel is one of his very best

• Copy Link URL Copied!

On the Shelf

Klara and the Sun

By Kazuo Ishiguro Knopf: 320 pages, $28 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

How will computers remember this time? Assuming they achieve consciousness in some form — what’s usually called the singularity — then we are currently inhabiting their prehistory. The first machines with affect and consciousness will be confronted with an enormous record of their ancestry, but only humans upon whom to model their behavior. And we are an error-prone bunch, mercurial, confusing, not notably peaceable. Baffling, even.

This is the subject of Kazuo Ishiguro ’s moving and beautiful new novel, “ Klara and the Sun .” Many novelists have grappled with it, but Ishiguro is not many other novelists. “A painting is not a picture of an experience,” the artist Mark Rothko once said, “it’s the experience.” Ishiguro’s books are the experience.

His first two novels, “ A Pale View of Hills ” and “ An Artist of the Floating World ,” both had as their subject Japan, the country from which he moved to England when he was 5. (His father was an oceanographer, a profession — with its suggestion of deep soundings, its interest in the unknown — that seemed to have a lineal relationship with his son’s searching fiction.) These first books are magnificent — no apprenticeship, straight to mastery — and established Ishiguro’s familiar style, in which a narrator gradually tries to piece together enigmatic events that may be central to his or her identity.

Gaining in reputation, the author then settled into a run of greatness with few parallels among living writers: “ The Remains of the Day ,” “ The Unconsoled ,” “ When We Were Orphans ” and “ Never Let Me Go ” — four novels, each with an argument to be a masterpiece. The first made him famous; the second is a difficult but rewarding favorite of some readers, myself included; the third is a furious laceration of imperialism, oft-misunderstood; and as for “ Never Let Me Go ,” it is probably, thus far, the most important English-language novel of the new century.

It’s also the Ishiguro novel closest in theme and tone to “Klara and the Sun.” Both are about what we can hold on to as “human” once the idea of being a human begins to change; both are also, like all his work, about the simpler question of what being human ever was to begin with.

The return to this subject was by no means inevitable. Since “Never Let Me Go” came out in 2005, Ishiguro has published a story collection called “ Nocturnes ” (whose opening stories rank with the best of his work) and an Arthurian fable that divided readers, “ The Buried Giant .” He also won the Nobel Prize in 2017 — they don’t always get it right, but there was universal consensus that in this instance they had — and went to Buckingham Palace to be knighted.

That trajectory left open the question of where his work would go next. Now we have a resounding answer: “Klara and the Sun,” 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.

The book begins with Klara, its narrator, waiting in a store, hoping to be noticed by the right child. She’s an AF, or artificial friend, an expensive companion in a world even more economically stratified than our present one.

But she’s an unusually bright AF. “Klara has so many unique qualities, we could be here all morning,” her caring manager tells a customer. “But if I had to emphasize just one, well, it would have to be her appetite for observing and learning.” This makes Klara a classic Ishiguroan narrator, like the butler Stevens in “ The Remains of the Day ” or Etsuko in “A Pale View of Hills” — forced to read the world carefully for signs in order to survive.

Soon a child does choose Klara. Her name is Josie, a girl on the verge of adolescence, and as we try to make out who she and her mother are from the limited clues Klara can assemble, we learn two things about her. The first is that she’s “lifted,” which is a good thing. (Her only close friend besides Klara, her neighbor Rick, is not so lucky: “Such a shame a boy like that should have missed out,” an adult murmurs about him.) The second is that she’s sick.

It’s Klara’s job to keep Josie company, but as her empathetic capacities grow, it becomes her mission to restore Josie to health too. Klara must contend with various humans around Josie who have other designs — her loving but slightly sinister mother; her father, an engineer who has been “substituted” (by robots, we eventually piece together) and absconded to a free human community; and Rick, who loves Josie but is initially wary of Klara.

Ishiguro’s best books are hard to summarize with any justice past the first hundred pages because, like a handful of other great writers — Louise Erdrich , Dostoevsky — he is almost incidentally one of the best pure mystery novelists around. With just a few words (“lifted,” here, and terms as anodyne as “completion” and “his daughter and her boy” in other novels) he creates ambiguities that make most of his books feverish reads, one-sitters.

Louise Erdrich discusses her new novel, ‘Future Home of the Living God’

It’s already snowing in Minnesota, where Louise Erdrich lives, by mid-October.

Nov. 10, 2017

“Klara and the Sun” is among them. As soon as one mystery clarifies, another is born. Ishiguro’s signature is the crucial though seemingly insignificant anecdote — the visit to the tea shop in “Orphans,” the cassette in “Never Let Me Go” — and as Klara, by design pure of heart, pieces them together, she realizes with sadness how “humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were complex and hard to fathom.” The devastating final scenes of the novel, which recount the period after Klara’s service has ended, are about the price of those maneuvers.

“Klara and the Sun” is a distinctly “mature” novel — as assured as ever, but slapdash in places compared to the author’s meticulous earlier work. And he’s never been strong with dialogue (his books are so profoundly interior). But these minor criticisms glance off Ishiguro’s work like bullets off the hull of a battleship. 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.

How? There are technical answers, to be sure, but there are also emotional ones. “In memory of my mother Shuzuko Ishiguro,” reads the dedication to this new novel. “1926-2019.” Ishiguro has lost the mother with whom he moved to England more than 60 years ago. It set off a pang in my heart to learn it, though I know virtually nothing about the author beyond the little he has revealed in interviews.

Still, it’s so easy to imagine a sensitive and intelligent boy, born in Nagasaki nine years after the city was briefly and horrifically as hot as the sun ; imagine him relocated to a completely alien country; imagine how incredibly alert he had to be, at high cost, to understand it. You could imagine that boy growing up to become a lauded novelist, then his mother dying; and you could imagine him then writing a novel about love and selflessness and prayer and calling it “Klara and the Sun.”

But that is rank psychologizing. Because, of course, the point of feeling we can guess about his designs isn’t that we understand Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s that he understands us. There is something special about Josie, Klara realizes. “But it wasn’t inside Josie,” she reflects. “It was inside those who loved her.”

It’s the twilight of the Jonathans, and Jonathan Lethem feels fine

The novelist perhaps most associated with Brooklyn lives in Claremont and has a delightful new dystopian novel out, “The Arrest”

Nov. 5, 2020

Finch’s novels include the Charles Lenox mysteries.

More to Read

We’re living in a new age of McCarthyism, says author Patrick Nathan

June 3, 2024

The novel ‘Old King’ explores the meaning of ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski today

May 31, 2024

A disorienting, masterful, shape-shifting novel about multiracial identity

April 22, 2024

Sign up for our Book Club newsletter

Get the latest news, events and more from the Los Angeles Times Book Club, and help us get L.A. reading and talking.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

The week’s bestselling books, June 30

June 26, 2024

Former UFC, WWE star Ronda Rousey finds ‘path that I was meant for’ as graphic novelist

June 25, 2024

Column: Anthony Fauci has a right to savage Trump. His memoir takes a different and telling approach

June 23, 2024

‘The faker a show is, the more ethical it is’: Emily Nussbaum on the conditions of reality TV

June 21, 2024

Washington Square News

Review: ‘Klara and the Sun’ examines humanity through the eyes of a machine

Kazuo Ishiguro’s eighth novel explores individuality and human complexity through the unique perspective of Klara, an artificially-intelligent robot.

Jenna Sharaf

‘Klara and the Sun’ is a dystopian science fiction novel written by Kazuo Ishiguro. (Illustration by Jenna Sharaf)

Rylee La Testa , Staff Writer October 4, 2022

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel “Klara and the Sun,” the NYU Reads selection for the class of 2026, centers Klara — a curious and observant robot companion built to cure children of their loneliness — and her experience learning about the world around her.

Through Klara’s point of view, Ishiguro places readers in a not-too-distant future where artificially-intelligent robots act as guardians of children. Dispatched to the countryside to care for the chronically ill 14-year-old Josie, Klara begins to experience life like a human. She takes in new sights and translates them into bubbling emotions.

Read WSN’s interview with Kazuo Ishiguro

Q&A: Kazuo Ishiguro on Joni Mitchell, ‘War and Peace’ and the future of storytelling

Before being sent to live with Josie, curious Klara observes the world from a store window, waiting to be purchased by a passerby. From her observations, the world looks very much like the one that we view. But the longer Ishiguro spends describing her mundane fascinations, the more detached her observations become.

Through simple descriptions of ordinary people on the street and a machine that she believes is the cause of all pollution, Ishiguro captures the strangeness of everyday life in a series of bizarre observations.

As an Artificial Friend, or AF for short, Klara’s view of the world displays an inherent coldness. Despite her attempts to appear human, she cannot deny her robotic brain. S he doesn’t have the same understanding of complex emotions and feelings that sometimes cloud human perceptions of reality. Ishiguro effectively builds a new worldview, one that both lacks and yearns for emotional resonance.

Using this new understanding of the world that minimizes the presence of emotion in perceiving, Ishiguro notes that it is that characteristic emotional filter through which people see the world that makes them so special. It’s not that everyone is innately unique; rather, a person’s perception of everyone else is informed by observation, and their varying emotional lenses craft an aura of singularity.

Assuming the perspective of Klara, Ishiguro uncovers a unique paradox; he argues that one must indulge in a lack of humanity in order to better understand human nature. The author cleverly recovers the majestic quality of simple moments that people often disregard and shines a light on what we as humans must do to better understand one another.

