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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. ♦

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Hamilton cain, more online by hamilton cain.

• I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
• To Paradise
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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

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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?

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Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, review — his first novel since the Nobel

This tale of a young girl’s robot is classic ishiguro — oblique and deeply poignant.

K lara, who narrates Kazuo Ishiguro’s remarkable new novel, is an AF (B2, fourth series). Marketed as an “Artificial Friend”, she is a robot engineered to be a compliant companion to a young owner. This makes her both an unusual and a typical Ishiguro narrator.

Subservience has always fascinated him. His best-known and best-loved book, The Remains of the Day (1989), is recounted by a butler, Stevens, looking back over his years in service to an English aristocrat disgraced for fascist sympathies in the 1930s. Gradually the professional deference and unquestioning obedience Stevens has prided himself on is peeled back to reveal the moral and emotional corrosion his misplaced loyalty has led to. A similar situation is on view in An Artist of the Floating World

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Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro review – what it is to be human

The Nobel laureate examines loneliness, sacrifice and the meaning of love in a novel narrated by a machine with feelings

• Interview with Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘AI, gene-editing, big data ... I worry we are not in control of these things any more’

Klara and the Sun asks readers to love a robot and, the funny thing is, we do. This is a novel not just about a machine but narrated by a machine, though the word is not used about her until late in the book when it is wielded by a stranger as an insult. People distrust and then start to like her: “Are you alright, Klara?” Apart from the occasional lapse into bullying or indifference, humans are solicitous of Klara’s feelings – if that is what they are. Klara is built to observe and understand humans, and these actions are so close to empathy they may amount to the same thing. “I believe I have many feelings,” she says. “The more I observe the more feelings become available to me.”

Klara is an AF, or artificial friend, who is bought as a companion for 14-year-old Josie, a girl suffering from a mysterious, perhaps terminal illness. Klara is loyal and tactful, she is able to absorb difficulty and return care. Her role, as she describes it, is to prevent loneliness and to serve.

So we, the readers, love Klara the way we love what is good. We love her the way we loved our childhood teddy bear, perhaps, or even in the way we love a fictional character. Because even the most rounded fictional character is also a kind of animated doll; a code made out of language and the readers’ goodwill, which makes us smile or cry because we believe in it. The credulity of the reader is a hopeful and sometimes beautiful thing. Klara and the Sun captures this poignancy exactly – not because of the way people believe in Klara, but because of the way she starts to believe in the sun.

The themes of replication and authenticity are similar to those in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go , published in 2005. Both novels are set in a speculative future that feels quite like the present. Both also contain a secret moral shift: an advance in technology that has changed people’s sense of what it is to be human, and the emotional punch of Klara , as with Never Let Me Go , comes from the fact that the central character doesn’t know what is going on.

At the start of the novel, we see Klara being moved into the window display of her store in the city in order to attract customers (Ishiguro makes this less pervy than it sounds), and she speaks in gentle tones about what she sees outside. Klara is already a little self-conscious, for a machine. She is also an exceptionally talented AF, because she is able to grasp emotional contradiction. Out in the street, a man and a woman see each other, perhaps for the first time in many years, and they embrace so tightly Klara wonders if they are more upset than delighted. “Sometimes,” her manager says, “at special moments like that, people feel a pain alongside their happiness.”

She has already seen Josie, the girl whose friend she instantly wants to become, but Josie has not come back to make the purchase. Klara must wait, which she does with great patience. Ishiguro is very interested in delay and restoration. Loneliness and waiting are almost the same thing here; estrangements and reunifications run through the book. Josie reconciles with her old friend Rick, she meets her separated father, and Rick’s mother makes contact with an old boyfriend, Vance. The promise is held out that those who wait will be rewarded, and sometimes they are. Other times, the reality is disappointing or even brutal, but win or lose, hope is such a sustaining thing that it becomes a value in itself. Hope, in the face of sickness and possible death, is what Klara does best.

Meanwhile, the reader must learn to wait too, as with steady craft, Ishiguro leaves one hint after another. What is wrong with the world outside Klara’s store window? Why are the children she sees so thin? Why does the beggar man seem dead (along with his dog) and then alive again? What will happen when humans realise that the new upgraded series of AFs are capable of deceitfulness? The book rustles with possibility.

