KLARA AND THE SUN
KAZUO ISHIGURO
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Genre: Metaphysical Science Fiction, Dystopian
Dystopian makes me nervous.
Memories of tepid afternoons in 5th Form English, reading Brave New World spring to mind. Finishing the book with a new found fear of living in a Black Mirror society. Just another catastrophic thought for a twitchy, anxious teen. Because of this, I avoid all things dystopian and/or metaphysical.
Maybe I was swayed by the Nobel Prize for Literature (quite convincing) or the modernist cover design (what was it they say about book covers?) Either way, I feel grateful I plucked Klara and the Sun from the Women’s Bookstore on Ponsonby Road. I am better for it.
Like his previous works Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, Ishiguo employs his talent for taking motifs that are surreal and stretching them to an almost insane, still believable limit. The ideas feel familiar, in a sad, crumbling of society kind of way.
Klara and The Sun describes the human existence; sharp and brutal, with small pockets of compassion. The catch, the narrator is not human. Klara is an artificial friend, or AF. She is solar powered. The Sun, its own character in the book is contemporary in Klara’s understanding of the world.
I fell in love with Klara, a naïve, insightful narrator. Enthralled in her perspective, I longed to know her view of the world as she slowly came across it. I wanted to know what she thought about Dalmatian puppies and bookstores. Wild grass and heartbreak. I coveted her nuance and hopeful interpretations of love and loss. With her eye, I was able to sit with the subtleties of interactions I normally take for granted. The shifts in tone and the way in which we placate one another for harmony. I sit with these thoughts long after finishing this book.
The arc of the plot leans heavily into a dystopian rhetoric, which I hated. Not for its existence, but for its believability. I believed in the decisions that were being made, I understood them. The book withdraws into itself towards its ending. There is distance written into the plot and its characters, which shadows the ways in which we make ourselves obsolete.
Ishiguo’s writing in Klara and the Sun is accessible and spare. There is no fanciful word-smithing. Instead only believability. Personally I love a brilliantly crafted sentence woven within the plot, but I didn’t miss those moments here.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s first piece since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature is a study in compassion, its pages are marked with kindness. The world needs more books like this one.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro is out now in hardback, ebook and audiobook.