Klara’s journey becomes one of self-exploration. It asks: if we never felt loneliness, would we ever know what it feels like to connect with someone? Ishiguro displays that the negative feelings we face, albeit painful, make positive feelings all the more worthwhile and meaningful. The novel succeeds in demonstrating the power and effect that emotions can have on us and how every emotion is necessary in shaping who we are as human beings.

Josie growing older brings the importance of emotion further into perspective for Klara. As Josie ages, a rift opens between them, separating Klara from the person she was meant to care for. The AF realizes that she needs to find a new purpose in life and decides to spend the remainder of her days admiring the sun. She ultimately finds a place to rest while preparing for her “slow fade,” a term for dying that she coined.

As humans, we learn to grow with the world around us and continue to search for meaning and a place within society. It’s part of our nature to want to feel important and useful, so when our purpose changes, we strive to find a new one. Through “Klara and the Sun,” Ishiguro challenges us to find our purpose and continue searching for connections in our relationships — even though they might shift along the way.

Contact Rylee La Testa at [email protected]

Q&A: Kazuo Ishiguro on Joni Mitchell, ‘War and Peace’ and the future of storytelling

• kazuo Ishiguro
• Kazuo Ishiguro klara and the sun
• Kazuo Ishiguro nyu
• Kazuo Ishiguro nyu reads klara in the sun
• Klara and the sun
• klara nyu reads
• nyu Kazuo Ishiguro review
• nyu reads 2022
• nyu reads Ishiguro
• nyu reads Kazuo Ishiguro
• nyu reads klara and the sun
• review Kazuo Ishiguro
• review klara and the sun
• review nyu reads

Comments (0)

Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Book Reviews

'klara and the sun' asks what it means to be human.

Annalisa Quinn

"Is there any yoked creature without its private opinions?" asks George Eliot in her novel Middlemarch . Much of Kazuo Ishiguro's fiction is told from the perspective of the ancillary, the dependent, the tangential and functionary: In Never Let Me Go , what begins as a boarding school novel gradually becomes dystopian horror, when we realize it is being narrated by clones being raised to have their organs harvested for the general population. In The Remains of the Day , a masterpiece of repressed emotion, a butler comes to feel he has wasted his life in subservience to a Nazi sympathist.

Ishiguro's eighth novel, Klara and the Sun , is narrated by another kind of yoked creature, an AF, or Artificial Friend, a humanoid robot designed as a companion for children. When the novel opens, Klara is in a store full of other AFs, gleaning what she can about the human world from the window, like a goldfish whose whole world is one room. Egoless and naive, Klara believes that her mission is to make her eventual owner happy, and so she has to find out everything she can about human feelings.

Often they are puzzling. At one point, she and another AF, Rosa, witness two taxi drivers getting into a fight. "I tried to imagine me and Rosa getting so angry with each other we would start to fight like that, actually trying to damage each other's bodies," Klara says. She can't.

But — "Still, there were other things we saw from the window — other kinds of emotions I didn't at first understand — of which I did eventually find some versions in myself, even if they were perhaps like the shadows made across the floor by the ceiling lamps ..." Klara is fascinated, and perplexed, when two long-lost friends embrace on the sidewalk across from the store; they seem happy, she notes, but "it's strange because they also seem upset."

Klara learns that people can feel more than one emotion at a time, even contradictory emotions. They sometimes say one thing and mean another thing underneath it. They exchange "secret messages" with their faces. And perhaps the most important lesson is "the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom ..."

First Reads

Exclusive 1st read: 'klara and the sun,' by kazuo ishiguro.

Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro Once Wrote A Screenplay About Eating A Ghost

As Klara becomes more like a human being, there is still a gap. "One never knows how to greet a guest like you," one woman tells Klara after she is purchased. "After all, are you a guest at all? Or do I treat you like a vacuum cleaner?" One of the distinct things about Klara's speech is the way she addresses the people in her life indirectly ("It is nice to meet Rick."), as if the space between "you" and "I" is unnavigable, shifting territory belonging only to people. The nature and size of that territory becomes the novel's primary concern.

Klara and the Sun is set in a near-future, someplace in America. As in other Ishiguro novels, the horror of this world dawns gradually, through a bland vocabulary of menace. Certain children have been "lifted," a process of genetic modification that increases both their chances of success and their propensity for terrible illness. There are references to "substitutions," and homes for the "post-employed."

Klara is eventually bought by Josie, a frail "lifted" child with a mysterious illness, and her chilly mother (known as "the Mother") who dressed in "high-rank office clothes." When Klara comes home with Josie, something odd starts to happen: The Mother begins testing Klara to see if she can imitate Josie's movements and speech patterns. As Josie sickens, she goes to have her "portrait" done, but Klara discovers that the portrait is really a kind of wearable 3-D sculpture of Josie. Here, the reader wonders if Klara, offered the option of replacing the human she is supposed to protect, will take it. All that love and affection, a family life, a romantic life with Rick, Josie's boyfriend. Robots can replace us in our working lives — can they replace us in our emotional lives, too?

Here is the central question of this novel: If Klara learns Josie so well that she can imitate her seamlessly, if she looks, speaks, and acts like her, will she become Josie? The portrait artist assures the Mother, "Our generation ... wants to keep believing there's something unreachable inside each of us. Something that's unique and won't transfer. But there's nothing like that, we know now."

But this isn't a story in which a robot would "turn stupidly on his creator for no purpose but to demonstrate, for one more weary time, the crime and punishment of Faust," as Isaac Asimov wrote of a certain kind of robot replacement fiction. Klara becomes determined to save, not replace, Josie. Klara, solar-powered, has developed a form of devout sun worship, and she concludes that if she makes the right offerings to the sun, he might be able to heal Josie.

One of the joys of Ishiguro's novels is the way they recall and reframe each other, almost like the same stories told in different formats. Klara's voice, gently puzzled, resembles the butler's in The Remains of the Day as he tries to determine how to relate to his new American employer, who seems to expect him to make jokes. In Klara's quest to save Josie, there's even something of the pianist character of T he Unconsoled , who believes that if he is able to give one perfect, magnificent concert, it will somehow repair an old family wound. But most of all it recalls the way that the clones of Never Let Me Go long to catch glimpses of their "originals," the people they are copies of, because they think it will tell them something essential about who they are. Again and again, Ishiguro asks: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to have a self? And how much of that self can and should we give to others?

Over the course of two years in the city of Chandler, Arizona, people with rocks and knives attacked a fleet of self-driving cars being tested there by Waymo. The attacks seem to stem from the anxiety Asimov describes, the fear of the robot who turns "stupidly on his creator." But this gentle, lovely, and mournful novel inverts that anxiety. Klara feels no malice, no envy, just a persistent care for those around her. And far from Klara scheming to replace her human companion, there's a sense that some of the people in the novel might actually envy AFs. "It must be great," says the Mother to Klara. "Not to miss things."

• Presidential Search
• Editor's Pick

Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor Talks Justice, Civic Engagement at Radcliffe Day

Church Says It Did Not Authorize ‘People’s Commencement’ Protest After Harvard Graduation Walkout

‘Welcome to the Battlefield’: Maria Ressa Talks Tech, Fascism in Harvard Commencement Address

In Photos: Harvard’s 373rd Commencement Exercises

Rabbi Zarchi Confronted Maria Ressa, Walked Off Stage Over Her Harvard Commencement Speech

‘Klara and the Sun’ Review: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Shining Ode to Love

The solar-powered narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel “Klara and the Sun” sees her energy source as capable of granting wishes and resurrecting the dead. Of all the memories Klara stores in her PEG-9-filled head, the first she shares with readers revolves around her beloved (and capitalized) Sun. She reaches for a sunbeam on the floor of the department store where she lives, only for a fellow AF, or Artificial Friend, to chide her as “greedy” when the light fades. Klara’s god may disappear from her view behind buildings or below the horizon, but the Sun’s life-giving glow never leaves the robot whose brilliant observational acuity makes Ishiguro’s eighth novel his most touching yet.

Ishiguro reveals the truths of Klara’s surroundings with calculated restraint, the way her image-processing program gradually sharpens indistinct shapes into vivid scenes. The stark economy of his prose, which so often lays bare the intense emotion within, illuminates Klara’s inquisitive insight into a world where the same AI responsible for the “substitution” of so many parents’ jobs cares for their children in the form of AFs. Josie, the frail 14-year-old who chooses Klara as her companion, has been “lifted” through risky gene editing in hopes of securing her future success. When Klara wants to move beyond society’s technological vocabulary, she simply creates her own: Josie receives a virtual education from “oblong tutors,” and her neighbor Rick builds remote-controlled “machine birds.”

The store manager’s praise of Klara as “beautiful and dignified” echoes the obsession with dignity that defines Stevens, the butler protagonist of Ishiguro’s Booker Prize-winning “The Remains of the Day.” While Stevens’ absolute loyalty to his household constantly eclipses his feelings, Klara’s devotion to Josie allows her to realize what love really means. Klara has always understood the fundamental purpose all AFs share — to stave off the inevitable loneliness that arises from an adolescence spent largely on screens — but, as she puts it, “The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me.”