By the time we realise what is happening to the children, this first mystery has given way to the more urgent question of what Josie’s mother is planning for Klara. If you are waiting for a big sci-fi reveal about this future world then you are reading the wrong book, however. There is no great veil ripped from the narrative to reveal a conspiracy of machines, or of men. Social and political details come late, and make no difference to Klara. Slowly, however, our understanding of the world detaches from her naive point of view. We come to know more than Klara does, and this distance is the gentle opposite of irony – it is compassion.

The novel requires the reader to ask and settle, over and again, while the philosophical content quietly takes hold. Klara and the Sun is a book about what it is to be human. The fact that Ishiguro can make such huge concerns seem so essential and so simple is just one of the reasons he was awarded the Nobel prize .

How does a robot become conscious? Klara runs on solar power and is fretful when the world goes grey. The absence of light, she says, might make an AF “start to worry there was something wrong with him”. Klara’s need for the sun is so close to an emotion as to make no difference. The sun is “goodness”, she says, it provides “special nourishment” and – as easily as that – both abstraction and magical thinking are engendered in the mind of a machine. When Klara looks at the sky the light can be lemon or slate grey, but when Josie is sick, it turns to the colour “of her vomit or her pale feces”. Klara is generating symbolism, she is making meaning and taking solace from what might be called a “psychology”. This finally yields a spiritual sense, when she starts to bargain for Josie’s health, or when she decides to make a sacrifice, in order to make Josie better. Klara starts to pray.

Ishiguro is at his most moving when he writes about the meek. It is almost concerning how ready the female characters in the book are to be sacrificed to some greater aim, to suffer or be punished. When a woman tries to strike a bargain with a cruel authority figure, she takes it one step further: “You can check if I have been punishing myself properly,” she says. The men in the novel are, by contrast, more rebellious and free.

Klara’s naivety is the engine of the book and its great strength, but we might query why the humans seem to know so little and be so trusting too. When Klara asks for assistance in the task she has set herself to save Josie, no one turns her down. “I don’t see how this helps Josie,” says Rick, “but if you say it will, then of course I’ll help.” This same avowal is repeated, more strangely, by Josie’s father, though his motives are less clear.

There are questions the reader might ask, in this as well as in any other novel that is set after the invention of the internet. Why does Klara not talk to Siri, if she wants to know what is going on in the wider world, or sometimes even what is going on in front of her? Other questions linger, in a more fruitful way, after the novel is finished. Would people risk making their children sick, you wonder, in order to help them get ahead in the world? In fact, people do all kinds of awful things to their children, for exactly that reason. Ishiguro’s simplicity here, as elsewhere, yields serious speculation.

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.

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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.

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“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.”

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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 ..."

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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."

clock This article was published more than  3 years ago

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Klara and the Sun,’ a robot tries to make sense of humanity

One hundred years ago, a play titled “R.U.R.,” by Karel Capek, debuted in Prague and gave us the word “robot.” Since then, androids have been dreaming of electric sheep, and we’ve been having nightmares about the robot apocalypse. But calamity rarely comes in the neat, clarifying ways we fear.

Leave it to Kazuo Ishiguro to articulate our inchoate anxieties about the future we’re building. “ Klara and the Sun ,” his first novel since winning the Nobel Prize in 2017, is a delicate, haunting story, steeped in sorrow and hope. Readers still reeling from his 2005 novel “ Never Let Me Go ” will find here a gentler exploration of the price children pay for modern advancements. But if the weird complications of technology frame the plot, the real subject, as always in Ishiguro’s dusk-lit fiction, is the moral quandary of the human heart.

Klara, the narrator of this genre-straddling novel, is an Artificial Friend (AF), a popular class of androids designed to provide companionship to teenagers. Why young people would need artificial companionship is one of the chilling questions that Ishiguro raises but postpones so naturally that the horror feels almost incidental.

Kazuo Ishiguro wins Nobel Prize in literature

When we meet Klara, she (it?) is on display in something like the Apple Store, an elegant retail shop catering to well-heeled parents. Older AFs such as Klara rotate with the latest models, competing for attention based on their specifications and social cachet. Klara’s particular skill is empathetic observation. She sits in the store window like a teddy bear on Christmas Eve, waiting for a young person to notice and take her home.

Powered by solar energy, Klara takes a keen interest in the sun. Its rays literally give her life, and she notices how daylight enlivens everyone outside the store, too. It’s not such a leap for her to conclude that the sun is an omnipotent, often benevolent being capable of casting his invigorating light on whom he chooses. That faith, if you will, becomes the abiding premise of Klara’s life — and the haunting complication of this novel.

