Klara and the Sun

By Kazuo Ishiguro

This is Ishiguro’s eighth novel, and Klara, who narrates it, is an Artificial Friend, a humanoid machine.

In many of his previous novels his subjects had been memory and the accounting of memory, its burdens and its reconciliation,. With “Klara and the Sun,” he tackles the connected theme of obsolescence. 

What is it like to live in a world whose way of life and ideas have passed you by? What happens to the people who must be cast aside in order for others to move forward?

 “Klara and the Sun” takes place in the uncomfortably near future, and ordinary words aquire sinister meaning: highly qualified employees have been “substituted,” their work now performed by A.I.

Whole classes of workers have been replaced by machines, which themselves are subject to replacement. 

But the characters in the novel, in contrast to the older generation, who remember the way things were, find these conditions normal.

 In order to ensure that her daugthter, Josie, will not become “obsololete” but thrive and compete in this “breave new world”, her mother decides to have her “lifted up”, i.e, surgically enhance her mental abilities, knowing she endangered her health, her happiness, even her life — a risk that sounds unbelievable until we realize that, perhaps, in certain ways, it is already happening.

An explication of the “squares” that Klara sees:

“Klara’s perception, too, is at once mechanical and deeply subjective. Fields of vision appear in squares and panels, so that you can imagine (through her eyes) pictures processed and bitmapped, resolving themselves the way a high-definition image resolves on a screen, but with a shifting focus that seems tied to her interpretation of the events and environment around her. Seeing the world from Klara’s point of view is to be reminded constantly of what it looks like when mediated through technology. That might have felt foreign a century ago, but not anymore.” (From a review.)

Klara is an exceptional AF, manufactured, as an experiment, to be likeable, and somehow she comes over as more likeable than most of the human characters.

“I believe I have many feelings,” Klara says. “The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me.”

Perhaps humans acquire all their various degrees of feelings in a similar way? 

I think most of the reading club members liked the novel. I, for one, was quite moved by the story, despite my dislike of dystopias in general, and got rather fond of Klara…

Blanka