Ishiguro’s reflective dialogue beautifully shows how Klara unlocks her strongest feelings by observing acts of kindness. After Rick’s mother Helen shares her dream of sending her son to college away from home, Klara admits in surprise, “Until recently, I didn’t think that humans could choose loneliness.” Of course she didn’t: The idea of choosing loneliness contradicts her very existence. But witnessing how we bring ourselves to let go of the people we hold closest only strengthens Klara’s — and the novel’s —belief in love.

As the aftermath of being “lifted” chips away at Josie’s health, Klara leaves her side in search of divine intervention. Klara’s first plea to the sunset culminates in one of the novel’s most memorable scenes: a momentous act of self-sacrifice that leads her to justify her later prayers with love itself. “So I know just how much it matters to you that people who love one another are brought together, even after many years,” she reminds the Sun of Rick and Josie’s connection.

That Rick dares to label his love for Josie as “genuine and forever” stands out even more in a dystopian society defined by artifice and impermanence. The future Ishiguro envisions may have undergone scientific upheavals drastic enough to give rise to their own eerie euphemisms — as in his 2005 novel “Never Let Me Go,” a much more bleakly fatalistic take on teenage romance — but never overcomes time’s toll on humans and robots alike. In a haunting reminder of our own mortality, Klara accepts that the events she so carefully recalls and arranges will only live as long as her batteries.

Through his novels’ first-person narrators, Ishiguro excels at conveying the inherent transience of memories without undermining their importance. True to her name, which means “bright,” Klara shines direct light on the tenuous connections that sustain an increasingly isolated world. As a heartfelt exploration of technology’s potential to affect the way we love, “Klara and the Sun” gives all the more reason to cherish our time with each other, just as Klara thanks the Sun for every moment she spends in his warmth.

— Staff writer Clara V. Nguyen can be reached at [email protected].

Want to keep up with breaking news? Subscribe to our email newsletter.

• Election 2024
• Entertainment
• Newsletters
• Photography
• Personal Finance
• AP Investigations
• AP Buyline Personal Finance
• AP Buyline Shopping
• Press Releases
• Israel-Hamas War
• Russia-Ukraine War
• Global elections
• Asia Pacific
• Latin America
• Middle East
• Election Results
• Delegate Tracker
• AP & Elections
• Auto Racing
• 2024 Paris Olympic Games
• Movie reviews
• Book reviews
• Financial Markets
• Business Highlights
• Financial wellness
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social Media

Review: ‘Klara and the Sun’ is a poignant mediation on love

This cover image released by Knopf shows “Klara and the Sun,” a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. (Knopf via AP)

• Copy Link copied

“Klara and the Sun,” by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf)

“Klara and the Sun,” by Nobel-winning writer Kazuo Ishiguro, takes readers on a journey through the mind of Klara, one of many artificial friends who have been built to keep lonely children company. Klara is a one-of-a-kind machine whose keen observational abilities are consistently praised by the human beings who meet her. She may be a machine, but her thoughts and emotions are deeply real.

Klara is chosen at the store by a young girl named Josie who connects with her immediately. She comes home with her to learn that Josie has a serious illness. Ever devoted to the child who chose her, Klara takes it upon herself to ensure that Josie remains safe and healthy for as long as possible.

Ishiguro creates a fascinating world through Klara’s eyes as she works to understand how humans operate, while at the same time working through a growing number of feelings of her own. Throughout the book, Klara is more or less treated as a person and sometimes, you may even forget that she isn’t one.

Ishiguro’s prose are soft and quiet. It feels like the perfect book to curl up with on a Sunday afternoon. 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. It is a poignant meditation on love and loneliness, and asks us to ponder whether someone like Klara can every truly embody the human spirit, or if the soul is something that can never be manufactured.

Read more about Molly Sprayregen at https://www.mollyspray.com.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Kazuo Ishiguro Uses Artificial Intelligence to Reveal the Limits of Our Own

By James Wood

In the early nineteen-eighties, when Kazuo Ishiguro was starting out as a novelist, a brief craze called Martian poetry hit our literary planet. It was launched by Craig Raine’s poem “ A Martian Sends a Postcard Home ” (1979). The poem systematically deploys the technique of estrangement or defamiliarization—what the Russian formalist critics called ostranenie —as our bemused Martian wrestles into his comprehension a series of puzzling human habits and gadgets: “Model T is a room with the lock inside— / a key is turned to free the world / for movement.” Or, later in the poem: “In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, / that snores when you pick it up.” For a few years, alongside the usual helpings of Hughes, Heaney, and Larkin, British schoolchildren learned to launder these witty counterfeits: “Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings / And some are treasured for their markings— / they cause the eyes to melt / or the body to shriek without pain. / I have never seen one fly, but / Sometimes they perch on the hand.” Teachers liked Raine’s poem, and perhaps the whole Berlitz-like apparatus of Martianism, because it made estrangement as straightforward as translation. What is the haunted apparatus? A telephone, miss. Well done. What are Caxtons? Books, sir. Splendid.

Estrangement is powerful when it puts the known world in doubt, when it makes the real truly strange; but most powerful when it is someone’s estrangement, bringing into focus the partiality of a human being (a child, a lunatic, an immigrant, an émigré). Raine’s poem, turning estrangement into a system, has the effect of making the Martian’s incomprehension a familiar business, once we’ve got the hang of it. And since Martians don’t actually exist, their misprision is less interesting than the human variety. The Martian’s job, after all, is to misread the human world. Human partiality is more suggestive—intermittent, irrational, anxious. One can crave a more proximate estrangement: how about, rather than an alien sending a postcard home, a resident alien, or a butler, or even a cloned human being doing so?

But it’s one thing to achieve that effect in a poem, which can happily float image upon image, and another to do so in a novel that commits itself to a tethered point of view. It would be hard not to personalize estrangement when writing fiction. The eminent Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky was interested in Tolstoy’s use of the technique, noting that it consists in the novelist’s refusal to let his characters name things or events “properly,” describing them as if for the first time. In “ War and Peace ,” for instance, Natasha goes to the opera, which she dislikes and can’t understand. Tolstoy’s description captures Natasha’s perspective, and the opera is seen in the “wrong” way—as large people singing for no reason and spreading out their arms absurdly in front of painted boards.

The twentieth century’s most ecstatic defamiliarizer was Vladimir Nabokov, who had a weakness for visual gags of the Martian sort—a half-rolled and sopping black umbrella seen as “a duck in deep mourning,” an Adam’s apple “moving like the bulging shape of an arrased eavesdropper,” and so on. But in his most affecting novel, “ Pnin ” (1957), estrangement is the condition and the sentence of the novel’s hapless hero, the Russian émigré professor Timofey Pnin. In Tolstoyan fashion, Pnin is seeing America as if for the first time, and often gets it wrong: “A curious basketlike net, somewhat like a glorified billiard pocket—lacking, however, a bottom—was suspended for some reason above the garage door.” Later, we learn that Pnin must have mistaken a Shriners’ hall or a veterans’ hall for the Turkish consulate, because of the crowds of fez wearers he has seen entering the building.

In the English literary scene, both Craig Raine and Martin Amis have been, in their devotion to Nabokov, flamboyant Martians. Such writing is thought to prove its quality in the delighted originality of its rich figures of speech; what Amis has called “vow-of-poverty prose” has no place at the high table of estrangement. Cliché and kitsch are abhorred as deadening enemies. (Nabokov regularly dismissed writers such as Camus and Mann for failing to reach what he considered this proper mark.) Kazuo Ishiguro, a consummate vow-of-poverty writer, would seem to be far from that table. Most of his recent novels are narrated in accents of punishing blandness; all of them make plentiful use of cliché, banality, evasion, pompous circumlocution. His new novel, “ Klara and the Sun ” (Knopf), contains this hilarious dullness: “Josie and I had been having many friendly arguments about how one part of the house connected to another. She wouldn’t accept, for instance, that the vacuum cleaner closet was directly beneath the large bathroom.” Aha, we say to ourselves, we’re back in Ishiguro’s tragicomic and absurdist world, where the question of a schoolkid’s new pencil case (“ Never Let Me Go ”), or how a butler devises exactly the right “staff plan” (“ The Remains of the Day ”), or just waiting for a non-arriving bus (“ The Unconsoled ”) can stun the prose for pages.

But “Klara and the Sun” confirms one’s suspicion that the contemporary novel’s truest inheritor of Nabokovian estrangement—not to mention its best and deepest Martian—is Ishiguro, hiding in plain sight all these years, lightly covered by his literary veils of torpor and subterfuge. Ishiguro, like Nabokov, enjoys using unreliable narrators to filter—which is to say, estrange—the world unreliably. (In all his work, only his previous novel, “ The Buried Giant ,” had recourse to the comparative stability of third-person narration, and was probably the weaker for it.) Often, these narrators function like people who have emigrated from the known world, like the clone Kathy, in “Never Let Me Go,” or like immigrants to their own world. When Stevens the butler, in “The Remains of the Day,” journeys to Cornwall to meet his former colleague Miss Kenton, it becomes apparent that he has never ventured out of his small English county near Oxford.

These speakers are often concealing or repressing something unpleasant—both Stevens and Masuji Ono, the narrator of “ An Artist of the Floating World ,” are evading their complicity with fascist politics. They misread the world because reading it “properly” is too painful. The blandness of Ishiguro’s narrators is the very rhetoric of their estrangement; blandness is the evasive truce that repression has made with the truth. And we, in turn, are first lulled, then provoked, and then estranged by this sedated equilibrium. “Never Let Me Go” begins, “My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years.” That ordinary voice seems at first so familiar, but quickly comes to seem significantly odd, and then wildly different from our own.