The story begins in earnest when Klara is purchased to be the companion for a bright but sickly teenager named Josie. She moves into an isolated country house and takes up her role as an attentive Artificial Friend. The housekeeper treats her with suspicion bordering on disgust, but Klara’s programming doesn’t include resentment, and, in any case, she gets along well with Josie, and Josie’s mother seems particularly taken with her.

There’s a Jamesian quality to the searching, deliberate portrayal of life in Josie’s remote house. Like Klara, Ishiguro attends closely to the way apparently innocuous conversations shift, the way joy drains from a frozen smile. This is a home recovering from grief and bracing for more.

Josie’s illness — like the life-threatening ailments in fairy tales — is never diagnosed, but it’s the source of the home’s ever-rising alarm. The possibility of her death ratchets up the pressure on Josie’s mother to pretend that nothing is wrong even while preparing for the next terrifying loss. Klara, determined to help any way she can, is left to discern sensitivities she can sense but not entirely grasp. She may be an Artificial Friend, but there is nothing artificial about her friendship. “I knew my best course was to work harder than ever to be a good AF to Josie until the shadows receded,” Klara tells us. “At the same time, what was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom.”

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Beyond the dark enchantment of this peaceful house, Ishiguro suggests a world radically transformed. Another author would have been eager to elaborate on the dystopian features of the not-too-distant era, but Ishiguro always implies, never details. One reads Ishiguro in a defensive crouch, afraid to have our worst suspicions confirmed. We’re left to intuit that the economy has been revolutionized, hollowing out the middle class. Odd new social practices have arisen, too, such as “interaction meetings” in which teenagers gather at one another’s houses to practice getting along. For readers still social distancing while their children endure remote learning, this is unnervingly close to the bone.

But the most unsettling reference in “Klara and the Sun” concerns a process called “lifting.” It’s some kind of genetic enhancement — rarely fatal — that has created a superclass of young people, completely altering adolescence, college admissions and employment possibilities.

Creepy as this is, it’s not so far off from current genetic research, and it certainly comports with the desires of frantic parents who will stop at nothing to promote their darlings. That’s the real power of this novel: Ishiguro’s ability to embrace a whole web of moral concerns about how we navigate technological advancements, environmental degradation and economic challenges even while dealing with the unalterable fact that we still die.

Telling this story from Klara’s algorithmic point of view is a perilous choice, even for an author used to risky narrative maneuvers. With her childlike intensity, Klara evinces a kind of devotion that could sound preprogrammed, like listening to the reassuring voice of an automatic telephone operator for 300 pages. But Ishiguro has perfectly calibrated Klara’s uncanny tone, with a personality just warm enough and alien enough to feel like the Artificial Friend we all need. Even her radical faith in the sun, which could easily have slipped into a crude satire of Christians’ faith in the Son, is moving and profound. Seeing her construct her own theodicy from the simple process of observing and reasoning is like watching the passage of 2,000 years over a few months.

Of course, tales of sensitive robots determined to help us survive our self-destructive impulses are not unknown in the canon of science fiction. But Ishiguro brings to this poignant subgenre a uniquely elegant style and flawless control of dramatic pacing. In his telling, Klara’s self-abnegation feels both ennobling and tragic.

Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com .

Review: Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘The Buried Giant’ defies easy categorization

Review: Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’

Klara and the Sun

By Kazuo Ishiguro

Knopf. 320 pp. $28

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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.

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2021

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

KLARA AND THE SUN

by Kazuo Ishiguro ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 2, 2021

A haunting fable of a lonely, moribund world that is entirely too plausible.

Nobelist Ishiguro returns to familiar dystopian ground with this provocative look at a disturbing near future.

