Book Review: "Klara and the Sun" by Kazuo Ishiguro

From start to finish, Kazuo Ishiguro's books tend to draw you in with this fascination for difference and the capacity for love. In his book "Remains of the Day" Ishiguro gives us a heartwarming story that has since been not only turned into a film, but read widely in many different languages. But, I believe one of his most well-known books of our own times is the dystopian "Never Let Me Go". Turned into a film starring Keira Knightley and Carrie Mulligan, this book is about children who are raised for other purposes. In the world of social class and reputation, there are certain things required of these orphans and they need to give them up. Ishiguro is very good at asking the difficult questions about the requirement for suffering and in this book "Klara and the Sun" - he does just that once again. Is it possible for these machines to feel love and be loved? Is it possible for them to feel pain and suffer? The extended metaphor underlying the book is both disturbing and incredibly crafted.

“Klara and the Sun” is about an artificial friend (AF) named Klara who sits in a shop as a B2, amongst the B3 artificial friends and wants a good home, but also wants to be chosen for who she is rather than her make and model. When a child named Josie comes in, Klara feels an instant connection to her and makes a point of connecting herself with Josie. When Josie leaves, the shopkeeper reprimands Klara and states that children never keep their promises of coming back to buy the one they saw in the shop - they just want the latest model. Klara was not the latest model. However, Josie returns and gets Klara, insistent that Klara and her have a bond. When Klara is taken home to Josie’s house, her life and purpose begin to change and morph into Josie’s. The question of whether a machine, or an artificial intelligence is capable of feeling love and attachment is constantly underlying the book and I feel like Kazuo Ishiguro has done his very best when it comes to wording it so that it is not only a constant mystery to us, but also that it becomes clearer and clearer as the book goes on. We who are humans hardly ever think about this, but with the changing world of virtual everything and artificial this, that and the other - I think we need to pay it some mind now or else it may be too late.

Kazuo Ishiguro did not win the literary Nobel Prize for no reason. His contribution to literature over the course of the late 20th and early 21st century are almost unmatched and his ability to blend together different genres in a way to create a dystopian machine-fantasy that is not only believable but could, in all aspects actually happen - is something that he does best when it comes to novels. I think that if Ishiguro were to write a follow up or a sequel to this, it could be very interesting indeed, especially seeing as the language gets more involved in emotion as we hit part 2 when Klara is taken home with Josie.

In conclusion, there are many great books out there in the year of 2021, but I think that this book is a key example of what could happen with literature. Writing about how our own world is changing and how we need to focus on what changes are happening is important. Putting them into a story though, is difficult. We have to be made to feel - and that, as we are humans, is the irony of it all.