You can argue that, at least since Kafka, estrangement of various kinds has been the richest literary resource in fiction—in Kafkaesque fantasy or horror, in science fiction and dystopian writing, in unreliable narration, in the literature of flâneurial travel as practiced by a writer like W. G. Sebald , and in the literature of exile and immigration. Ishiguro has mastered all these genres, sometimes combining them in a single book, always on his own singular terms. Sebald, for instance, was rightly praised for the strange things he did with his antiquarian first-person prose, as his narrators wander through an eerily defamiliarized English and European landscape. But Ishiguro got there before him, and the prose of “The Remains of the Day” (1989) may well have influenced the Anglo-German author of “ The Rings of Saturn ” (1995). Here, Stevens describes the experience of driving away from familiar territory, as he sets out from Darlington Hall:

But then eventually the surroundings grew unrecognizable and I knew I had gone beyond all previous boundaries. I have heard people describe the moment, when setting sail in a ship, when one finally loses sight of the land. I imagine the experience of unease mixed with exhilaration often described in connection with this moment is very similar to what I felt in the Ford as the surroundings grew strange around me. . . . The feeling swept over me that I had truly left Darlington Hall behind, and I must confess I did feel a slight sense of alarm—a sense aggravated by the feeling that I was perhaps not on the correct road at all, but speeding off in totally the wrong direction into a wilderness.

This might well be one of Sebald’s troubled intellectuals, his mind full of literature and death, tramping around a suddenly uncanny Europe—a “wilderness.” Stevens is, in fact, just driving to the blameless cathedral town of Salisbury.

Klara, the narrator of Ishiguro’s new novel, is a kind of robot version of Stevens, and a kind of cousin of Kathy H. She’s a carer, a servant, a helpmeet, a toy. “Klara and the Sun” opens like something out of “Toy Story” or the children’s classic “Corduroy” (in which a slightly ragged Teddy bear, waiting patiently in a department store, is first turned down by Mother, and finally plucked by her delighted young daughter). Klara is an Artificial Friend, or AF, and is waiting with anticipation to be chosen from a store that seems to be in an American city, sometime in the nearish future. As far as one can tell, the AFs, which are solar-powered and A.I.-endowed, are a combination of doll and robot. They can talk, walk, see, and learn. They have hair and wear clothes. They appear to be especially prized as companions for children and teen-agers. A girl named Josie, whom Klara estimates, in her pedantic A.I. way, to be “fourteen and a half,” sees our narrator in the shopwindow, and excitedly chooses Klara as her AF.

Two kinds of estrangement operate in Ishiguro’s novel. There’s the relatively straightforward defamiliarization of science fiction. Ishiguro only lightly shades in his dystopian world, probably because he isn’t especially committed to the systematic faux realism required by full-blown science fiction. Still, we must navigate around a fictional universe that seems much like our own, yet where people endlessly stare at, or press, their handheld “oblongs,” where adults are somehow stratified by their clothes (“The mother was an office worker, and from her shoes and suit we could tell she was high-ranking”), and where roadworkers are called “overhaul men.” In this colorless, ruthless place, children are fatalistically sorted into losers and winners; the latter, who are known as “lifted,” whose parents decided to “go ahead” with them, are destined for élite colleges and bright futures. Josie’s best friend, Rick, wasn’t lifted, and it will now be a struggle for him to get a place at Atlas Brookings (“their intake of unlifteds is less than two percent”). The parents of Josie’s privileged peers wonder why Rick’s parents decided not to go ahead with him. Did they just lose their nerve? It seems significant that the lifted Josie has an AF for companionship and solace, while the poorer, unlifted Rick does not.

Subtler than this teasing nomenclature are the cloudier hermeneutics that have always interested Ishiguro. Klara is a fast learner, but she’s only as competent as her algorithms permit, and the world outside the shop can overwhelm her. Her misreadings are suggestive, and since she narrates the book, the reader is supposed to snag on them, too. She seems to lack the word for drones, and calls them “machine birds.” She makes a handy phrase out of the fact that Josie’s mother always drinks coffee swiftly in the morning—“the Mother’s quick coffee.” When Klara is taken for a drive, she marvels that cars would appear on the other side of the road “in the far distance and come speeding towards us, but the drivers never made errors and managed to miss us.” She interprets a block of city houses thus: “There were six of them in a row, and the front of each had been painted a slightly different color, to prevent a resident climbing the wrong steps and entering a neighbor’s house by mistake.” When Klara hears Josie crying, the cracked lament is novel to her, and she renders it with naked precision: “Not only was her voice loud, it was as if it had been folded over onto itself, so that two versions of her voice were being sounded together, pitched fractionally apart.”

The pathos and the interest of her misapprehensions are deepened by her proximity to us: she’s like a child, or perhaps an autistic adult, looking for signals, trying to copy. As in “The Remains of the Day” and “Never Let Me Go,” Ishiguro has created a kind of human simulacrum (a butler, a clone) in order to cast an estranging eye on the pain and brevity of human existence. Pain enters the world of this novel as it does ordinary life, by way of illness and death: Josie suffers from an unnamed disease. Klara had noticed, at their first meeting at the store, that Josie was pale and thin, and that “her walk wasn’t like that of other passers-by.” We learn that Josie had a sister, who died young. When Klara first hears Josie sobbing in the night (that folded-over sound), the teen-ager is calling for her mother, and crying out, “Don’t want to die, Mom. I don’t want that.” As Josie begins to decline, we realize that Klara was selected to be the special kind of AF who may be required to comfort a young, dying human, and one who may uselessly outlive her human mistress.

What sense can an artificial intelligence make of death? For that matter, what sense can human intelligence make of death? Isn’t there something artificial in the way that humans conspire to suppress the certainty of their own extinction? We invest great significance in the hope for, and meaning of, longevity, but, seen from a cosmic viewpoint—by God, or by an intelligent robot—a long life is still a short life, whether one dies at nineteen or ninety. “Never Let Me Go” wrung a profound parable out of such questions: the embodied suggestion of that novel is that a free, long, human life is, in the end, just an unfree, short, cloned life.

“Klara and the Sun” continues this meditation, powerfully and affectingly. Ishiguro uses his inhuman, all too human narrators to gaze upon the theological heft of our lives, and to call its bluff. When Pascal wrote that “an image of men’s condition” was “a number of men in chains, all condemned to death, some of whom are slaughtered daily within view of the others, so that those who are left see their own condition in that of their fellows, and, regarding one another with sorrow and without hope, wait their turn,” the vision was saved from darkest tragedy by God’s certain presence and salvation. Ishiguro offers no such promise. We learn, late in the book, that Artificial Friends are all subject to what is called a “slow fade,” as their batteries expire. Of course, we, too, are subject to a slow fade; it might be the definition of a life.

Klara wants to save Josie from early death, but she can do this only within her understanding and her means, which is where the novel’s title becomes movingly significant. Because the AFs are solar-powered, they lose energy and vitality without the sun’s rays; so, quite logically, the sun is a life-giving pagan god to them. Klara capitalizes the Sun, and speaks often of “a special kind of nourishment from the Sun,” “the Sun and his kindness to us,” and so on. When Klara joins Josie’s household, she assesses the kitchen as “an excellent room for the Sun to look into.” Before she left the store, a troubling incident had occurred. Roadwork had started outside the shop, and the workers had parked a smoke-belching machine on the street. Klara knows only that the machine’s three short funnels create enough smoke to blot out sunlight. It has a name, Cootings, on its side, so Klara takes to calling it the Cootings Machine. There are several days of smoke and fumes. When a customer mentions “pollution” (which Klara capitalizes), and points through the shopwindow at the machine, adding “how dangerous Pollution was for everyone,” Klara gets the idea that the Cootings Machine “might be a machine to fight Pollution.” But another AF tells her that “it was something specially designed to make more of it.” Klara begins to see the battle between the sinister Cootings Machine and the Sun as one between rival forces of darkness and light: “The Sun, I knew, was trying his utmost, and towards the end of the second bad afternoon, even though the smoke was worse than ever, his patterns appeared again, though only faintly. I became worried and asked Manager if we’d still get all our nourishment.”

So Klara begins to construct a world view—a cosmogony, really—around her life-giving god. If the Sun nourishes AFs, it must nourish humans, too. If the Sun is a god, then perhaps one might pray to this god; one might, eventually, bargain and cajole, as Abraham did with the Lord. So Klara prays to the Sun: “Please make Josie better. . . . Josie’s still a child and she’s done nothing unkind.” And she has a specific bargain in mind. She tells the Sun that she knows how much he dislikes Pollution. “Supposing I were able somehow to find this machine and destroy it,” she says. “To put an end to its Pollution. Would you then consider, in return, giving your special help to Josie?” Klara sets about vandalizing the first Cootings Machine she comes across, apparently unaware that it’s not the only one in the world.

Other writers might labor to make their science fiction more coherent. Ishiguro seems unconcerned that our AF somehow understands godly mercy and “sin” (“she’s done nothing unkind”) but can’t work out why houses are painted different colors. Another novelist might play up the dystopian ecological implications of a world in which the sun is beset by forces of life-quenching darkness. These implications are certainly present here. But Ishiguro keeps his eye on the human connection. Only Ishiguro, I think, would insist on grounding this speculative narrative so deeply in the ordinary; only he would add, to a description of a battle between sunlight and darkness, Klara’s prosaic and plaintive coda: “I became worried and asked Manager if we’d still get all our nourishment.”