Klara is an AF, or “Artificial Friend,” of a slightly older model than the current production run; she can’t do the perfect acrobatics of the newer B3 line, and she is in constant need of recharging owing to “solar absorption problems,” so much so that “after four continuous days of Pollution,” she recounts, “I could feel myself weakening.” She’s uncommonly intelligent, and even as she goes unsold in the store where she’s on display, she takes in the details of every human visitor. When a teenager named Josie picks her out, to the dismay of her mother, whose stern gaze “never softened or wavered,” Klara has the opportunity to learn a new grammar of portentous meaning: Josie is gravely ill, the Mother deeply depressed by the earlier death of her other daughter. Klara has never been outside, and when the Mother takes her to see a waterfall, Josie being too ill to go along, she asks the Mother about that death, only to be told, “It’s not your business to be curious.” It becomes clear that Klara is not just an AF; she’s being groomed to be a surrogate daughter in the event that Josie, too, dies. Much of Ishiguro’s tale is veiled: We’re never quite sure why Josie is so ill, the consequence, it seems, of genetic editing, or why the world has become such a grim place. It’s clear, though, that it’s a future where the rich, as ever, enjoy every privilege and where children are marshaled into forced social interactions where the entertainment is to abuse androids. Working territory familiar to readers of Brian Aldiss—and Carlo Collodi, for that matter—Ishiguro delivers a story, very much of a piece with his Never Let Me Go , that is told in hushed tones, one in which Klara’s heart, if she had one, is destined to be broken and artificial humans are revealed to be far better than the real thing.

Pub Date: March 2, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-593-31817-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020

LITERARY FICTION | SCIENCE FICTION | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

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by Kazuo Ishiguro ; illustrated by Bianca Bagnarelli

by Kazuo Ishiguro

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PERSPECTIVES

SEEN & HEARD

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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by Max Brooks

BOOK TO SCREEN

REAL AMERICANS

by Rachel Khong ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 2024

Bold, thoughtful, and delicate at once, addressing life’s biggest questions through artfully crafted scenes and characters.

A sweeping exploration of choice, chance, class, race, and genetic engineering in three generations of a Chinese American family.

Khong’s follow-up to her sweet, slim debut— Goodbye, Vitamin (2017)—is again about parents and children but on a more ambitious scale, portraying three generations in what feel like three linked novellas, or somehow also like three connected gardens. The first begins in 1999 New York City, where Lily Chen stands next to a man at an office party who wins a big-screen TV in the raffle. He insists she take it; he is Matthew Maier, heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, and has all the TVs he needs. On their first date, they go to Paris after dinner, and as this section ends, they’ve had their first child. The second part of the book moves to 2021 on an island off the coast of Washington state. It’s narrated by Lily’s now-15-year-old son, Nick; his father is nowhere in sight, at least for now. The closing section unfolds in 2030 in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s told by Lily’s now elderly mother, May, with an extended flashback to her youth in China during the Cultural Revolution and her first years in the U.S. As a budding scientist, May was fascinated by genetics. Of the lotus flowers she studied at university, she observes, “Raindrop-shaped buds held petals that crept closer, each day, to unfurling. As humans we were made of the same stuff, but their nucleotides were coded such that they grew round, green leaves instead of our human organs, our beating hearts.” This concern for how and why we turn out the way we do animates the book on every level, and along with science, social constructs like race and class play major roles. Every character is dear, and every one of them makes big mistakes, causing a ripple effect of anger and estrangement that we watch with dismay, and hope.

Pub Date: April 30, 2024

ISBN: 9780593537251

Page Count: 416

Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | LITERARY FICTION

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by Rachel Khong

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‘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].

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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]

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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.

Original review at Harvard review Online

BOSTON'S PREMIER ONLINE ARTS MAGAZINE

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).

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6 New Books We Recommend This Week

Suggested reading from critics and editors at The New York Times.

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It’s a happy coincidence that we recommend Becca Rothfeld’s essay collection “All Things Are Too Small” — a critic’s manifesto “in praise of excess,” as her subtitle has it — in the same week that we also recommend Justin Taylor’s maximalist new novel “Reboot,” an exuberant satire of modern society that stuffs everything from fandom to TV retreads to the rise of conspiracy culture into its craw. I don’t know if Rothfeld has read Taylor’s novel, but I get the feeling she would approve. Maybe you will too: In the spirit of “more, bigger, louder,” why not pick those up together?

Our other recommendations this week include a queer baseball romance novel, an up-to-the-minute story about a widower running for the presidency of his local labor union, a graphic novelist’s collection of spare visual stories and, in nonfiction, a foreign policy journalist’s sobering look at global politics in the 21st century. Happy reading. — Gregory Cowles

REBOOT Justin Taylor

This satire of modern media and pop culture follows a former child actor who is trying to revive the TV show that made him famous. Taylor delves into the worlds of online fandom while exploring the inner life of a man seeking redemption — and something meaningful to do.

“His book is, in part, a performance of culture, a mirror America complete with its own highly imagined myths, yet one still rooted in the Second Great Awakening and the country’s earliest literature. It’s a performance full of wit and rigor.”

