“Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches the children passing by the storefront and waits to be chosen.”
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Klara and the Sun is Kazuo Ishiguro's 2021 novel, his first novel after the Nobel Prize in Literature and one of the most carefully calibrated novels of his career. Klara is an Artificial Friend (AF), a humanoid solar-powered companion robot sold to wealthy families for their adolescent children in a near-future America. Klara waits in the storefront window. Klara is chosen by Josie, a chronically ill girl whose mother is making decisions Klara only partially understands. The novel is Klara's first-person narration of the months that follow.
What Ishiguro is doing is what Ishiguro has been doing across six novels: building a first-person narrator whose limited understanding is the structural engine of the book. Klara's perception is fragmentary, sometimes literally pixelated (her vision processes the world in geometric tiles when she is stressed), and the reader has to assemble the larger picture from her observations. The novel takes its time. It is also, slowly, devastating in the particular Ishiguro way that Never Let Me Go was devastating: the cost of being engineered for someone else's purpose.
Recommended as required Ishiguro reading, as the natural next read for fans of Never Let Me Go, and as one of the canonical 2020s literary-SF novels. Five stars and the right entry into late-Ishiguro. The Sura Siu audiobook is excellent.
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