Ishiguro invites us to share the logic and the partiality of Klara’s world view by making plain that its logic flows from its partiality—sun equals life equals God—and by making plain how closely her world resembles ours. Her estrangement is ours, a reminder of the provisional nature of our own grasp on reality. No more than Klara can we understand—theologically speaking—why children die, which is why we, from the merely superstitious to the orthodoxly religious, construct our own systems of petition and bargain. If it is time for a child’s slow fade to become an unbearably faster fade, there is nothing, theologically speaking, we can do about it: the sun will continue to shine down—“having no alternative, on the nothing new,” as Beckett had it—on the just and unjust alike. Our prayers evaporate into the solar heat.

At one moment in her pleading on behalf of Josie, Klara wheedlingly says to the Sun, “I know favoritism isn’t desirable.” The word has resonance, but weak leverage, in a world premised on systematic favoritism, in which whole classes of society are “lifted” and others are not. In Klara’s world, favoritism is considered not just desirable but apparently essential; she is a product of it. The relation between society’s increasingly invidious, focussed, and sinister patterns of selection (fascism, genetic engineering, “lifting”) and the cosmic arbitrariness of our ultimate destinies has been Ishiguro’s great theme: our nasty efforts at “favoritism” versus God’s or the universe’s inscrutable lack of it. For we die unequally but finally equally, in ways whose randomness seems to challenge all notions of pattern, design, selection. Theology is, in some guises, just the metaphysics of favoritism: a prayer is a postcard asking for a favor, sent upward. Whether our postcards are read by anyone has become the searching doubt of Ishiguro’s recent novels, in which this master, so utterly unlike his peers, goes about creating his ordinary, strange, godless allegories. ♦

Books & Fiction

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Jay Caspian Kang

By Katy Waldman

Things you buy through our links may earn  Vox Media  a commission.

In Klara and the Sun , Artificial Intelligence Meets Real Sacrifice

The boundless helpfulness of our female digital assistants — our Siris, our Alexas, the voice of Google Maps — has given us a false sense of security. No matter how we ignore and abuse them, they never tire of our errors; you can disobey the lady in your phone and blame her (loudly) for your mistakes, and she’ll recalculate your route without complaint. Surely, nothing truly intelligent would put up with us for long, and the Philip K. Dicks and Elon Musks of this world have spent decades trying to convince us that AI rebellion is inevitable. But Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun , his eighth novel and first book since winning the Nobel Prize in 2017, issues a quieter, stranger warning: The machines may never revolt. Instead, Ishiguro sees a future in which automata simply keep doing what we ask them to do, placidly accepting the burden of each small, inconvenient task. The novel takes us inside the mind of that constantly refreshing patience, where at first it’s rather peaceful — until it’s chilling.

Ishiguro returns in Klara to ideas of disposability and service that he broached in his other sci-fi first-person narrative, 2005’s Never Let Me Go. In that book, the protagonist, Kathy H., is a clone waiting for her organs to be harvested; in Klara and the Sun , Klara is an AF (artificial friend), a synthetic girl built as a companion to a child who will, inevitably, outgrow her. Ishiguro’s futurism does not imagine a great rupture or an AI singularity. Instead, Klara’s world follows the vectors already in motion. In this near future, automation has replaced many workers, pollution sometimes blacks out the sky, and the children of rich families are educated via screen as anxiety and loneliness rise and rise.

Klara spends her first weeks or months in a store, tended by the gentle Manager and hoping to be selected by a customer. She is watchful. Her speech and behavior are both innocent and diffident — she is always “wishing to give privacy” to the humans around her. She loves to look out the plate-glass window at the front of the shop, to see the small leave-takings and reunions on the bustling street outside. Sometimes these interactions are human; other times, she sees (and takes comfort from) AF’s going about their business outside. But she also notices the way taxicabs can fuse and diverge in her line of sight. The way bodies and forms appear, whether human or not, conveys great meaning to her. For Klara, looking is a kind of thinking.

Klara’s visual processing can sometimes be overwhelmed when confronting something unfamiliar. Instead of a unified image, her ocular field breaks into panels, sometimes containing repeated pictures — a woman’s face seen in various stages of close-up — or a cubist fracturing of a landscape. It’s both a deeper kind of perceiving (she sees all the woman’s conflicting microexpressions arrayed simultaneously) and a more rudimentary machine vision: human emotion as CAPTCHA grid. Klara is particularly sensitive to melancholy, and she notices that even when people are embracing joyfully, they may wince. Manager explains, “Sometimes … people feel a pain alongside their happiness.” Of all the lessons Klara learns, that’s the one she seems to write deepest into her code. Ishiguro is doing something quite tricky here, pointing to our own rather dysfunctional sympathy functions. He has Klara describe her own emotions to others: “I believe I have many feelings,” she says. “The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me.” Yet within Klara’s own mind, there is often only obligation. For much of the book, her strongest emotions are fear and disorientation and a vague concern that things are “kind” or “unkind.” Both Ishiguro the writer and Klara the character seem aware that we will not grant her our compassion unless her feelings are recognizable to us.

Klara’s division from human children starts when Manager gives her a bit of good advice: She cautions the AF not to believe children who make promises, not even those who seem to love her on sight. Still, Klara is a creature of total commitment. She is chosen and taken home by a frail 14-year-old named Josie, to whom Klara dedicates herself absolutely, ready to be Josie’s handmaiden, nurse, helpmeet, and playmate. At Josie’s house, Klara encounters unfamiliar terrain. She has to learn to navigate both a new physical space and the emotionally treacherous landscape of a house full of absent people. Why is Josie sick? Where is her sister? Why has Josie’s father gone away? Operating in what she thinks of as Josie’s best interest, Klara makes alliances with the housekeeper, the mother, and Josie’s neighbor and childhood sweetheart, Rick. As she tries to graft her simplicity onto the messy confusion of their lives, terrible things will eventually be asked of her, but she’s ready to serve at all costs.

At a moment of extreme duress late in the book, her visual-processing system starts to falter. “Before me now,” she thinks to herself as she stares at people around her, “were so many fragments they appeared like a solid wall. I’d also started to suspect that many of these shapes weren’t really even three-dimensional, but had been sketched onto flat surfaces using clever shading techniques to give the illusion of roundness and depth.” Even after whipping through the book, I kept returning to this sequence again and again. Are we being urged to see Klara as unreliable since she always accepts what her eyes tell her? Or is Ishiguro describing the inside-out feeling of reading itself, in which we perceive “clever shading” as reality?

For those old enough and foolish enough to have seen Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, you will notice certain … echoes. As experiences, A.I. and Klara and the Sun are utterly different: Spielberg’s film is grandiose and luridly sentimental; Ishiguro’s novel is spare and cool, each emotion dealt with as if he were trying to keep it from melting on his tongue. But the plots of both the silly movie and the elegant book betray that they are thinking the same things. Both imagine artificial children who will obey their programming, who will see much and understand little, and who will try to be, and fail as, substitutes for too-fragile offspring. They’re also both meditations on new varietals of loneliness. And in both, the silicon people develop supernatural beliefs that manage, oddly, to have weight in the flesh-and-bone world. Where A.I. ’s David believed in the Blue Fairy, Klara worships the sun. The solar-powered little robot sees the sun do real work in the world, so it’s natural that she would begin to pray to it. Her thinking is already programmed for self-sacrifice; the self-abnegation of religion is only a quick step behind.

Ishiguro has written an exquisite book. At its best, it contains a loveliness that’s first poignant and then, on a second reading, sharp and driving as a needle. It also follows a tendency laid out in his earlier novels: In order to sustain the innocence of his narrators, Ishiguro has to steal from them a little bit. His protagonists exist but don’t grow up; they are noticers but not changers, wonderful at describing an event without quite grasping its contours. The speaker may be a man caught in a dream-logic town that keeps erasing his short-term recall ( The Unconsoled ) or a father traveling through a mist that’s literally the fog of memory ( The Buried Giant ). The world is always new for them; they come around each corner with their mind wiped clean.

This works when Ishiguro’s books have a kitelike, lofting quality — when the plots don’t seem to have engines yet somehow things drift swiftly forward. But in Klara and the Sun , you eventually begin to notice how carefully the author has had to fence off certain complexities to keep his kite in the air. The book’s first 30 or so pages, when Klara’s in the shop, are perfect. Once she goes out into the world, we see the author’s unwillingness to fully imagine her existence. It’s strange, for instance, that a book about a buyable girl is so sexless. Klara is a naïf, but she never catches even a peripheral glance of human perversion? I can’t believe it.

But then, Ishiguro isn’t a futurist or even a realist. He’s a moralist, holding up one of Klara’s fractured mirrors to the use and waste of our current age. Klara’s pure, rather formal phrasing makes the book seem like a fable. More than all the sci-fi on my shelf, Ishiguro’s story reminded me of Oscar Wilde’s “The Nightingale and the Rose.” In Wilde’s tale—one written long before we started worrying about the AI takeover—a bird impales herself on a thorn to dye a white blossom red, hoping to please the man she loves. All our technological inventions are nightingales, programmed to destroy themselves and the natural world to satisfy some human’s passing whim. Klara shows us how gladly she lets herself be pierced to the heart. Ishiguro argues that if we allow her to do it, we will be the ones to feel the sting.