From Joshua Ferris’s review

Pantheon | $28

YOU SHOULD BE SO LUCKY Cat Sebastian

When a grieving reporter falls for the struggling baseball player he’s been assigned to write about, their romance is like watching a Labrador puppy fall in love with a pampered Persian cat: all eager impulse on one side and arch contrariness on the other.

“People think the ending is what defines a romance, and it does, but that’s not what a romance is for. The end is where you stop, but the journey is why you go. … If you read one romance this spring, make it this one.”

From Olivia Waite’s romance column

Avon | Paperback, $18.99

ALL THINGS ARE TOO SMALL: Essays in Praise of Excess Becca Rothfeld

A striking debut by a young critic who has been heralded as a throwback to an era of livelier discourse. Rothfeld has published widely and works currently as a nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post; her interests range far, but these essays are united by a plea for more excess in all things, especially thought.

“Splendidly immodest in its neo-Romantic agenda — to tear down minimalism and puritanism in its many current varieties. … A carnival of high-low allusion and analysis.”

From David Gates’s review

Metropolitan Books | $27.99

THE RETURN OF GREAT POWERS: Russia, China, and the Next World War Jim Sciutto

Sciutto’s absorbing account of 21st-century brinkmanship takes readers from Ukraine in the days and hours ahead of Russia’s invasion to the waters of the Taiwan Strait where Chinese jets flying overhead raise tensions across the region. It’s a book that should be read by every legislator or presidential nominee sufficiently deluded to think that returning America to its isolationist past or making chummy with Putin is a viable option in today’s world.

“Enough to send those with a front-row view into the old basement bomb shelter. … The stuff of unholy nightmares.”

From Scott Anderson’s review

Dutton | $30

THE SPOILED HEART Sunjeev Sahota

Sahota’s novel is a bracing study of a middle-aged man’s downfall. A grieving widower seems to finally be turning things around for himself as he runs for the top job at his labor union and pursues a love interest. But his election campaign gets entangled in identity politics, and his troubles quickly multiply.

“Sahota has a surgeon’s dexterous hands, and the reader senses his confidence. … A plot-packed, propulsive story.”

From Caoilinn Hughes’s review

Viking | $29

SPIRAL AND OTHER STORIES Aidan Koch

The lush, sparsely worded work of this award-winning graphic novelist less resembles anything recognizably “comic book” than it does a sort of dreamlike oasis of art. Her latest piece of masterful minimalism, constructed from sensuous washes of watercolor, pencil, crayon and collage, pulses with bright pigment and tender melancholy.

“Many of these pages are purely abstract, but when Koch draws details, it’s in startlingly specific and consistent contours that give these stories a breadth of character as well as depiction.”

From Sam Thielman’s graphic novels column

New York Review Comics | $24.95

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Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams starring in Klara and the Sun

Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams are set to lead the cast of 'Klara and the Sun'.

The duo are in negotiations to star in Taika Waititi's movie that is based on the New York Times best-selling novel by the Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro.

The story follows Klara (Ortega), a robot girl designed to stop teenagers from getting lonely.

Klara is purchased by a mother (Adams) and a bright teen girl called Josie who loves her robot companion but is suffering from a mysterious illness. Klara attempts to save Josie and her loved ones from heartbreak and ends up discovering the power of human love in the process.

The book earned positive reviews following publication and was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2021.

Dahvi Waller is adapting the script for the film and Ishiguro will serve as an executive producer on the project.

It is another big role for Jenna after her work in the likes of the 'Scream' franchise and 'Wednesday' although she confessed that she "can't watch" herself on screen as she would spend too much time obsessing over things she disliked.

The 21-year-old star told Harper's Bazaar magazine: "I can’t watch my work, as I know I won’t be able to push forward and continue to grow as an actor if I cling on to certain things.

"A lot of people in my profession can probably relate to this: when you do a take you don’t like, you go to bed kicking yourself.

"But ultimately, all I can do is be vulnerable and honest when the camera’s on, and then I have to move on and let it go."

Jenna is determined to be in control of her own career choices and hopes to make a "mistake" so she no longer has to worry about things going wrong.

She said: "I want to be able to really orchestrate my own future and make more specific, precise moves. I’ve even begged a little bit to be allowed to make a mistake. Because how can I learn if I don’t do that for myself?

"I can’t be scared of the fact that I might fall on my face. But it’s hard to do that when so many people are watching."