Klara and the Sun

 

My literary taste is quite random, predicated upon happenstance for the most part. I discovered "Klara and the Sun" at an impromptu trip to McNally Jackson approximately a year-and-a-half ago. My partner and I started reading it together in spurts before stopping altogether.

It settled into a corner of my room, collecting dust. Nonetheless, I still had the page marked. Over a year later, I went back and vowed to finish it, a) because it is a compelling story and b) I hate leaving things undone.

I had never read Kazuo Ishiguro before, but after reading "Klara and the Sun," I can understand why he has achieved global recognition. The story is relevant to the present time (fear of AI and robots overtaking the earth), with the narrator being Klara, an "artificial friend", abbreviated throughout the book as AF.

It starts with Klara narrating her life in a shop, oftentimes spending her days on display in the window, hoping one day that someone will notice her and take her home. Her dreams come true when Josie, an earnest, energetic girl, shows up at the shop and displays an immediate interest in Klara.

There is an undercurrent of sadness right from the start, the sense that Josie's interest in Klara is temporary and will one day fade away. 

Once she comes home with Josie, Klara is introduced to a variety of characters: Josie's cold, rather distant mother, the flustered maid, known as Melania Housekeeper, and Josie's best friend, Rick.

Klara relies on solar power in order to regain energy and her relationship with the sun is the primary motif running throughout the novel (hence the title). 

By writing it from her perspective, Ishiguro shows how she is attempting to navigate what feel like emotions, mainly her relationship to Josie and her family. One particularly interesting part is when the mother reveals to Klara that she believes Josie might die and she would like her to start studying Josie because she would want her to take Josie's place should she pass away. 

Klara experiences persecution in multiple instances, solely for being a robot, which bring her a sense of what maybe feels like sadness. As time passes, Klara's relationship with the sun, which seems to elicit the strongest emotion from her, grows throughout the story. It is the focal point of a scene where she goes to a field and pleads with it for Josie to recover from her illness.

A rather interesting part was when Klara returned to the city in search of what she described as the "Cootings Machine." I'm not sure exactly what this was, except that it was polluting the air and she felt that it was the main catalyst behind Josie's sickness. This is interesting because of the clash of machine versus machine. Even though Klara can't exactly "feel," one of the closest points she comes to doing so is with her anger toward the machine.

Overall, I thought Klara and the Sun was a good read. It was written in a simplistic, easy-to-understand way free of unnecessarily verbose language. There were moments where I did feel it lagged, but the end scene, where you felt Klara overcome by an element of sadness yet resolution that her time with Josie was in fact coming to an end, was poignant.

Rating: 7/10