Book Report: Klara and the Sun

1. Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (2021) (1/4/26)

In 2017, Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his banquet speech, he said:

The Nobel Prize, like many great ideas, is a simple one . . . and that is perhaps why it continues to have such a powerful hold on the world’s imagination. The pride we feel when someone from our nation wins a Nobel Prize is different from the one we feel witnessing one of our athletes winning an Olympic medal. We don’t feel the pride of our tribe demonstrating superiority over other tribes. Rather, it’s the pride that comes from knowing that one of us has made a significant contribution to our common human endeavour. The emotion aroused is a larger one, a unifying one.
     We live today in a time of growing tribal enmities, of communities fracturing into bitterly opposed groups. Like literature, my own field, the Nobel Prize is an idea that, in times like these, helps us to think beyond our dividing walls, that reminds us of what we must struggle for together as human beings. It’s the sort of idea mothers will tell their small children, as they always have, all around the world, to inspire them and to give themselves hope. 

These sentiments, in a reverse way, inform all three of the books by Ishiguro that I've read: Remains of the Day, many years ago; Never Let Me Go; and now Klara and the Sun—the latter two being futuristic, somewhat dystopian allegories.

In Klara, the various tribes include AFs, or artificial friends—androids—of which Klara is an exemplar, and in the human realm, "lifted" and "unlifted" people, the former—exclusively, though not universally, young people—having been subjected to (risky) genetic editing to enhance their academic ability and thus gain further benefits in society. Klara narrates, from her days in the shop where she and her fellow AFs display themselves in order to attract a potential buyer; to the time she spends with the sickly 14-year-old girl, Josie, who chooses her; to, ultimately, her time after Josie becomes well and goes off to college. Throughout all this, decisions are being made that affect Klara greatly, and of which she is only vaguely aware, or perhaps even wrong about.

Josie and her mother live on the edge of a prairie rather far from town, their only neighbors being Josie's good friend—and adolescent love—Rick, together with his mother. When they go into the city they encounter the strife of larger society: pollution, bigotry, fear; and they meet people from the mothers' pasts—so, memories, failed hopes, and the simple friction of different wills wanting different things. But everyone wants Josie to get better, to thrive. And Klara makes a deal with the Sun to ensure that happens. 

It's a simple story, really, and simply told, but here and there a keen observation or comment carries philosophical weight, about both "othering" and the universal and lingering connections of the human heart. When Klara says, "I believe I have many feelings. The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me," it makes me think of the necessity of travel, of wide experience, in becoming a more rounded human being—or, perhaps, of having a close family, for the same end. (I think of travel first perhaps because I don't have a close family. There are no doubt many ways to expand our awareness of this infinite existence.) 

In the end, the book is perhaps about love, plain and simple. As Klara, in the final pages, "goes through her memories and places them in the right order," she comes to the conclusion that to truly know someone, it's not enough to know what's in that person's heart; one must also know what's in the hearts of those who surround them. Nothing—none of us—is separate. 

As with Never Let Me Go, I wasn't entirely sure where this book was going, or even whether I really liked it—Klara's voice, naive and childlike, gets tiresome. But having finished it, I feel richer.