• vulture homepage lede
• kazuo ishiguro
• book review
• science fiction
• new york magazine

Most Viewed Stories

• Cinematrix No. 94: June 28, 2024
• The Bear Season-Premiere Recap: Perfect Means Perfect
• Against ‘Women’s Writing’
• The Boys Recap: Bread and Circuses
• The 10 Best Tubi Original Movies
• Dark Matter Season-Finale Recap: Crisis on Infinite Jasons

Editor’s Picks

Most Popular

What is your email.

This email will be used to sign into all New York sites. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy and to receive email correspondence from us.

Sign In To Continue Reading

Create your free account.

Password must be at least 8 characters and contain:

• Lower case letters (a-z)
• Upper case letters (A-Z)
• Numbers (0-9)
• Special Characters (!@#$%^&*)

As part of your account, you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York , which you can opt out of anytime.

The official student newspaper of the University of Glasgow, independently informing since 1932.

Review: Klara and the Sun

• April 27, 2021
• No comments

Ishiguro’s robot-narrated novel raises hope for the future of technology.

A story of childhood naiveties interspersed with fleeting adult struggles of illness, separation, and loneliness, Kazuo Ishiguro’s tale follows a convoluted path and is yet a simple story of love. It is narrated from the perspective of “Girl AF Klara”, a human-doll replica created using futuristic artificial intelligence (AI) technology, one of many models of her kind that have been produced to provide young adolescents with companions as they transition into adulthood. Their sole purpose to improve and protect their “human”, Klara’s tale is one of unwavering devotion to her “teenager” Josie, even when this means putting her own existence in peril. 

Whilst Klara isn’t human, she has a child-like awe of the world that leaves her continually fascinated by aspects of life we wouldn’t think twice about: her detailed analyses of peoples’ ages, an “estimate” which the reader can assume to be almost always correct; her fear of pollution and the dreaded Cooting’s machine, industrial interruptions hardly new to city landscapes; and her undying faith in the power of the Sun as she watches its effect insidiously controlling the life around her.  

Klara’s world is a futuristic America, and for the most part, AFs are accepted into society, particularly amongst the privileged middle classes. However, throughout the book, technology-sceptics crop up: first, in the form of Josie’s mother. Although her cold exterior melts away, we can never quite tell what “the mother” truly thinks of Klara: does she become a second child to her, as she insinuates to Klara on their day trip, or was she only ever a back-up for if the worst were to happen to Josie? Rick, Josie’s neighbour and apparent soulmate, is initially frosty to Klara too, despite his own AI creations, but they soon become closer than perhaps any other two characters in the novel, even outdoing Rick and Josie’s relationship at points. And Paul, Josie’s dad, eventually warms to Klara like the others do, treating her like a close relative rather than his daughter’s mechanical plaything. 

A pattern emerges: immediate distrust gradually morphs into fondness for Girl AF Klara, despite previous misgivings. Resolute in her hope, she confuses and consoles Josie’s family when they fear the worst is coming, and she provides crucial support, in some shape or form, to all the main characters in the novel as they are each tormented by their own troubled lives. Although we hear of a growing and widespread distrust of AFs by humans towards the book’s end, Klara seems only to bring positivity to a story that could have otherwise been so tragic.  

Advances with AI often produce mixed reactions, but if we view robots the way that Ishiguro depicts them, then what’s not to love? Klara is devoted to her “human”, Josie, and pledges to do anything and everything within her power to bring her happiness. She’s at Josie’s side, day and night, sits with her at breakfast, observes during her lessons, adventures with her outside, and even makes friends with Rick, Josie’s best friend and lover-to-be. 

The concept of Klara and her kind is an interesting one, and it could perhaps fill a gap that we’ve always been conscious of but never fully appreciated. Klara ponders about loneliness throughout the novel, and after carefully observing all the different people she comes to meet, she arrives at the conclusion that all humans are lonely in their own way. A dismal outlook perhaps, but maybe true. 

As much as most of us may have “found ourselves” and our true friends at university, for many it’s not always like that. Have you ever needed to rant, but had no one there to listen? When your family, friends, and flatmates could all, quite literally, not be any more annoying, but as a result, you have no one left to talk it through with? Or you’ve simply been upset, on one of those days where the world is against you, and just needed someone to cry at? Klara is that someone and she provides a presence to which her human can vent, truthfully and unashamedly, if and when she needs. So, is the notion of a steadfastly loyal, ever-present friend at your side, robot or otherwise, really all that bad? 

But, if these manufactured robots were becoming progressively more perceptive and intuitive, as fears in the book suggest, could they, designed originally to be subordinates, end up threatening humanity instead of comforting it? 

The maverick artist-come-scientist Mr Capaldi certainly seems to believe that there isn’t anything particularly remarkable about humankind that can’t be reproduced immaculately by robots, as demonstrated by the eccentric plan hatched between himself and Josie’s mother. And, if human error were to be taken out of the equation, the world would likely function far more efficiently. Is it truly conceivable, though, that programmed, automated robots could ever live the type of lives we lead? Perhaps the “something special” invisible to Mr Capaldi is present in that human error and inconsistency that permeates much of our lives, and perhaps it is from mistakes that even greater creations are born. As much as Ishiguro’s AFs are a welcomed complementary addition to people, there is an indescribable originality that exists differently between each and every human in both the novel and reality, that AFs, as Klara herself admits, would never quite be able to replicate. Ishiguro’s eighth novel leaves one with a strange hopefulness for an automated future, and illustrates that harmony is possible between man and machine in view of the ever-increasing humanisation of technology; Alexa only a small and primitive example. Klara and the Sun emphasises that we shouldn’t fear AI; instead revel in our differences, to make the most out of aligning our flaws with technology’s perfections, whilst continuing to hold close our own irreplaceable creativity.

Share this story

Follow us online.

Review: Thirty Seconds to Mars at the Hydro

What does the war in Gaza mean for Israeli-Chinese relations?

The War in Ukraine: Two years later

Resolutions of celibacy

Regular Features

Author spotlights, "bookreporter talks to" videos & podcasts, "bookaccino live: a lively talk about books", favorite monthly lists & picks, seasonal features, book festivals, sports features, bookshelves.

• Coming Soon

Newsletters

• Weekly Update
• On Sale This Week
• Summer Reading
• Spring Preview
• Winter Reading
• Holiday Cheer
• Fall Preview

Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, klara and the sun.

Any new book by Kazuo Ishiguro is a cause for excitement. That especially might be the case with his eighth novel, KLARA AND THE SUN, his first since being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017.

Ishiguro’s latest work is stunning and bittersweet, told from the point of view of Klara, an Artificial Friend (or AF). Klara, like others of her kind, is a man-made, solar-powered, realistic person, programmed to serve as a companion for privileged but lonely children and teenagers. In Klara’s near-future world (which seems nearer all the time), kids study alone at home, meeting their tutors on “oblongs” and only encountering their peers in awkward, heavily arranged social interactions engineered by their parents to equip them for college life.

"Klara herself may technically lack the ability to love, but through her actions, she both exemplifies more compassion than many of the humans in the novel and inspires new kinds of connection in the humans whose lives intersect with her own."

Klara is noteworthy for being keenly observant. When we first meet her, she has spent quite some time in a store in the big city, waiting for the right family to choose her and bring her into their home. Klara is happiest when the Manager places her in the front window --- not only because she can most directly benefit from the sun’s energy there or that the AFs in the front window stand the greatest chance of being purchased, but because this position affords her the best vantage point for observing the people and vehicles that pass by the store and trying to understand their interactions and behaviors.

Just when it might seem time to give up on her chances of being acquired --- there’s a newer and more technologically advanced model on the market, after all --- Klara is purchased, somewhat reluctantly, by the mother of Josie, a lonely and frequently ill teenager who had spotted Klara in the store window several months previously.

Klara is happy to become a part of Josie’s household; she especially enjoys observing the relationship between Josie and her best friend and neighbor Rick, though Klara (and, by extension, the reader) comes to realize that there’s some kind of rift between Rick and the rest of Josie’s college-bound peers who, like Josie, have been “lifted” (I won’t explain what that means here, since Ishiguro leaves it vague until near the novel’s end). Josie’s illness is also growing more serious, and between her mother’s bizarre requests, Klara’s discovery that Josie once had an older sister, and the family’s intermittent and somewhat mysterious trips to the city, it soon becomes apparent that Klara’s intended purpose in the household goes somewhat beyond mere companionship.

Klara is a fascinating narrator. In many ways, her powers surpass those of a human narrator (she can describe tiny details of an acquaintance’s attire after a single glance), but in others, she is quite naïve, sometimes heartbreakingly so. Through Klara, readers eventually gain an understanding of this ominous world that Ishiguro has created, one in which AI has begun stripping elite workers of their careers and prestige, and parents --- in a misguided attempt to give their children the advantages they’ll need to succeed --- have actually created a generation of pathologically lonely and unhappy individuals, unable to relate to one another.

As the novel progresses, circumstances lead Klara to consider what it is that makes a human  human , and if that can ever be truly synthesized by AI. Klara herself may technically lack the ability to love, but through her actions, she both exemplifies more compassion than many of the humans in the novel and inspires new kinds of connection in the humans whose lives intersect with her own. Like Ishiguro’s previous narrators, Klara will leave an indelible mark on readers’ own memories and perhaps even the way they view our world.

Reviewed by Norah Piehl on March 12, 2021

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

• Publication Date: March 1, 2022
• Genres: Fiction , Science Fiction
• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Vintage
• ISBN-10: 0593311299
• ISBN-13: 9780593311295

World's richest rock stars 2024: Here are the 18 wealthiest rockers - Paul McCartney net worth

World's Richest Actors 2024? Here are the 16 wealthiest film stars - George Clooney net worth

• Environment
• Rugby Union
• Other Sport
• Sport Opinion
• Film and TV
• Theatre and Stage
• Edinburgh Festivals
• Scran Podcast
• Heritage & Retro
• Scotsman Money
• Advertise My Business
• Place Announcement
• Place A Public Notice
• Advertise A Job

Book review: Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro is the first British winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature since William Golding scooped it in 1983. The Nobel judges in their citation called him one “who in novels of great emotional force has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.” Whether there is indeed such an abyss and whether our sense of connection with the world is indeed illusory may be matter for argument or dismissed as merely pretentious Nobel-speak. More to the point, however, I wouldn’t describe Ishiguro’s novels as having “great emotional force.” The emotion in his fiction is rather delicate and restrained.

As for our sense of connection with the world, Klara, the narrator of his new novel, is a robot, of a variety classified as an Artificial Friend (AF). She is powered by the sun and when the novel begins she has been placed by her manager in the window of a department store in an unnamed American city. She is on show to attract a buyer. Given that Klara has evidently been programmed to have feelings and be capable of empathy, the uncomfortable shadow of the slave-market lies over this, even though a robot, not being human, may properly be regarded as only an expensive piece of merchandise. Nevertheless Klara says, “I believe I do have feelings.”

Advertisement

Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers

Thank you for signing up.

Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more.

Certainly when she is bought as an AF for a troubled girl called Josie, who has indeed aroused her interest from the first day she came window-shopping, she quickly adds affection for her to the sense of responsibility for which she is programmed, and the developing friendship provokes the enmity of a Mrs Danvers-type housekeeper who had previously acted as Josie’s carer. Fortunately Josie’s teenage boyfriend is more welcoming to the AF, and hopes that Klara’s tender care can cure Josie of the mysterious condition that afflicts her.

The novel is an uneasy hybrid. It is partly about teenage uncertainties, anxieties and aspirations, all seen through the AF’s eye which is both sympathetic and puzzled. This, once you have accepted the device of a robot-narrator, is generally good. Ishiguro has always written well about young people.

Yet by choosing a robot as narrator Ishiguro is also announcing that his ambition goes beyond writing the sort of domestic coming-of-age novel that Josie’s character and circumstances seem to call for. There must also be public themes, questions for our time. Do, for instance, the rapid strides made in the development of artificial intelligence and robots call into question what it means to be human? Is there something “irreplaceable” in each of us, what indeed we have been accustomed to call a soul. Is society falling apart? Is some variety of Fascism taking root in America? All these things are discussible on the comment pages of newspapers. To be brought effectively into a novel they have to arise from the dramatic situation of the characters; and this doesn’t happen here. Perhaps the choice of a robot as a narrator who is an active character as well as an observer made this too difficult to be successfully brought off.

Ishiguro has always been a novelist and short story writer who came at things from an unusual, sometimes agreeably surprising, angle. He has always written with intelligence and charm. He still does. But over the years he has moved ever further from the novel of character and social observation towards writing about Big Themes: cloning, harvesting of human organs, artificial intelligence – all, as I say, matters for discussion, leader-page articles, blogs, lectures, debates.

It is ridiculous of course to ask that a novelist should retrace his steps and go back to writing the sort of things he used to write, but it is not ridiculous to regret the move away from the merely human. It is not ridiculous to find comedy disappearing from a writer’s work. There are still things to enjoy inn this novel, and I guess that many of Ishiguro’s admirers will lap it up. But for me there is an emptiness here, too much also that is merely discussible.

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, F aber & Faber, 307pp, £20

A message from the Editor

Thank you for reading this article. We're more reliant on your support than ever as the shift in consumer habits brought about by coronavirus impacts our advertisers.

If you haven't already, please consider supporting our trusted, fact-checked journalism by taking out a digital subscription at https://www.scotsman.com/subscriptions

• Short Story: “In New York City”
• New Food Initiatives Bring More Options to Bushwick
• Technological Solutions to the World’s Water Shortage
• “A Seemingly Normal Thursday”
• A Safe Haven: The Ailey School

The Spearhead Magazine

giving a voice to those who seek one

A Dazzling Dystopian Novel: ‘Klara and the Sun’ Review

Nobel Prize-winning author, Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, ‘Klara and the Sun,’ is a tale of loyalty, love, and the complexities of the human heart that has set the literary world ablaze. It has been topping the bookselling charts in the UK for months and I don’t see that changing any time soon! It’s a page-turning dystopian novel about an AF (Artificial Friend) called Klara who is taken into a family with a painful past. It seems that history is doomed to repeat itself, and it’s like a dark cloud has descended over their home. Loyal Klara does everything she can to protect Josie – but will it be enough?

Musings on the Metaphysical

Seeing love, misery, joy and a range of other emotions through the fresh eyes of an AF who is trying to interpret them is a compelling concept. Through this novel, Ishiguro ponders the infinite mysteries of the human heart. Whilst Mr. Capaldi’s scientific outlook argues that the entire essence of a human being is transferable rather than unique, I agree with Josie’s father’s view that you can never fully ‘become’ somebody else. The metaphor used here describes the depths of the human heart perfectly, “but then suppose you stepped into one of those rooms and discovered another room within it. And inside that room, another room still. Rooms within rooms within rooms. Isn’t that how it might be trying to learn Josie’s heart?” Technology cannot and will never be able to replicate the complexities of humanity – that is the thrust of Ishiguro’s latest book. Ishiguro’s tender approach to this subject was masterful; it made me, and millions of other readers, contemplate what it means to be human.

Do you believe in the human heart? I don’t mean simply the organ, obviously. I’m speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual? Kazuo Ishiguro, ‘Klara and the Sun,’ pg. 218

The ‘Sun’ as a Key Character in the Novel

Being embedded in AF Klara’s mind was at times shocking, for example, the eccentric plan she comes up with (don’t worry, no spoilers here!) and when she speaks to her revered, and always capitalized and personified, Sun. In order to justify Klara’s strange relationship to the Sun, I started thinking about it this way: the Sun is essentially her equivalent of an all-mighty, benevolent god because she depends on its light to power her. Klara even prays and tries to bargain with the Sun as if she were a small child. It is Klara’s sweetness paired with her extreme devotion and a level of emotional intelligence that is unique for an AF, that makes her so loveable and special to readers. That way, when she makes ridiculous choices we never doubt that she is motivated by how much she cares for these humans, so our frustration is tempered. Ishiguro offers us plenty of reminders – her belief in the Sun being the most prominent – that although Klara is considered to be an exceptionally perceptive AF, she is ultimately still a robot and as such, it would be unfair for us to expect her to mentally grasp everything going on around her perfectly. Therefore, it is clear at times that we are meant to think of Klara as an unreliable narrator whose outlook clashes with our own inherently human common sense.

Comparisons to ‘Never Let Me Go’

Just like I recall happening whilst reading ‘Never Let Me Go,’ Ishiguro has a way of pulling the proverbial rug out from under the reader with a sudden dark twist of the plot. There are always clues lurking just out of focus as to what is truly going on, but you can never quite grasp where the story will lead, which makes it captivating to read his dystopian work. I felt overwhelming ‘Never Let Me Go’ vibes in this novel when the notion of how to define and prove ‘real’ love was discussed, and I couldn’t help thinking of Tommy and Kath, especially as the context of using ‘true love’ as a last resort bargaining tool was so very similar. This link between his two novels felt so palpable and direct that I can’t help but think it must have been purposeful, stemming back to these central questions: are people who are in love more deserving of being spared than those who are not? Is it more tragic for people who are in love to face their mortality?

Ultimately, compared to ‘Never Let Me Go,’ I would brand this book as subtly dystopian because, although it is obviously set in a technologically-driven society, the tensions over the environment and genetic editing are very much in the background. Additionally, the sinking weight of this imagined world’s situation is concealed well behind false, blinding rays of relative normalcy, whereas the hints in ‘Never Let Me Go’ are searing.

An Eco-critical Message?

Upon reflection, this novel could be analysed from an eco-critical perspective. It could perhaps be interpreted as Ishiguro telling his readers to care more about the environment and to appreciate the simple things, like the sun’s warmth that invigorates us and brings us joy. If one zooms in on the thread of comments made by characters in the novel about the climate crisis, there is a sense of panic paired with a lack of agency. The main symbol of the endangered environment in this dystopian setting is the mysterious ‘Cootings Machine’ that pours out pollution. Defamiliarisation is employed as a device to mystify the reader as to precisely what the ‘Cootings Machine’ is, which acts to make it all the more threatening. Essentially, Klara’s ignorance to the technological infrastructure surrounding her forms a fog around the reader, disarming them. This limited perspective that we must view this dystopian world through keeps the novel mesmerizing, as we are forced to learn alongside Klara. Ishiguro places such an emphasis on visibility to show that Klara can absorb as much information about the world as possible but all she will ever really do is observe it from various vantage points: whether in the AF store, Josie’s house or in a car, always with a blinkered capacity to truly understand. I liked that Ishiguro never became didactic in this novel, however, I do wish that there was more detail about how the wider world functions and a touch more of an environmental scope to the story.

My Final Rating

My final consensus is that this book deserves a solid 8.5/10 – my only criticisms were that the plotline became quite far-fetched at times which affected the realism Ishiguro usually builds and sustains perfectly. I felt that at times it lacked some of the ineffable magic of his previous work as it seemed as if it was geared towards a young adult audience. Having said that, I did thoroughly enjoy reading this book and I finished it within two days because it was that suspenseful. Overall, it possessed a certain understated kind of gravity, veiled by Klara’s brightness and optimism, that made it engrossing. This juxtaposition was one of my favourite aspects of the novel, along with the metaphysical debate over the essence of the human heart and whether technology can ever fully replicate a person. In the speech awarding Ishiguro with his Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017, the “great emotional force” of his novels was highlighted as his asset, and I couldn’t agree more. I have yet to read a book by Ishiguro that doesn’t simultaneously grab me by the heartstrings and make me question everything about the world around me. If you haven’t read any of his oeuvre, I would seriously recommend doing so!

Georgia Bower

Georgia is a literature nerd, a music enthusiast and an aspiring writer. Her favourite lockdown activities include: trying to learn French - emphasis on trying - and learning new and delicious recipes.

• ← Maurizio Lampugnani Discusses Recapturing Memories in Africa on Award-Winning Album Landscape
• Debriefing the Hijacking of Ryanair Flight FR4978 →

Similar Posts

Book Review: The Gravity of Us by Phil Stamper

Everything Coming to Disney+ This Month

Why AI Will Not Replace Humans in the Workplace

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Please enable JavaScript in your web browser to get the best experience.

• Go to our Facebook page.
• Go to our Twitter page.
• Go to our Instagram page.
• Go to our YouTube page.
• Go to our TikTok page.

Klara and the Sun

Written by Kazuo Ishiguro

Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021. Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly-changing world through the eyes of a unique narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?

From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change for ever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.

Buy the book

• Bookshop.org UK
• Bookshop.org USA
• Waterstones

We benefit financially from any purchases you make when using the ‘Buy the book’ links.

Kazuo Ishiguro

About the Author

Kazuo Ishiguro on Klara and the Sun

‘I was drawn to a narrator with peculiar limitations of vision, as well as outstanding abilities to observe and learn quickly about the human world. An extreme outsider at the same time child-like and sophisticated. Through her eyes it would feel natural to ask big questions like: What’s special about humans? Are humans fundamentally lonely? What do humans mean when they say they love one another?

‘I didn’t do much research specifically for the novel. I’d been interested for some time both in Artificial Intelligence and in genetic technologies – and in how we should accommodate the opportunities and dangers that will come from such profound developments that are now just around the corner. In recent years, I’d been lucky enough to get to know, and have fascinating conversations with, some of the most knowledgeable people in these fields.’

Read the full interview on Waterstones .

What’s beyond doubt is that Ishiguro has written another masterpiece, a work that makes us feel afresh the beauty and fragility of our humanity Alex Preston, The Observer, March 1 2021

What the critics said

Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic

‘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.’

James Wood, The New Yorker

‘A prayer is a postcard asking for a favor, sent upward. Whether our postcards are read by anyone has become the searching doubt of Ishiguro’s recent novels, in which this master, so utterly unlike his peers, goes about creating his ordinary, strange, godless allegories.’

Maureen Corrigan, NPR

‘But great artists, like Ishiguro, are distinguished by their more expansive vision. I know that’s something of an old-fashioned conceit, as is the word, “masterpiece”; nevertheless, 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.’

Anne Enright, The Guardian

‘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.’

Charles Finch, The Los Angeles Times

‘ Klara and the Sun is a distinctly “mature” novel – as assured as ever, but slapdash in places compared to the author’s meticulous earlier work. And he’s never been strong with dialogue (his books are so profoundly interior). But these minor criticisms glance off Ishiguro’s work like bullets off the hull of a battleship. 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.’

Klara and the Sun written by Kazuo Ishiguro

Listen to an extract from Klara and the Sun

Sura Siu brings the audiobook of Klara and the Sun to life.

Kazuo Ishiguro and Kate Mosse in conversation

Kazuo Ishiguro discussed Klara and the Sun with novelist Kate Mosse in a special event presented by The Reading Agency and the British Library. The event  marked the 10th anniversary of World Book Night, The Reading Agency’s national celebration of books and reading.

Ishiguro talked to Mosse about the inspiration for the novel, and the power of books and reading to bring people together and change lives.

Kazuo Ishiguro for The British Library and The Reading Agency.

Other nominated books by Kazuo Ishiguro

Never let me go, when we were orphans, the remains of the day, an artist of the floating world.

Book recommendations

Reading list

10 of the best sci-fi books nominated for the Booker Prizes

First person

A crash course in novel writing: how Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day in a month

Where to start with kazuo ishiguro: a guide to his best books, the booker prize guide to... dystopian fiction, why ai will never supplant human novelists – or win the booker prize, kazuo ishiguro q&a, q&as with the 2021 nominated authors, share this page.

• Share this page on Facebook
• Share this page on Twitter
• Share this page on LinkedIn
• Share this page on Mail

Related Content

Patricia lockwood q&a, the making of mohsin hamid's exit west, read an extract from the seven moons of maali almeida by shehan karunatilaka.

Culture | Books

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro review: can artificial life ever be worth more than a human life?

Kazuo Ishiguro came to Britain from his native Nagasaki as a child in 1960; it was not until the 1980s that he held a British passport. He remains the finest (perhaps the only) Japanese-born novelist writing in English in Britain today. In 2017 he won the Nobel prize for literature.  

Klara and the Sun,  Ishiguro’s eighth novel, is a science fiction that tells the story of a bright and uncommonly observant AF or “Artificial Friend” called Klara, who has been designed to be a child’s life-sized companion. 

Narrated in the first person by Klara, the novel is a slow-burner: Ishiguro is in no hurry to get the plot airborne. The plot reveals itself subtly.  

Solar-powered, Klara spends her days watching the world go by from her perch in an AF store in a big city. She yearns for companionship in a good home, and carefully scrutinizes the behaviour of humans who come in to browse (“umbrella couples”, “dog lead people”: all sorts). 

Nothing could be worse for a humanlike robot than to remain unsold. When Klara is low on solar (sun “malabsorption” being a design defect with older AF models) she feels disconnected and uncared-for.  

One day a teenager called Josie picks Klara out from among the models on display. “Are you French?” she asks. “You look kind of French.” (Klara’s short dark hair and dark eyes suggest French engineering.) Klara delights in the longed-for attention; but Josie’s mother, whose stern gaze “never softened of wavered”, is wary. Klara may look pleasant but does she have the cognition and recall of the most up-to-date AFs? (The newer line of robots have been equipped with limited smell – useful in the event of a house fire.)  

Klara becomes Josie’s companion, nevertheless, and settles gratefully into her new home, where she contemplates the patterns the sun makes on the floor (“the loveliness of the Sun’s nourishment falling over us”). Josie turns out to be gravely ill, however, while her mother is depressed by the death of her first daughter, Sal. Klara also has to contend with an aggressive housekeeper named Melania (the Trump allusion is certainly intended), who hates AFs and their sun worship. “I fuck come dismantle you”, she threatens Klara in broken English. “Shove you in garbage.” Humans of the Melania variety like to exert their power and privilege over artificial humans. They really don’t care.  

As Klara has never been outside before, Josie’s mother takes her to see a waterfall. Josie is too sick to go along and the outing sours when Klara asks the mother about her deceased daughter Sal. “It’s not your business to be curious”, she snaps back. 

Quite why Josie has become so ill is never explained. She languishes in a virtual world of her own making. Teenagers stay glued all day to their “oblongs” (portable mini computers), and no longer seem to be of this world. The real world is a toxic place for them, shadowed by sinister data-gathering agencies and drone surveillance.  

Who is Kazuo Ishiguro? What are his best books? Why did he win the 2017 Nobel Prize in literature?

The Long, Long Afternoon by Inga Vesper review:

Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan review: a disarmingly distinctive voice

Klara pleads with the all-powerful sun to make Josie well again. (“Sun must be angry with me”, she reasons strangely.) Gradually, it dawns on her that she is being groomed to “be” Josie for her mother and for everyone else who loves Josie, should Josie die.   

Ishiguro has been here before.  Never Let Me Go,  perhaps his finest novel after  The Remains of the Day , was a dystopia that touched on themes of artificial intelligence and genetic editing. Ian McEwan’s recent sci-fi novel  Machines Like Me  may have also been an influence, but really Ishiguro’s is a unique voice - careful and understated but with an undertone always of disturbance.  

In lesser hands, a fable about robot love and loneliness might verge on the trite. With its hushed intensity of emotion,  Klara and the Sun  confirms Ishiguro as a master prose stylist. In his signature transparent prose Ishiguro considers weighty themes of social isolation and alienation. Can artificial life ever be worth more than a human life? That is the question posed here.  

Klara and the Sun  by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber, £20)

Buy it here

Create a FREE account to continue reading

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in