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the complete review - fiction

Klara and the Sun

by
Kazuo Ishiguro

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : well-developed tale, neatly spun around loneliness and faith

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Girl AF Klara is both the embodiment of the dehumanized server and its refutation. (...) Klara and the Sun doesn't strive for uncanniness. It aspires to enchantment, or to put it another way, reenchantment, the restoration of magic to a disenchanted world. Ishiguro drapes realism like a thin cloth over a primordial cosmos." - Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic
  
  
• "It is both logical and a touch self-parodic for a novelist whose characters often resemble automata to write an entire book in the voice of a machine imitating human speech patterns. (...) In Never Let Me Go the persistent understatement of the narration is crucial to the book's power -- a slow-dawning horror seeps between the lines and lingers well beyond its conclusion. But Klara and the Sun lacks any equivalent tension: its setting proves to be a generic dystopia, and Klara, even for this master of withholding, may be too blank a slate, incapable of evasion or repression. Klara's fixation on the Sun comes to stand in for a larger problem. The shadows are where meaning typically resides for Ishiguro, and in this book, they are simply too well illuminated." - Dennis Lim, Bookforum
  
  
• "Part of the book's pleasure is that it trusts the reader to infer such details. What makes the subtly sinister setting doubly strange is that it comes refracted through the partial understanding of the narrator (.....) His speculative scenario of technological innovation is also a domestic satire on aspirational parenting. Philosophical questions of faith and mortality mix with storylines involving boy trouble and mother-daughter strife. Josie's sickness is a metaphor for the pressures of a hot-housed adolescence, yet the story holds attention on its own terms, too." - The Economist
  
  
• "Narrated in the first person by Klara, the novel is a slow-burner: Ishiguro is in no hurry to get the plot airborne. The plot reveals itself subtly. (...) In lesser hands, a fable about robot love and loneliness might verge on the trite. With its hushed intensity of emotion, Klara and the Sun confirms Ishiguro as a master prose stylist. In his signature transparent prose Ishiguro considers weighty themes of social isolation and alienation. Can artificial life ever be worth more than a human life ? That is the question posed here." - Ian Thomson, Evening Standard
  
  
• "This is a book about the big questions of existence: what is a person ? What role does creativity play in everyday lives ? How should we respond to the unfairness of the world ? The fact that these questions come to feel worth taking seriously, rather than banal, or irresolvable, is due to Ishiguro's innate unshowiness." - Jon Day, Financial Times
  
  
• "Ishiguro is very interested in delay and restoration. Loneliness and waiting are almost the same thing here; estrangements and reunifications run through the book. (...) The novel requires the reader to ask and settle, over and again, while the philosophical content quietly takes hold. Klara and the Sun is a book about what it is to be human. The fact that Ishiguro can make such huge concerns seem so essential and so simple is just one of the reasons he was awarded the Nobel prize. (...) People will absolutely love this book, in part because it enacts the way we learn how to love." - Anne Enright, The Guardian
  
  
• "In this sense it's a classic "fish out of water" sci-fi story where the non-human narrator amusingly misunderstands human foibles and makes elementary mistakes about the nature of things that turn out to be enlightened nuggets of inspiration. Out of the mouth of babes, and all that. (...) Klara and the Sun is a very contemporary book. (...) Klara and the Sun is both a new Ishiguro novel and a classic Ishiguro novel. If you aren't already a fan then this book is unlikely to change your mind." - Iain Maloney, The Japan Times
  
  
• "(T)he conditions imagined by Ishiguro are also reflections of our own society, in which wealth and privilege already shape life chances. (...) An artificial friend she may be, but it is Klara's friendship with Josie that gives her story real meaning. In a society that has abandoned any clear distinction between the artificial and the real, that may be the most anyone can hope for." - James Purdon, Literary Review
  
  
• "Klara and the Sun is -- just about, technically -- a science fiction novel. (...) (I)t doesn't matter how Klara's mind works, because she isn't really a robot. She's a much older form of artificial intelligence, a much older kind of artificial friend: she's a fictional character. It may be inherently impossible to write a novel that openly poses such questions as whether robots can be said to have souls, or to be conscious, or capable of feeling love, or of inspiring and reciprocating sympathy in people. By making them characters in a story, you aren't asking the question: you've already answered it." - Thomas Jones, London Review of Books
  
  
• "(A) meditation in the subtlest shades on the subject of whether our species will be able to live with everything it has created. (...) Klara and the Sun is a distinctly “mature” novel -- as assured as ever, but slapdash in places compared to the author's meticulous earlier work. And he's never been strong with dialogue (his books are so profoundly interior). But these minor criticisms glance off Ishiguro's work like bullets off the hull of a battleship." - Charles Finch, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Ishiguro creates a sort of nostalgic dystopia. He lays a blanket of melancholy over a recognisable but slightly off-kilter world. His style is one of retro science fiction comprising an old-fashioned sensibility and a chilling technology from the future. (...) Klara is a complex and interesting protagonist. (...) In the end of this novel, Ishiguro seems to say that humans and human-level AI will never get along, and that there is some insoluble mystery about human nature." - Rowan Hooper, New Scientist
  
  
• "Klara and the Sun is certainly a resonant experience, a sort of tone poem that, like most of Ishiguro's fiction, recalls the title of one of his surrealist film scripts: The Saddest Music in the World. If I can't decide what he is going for, I'm hardly inclined to blame him. Equivocation is an under-employed response to works of art that reject existing forms, but in the case of Klara and the Sun it seems the only way of reconciling my boredom and annoyance with the patience and humility that genius deserves." - Leo Robson, New Statesman
  
  
• "Klara and the Sun takes place in the uncomfortably near future, and banal language is redeployed with sinister portent. (...) Klara is likable enough -- as she was manufactured to be -- but it's hard to empathize with her on the page, which is maybe the point. The stilted affect that so often characterizes Ishiguro's prose and dialogue -- an incantatory flatness that belies its revelatory ability -- serves its literal function. Klara's machine-ness never recedes." - Radhika Jones, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Ishiguro uses his inhuman, all too human narrators to gaze upon the theological heft of our lives, and to call its bluff. (...) Ishiguro keeps his eye on the human connection. Only Ishiguro, I think, would insist on grounding this speculative narrative so deeply in the ordinary" - James Wood, The New Yorker
  
  
• "This is a book -- a brilliant one, by the way -- that feels very much of a piece with Never Let Me Go, again exploring what it means to be not-quite-human, drawing its power from the darkest shadows of the uncanny valley. (...) It's the contemporary resonances that hit hardest in the novel, though. Ishiguro had apparently almost finished the novel when the pandemic hit, yet on almost every page there's a passage that feels eerily prescient of our locked-down, stressed-out, mysophobic times. (...) What's beyond doubt is that Ishiguro has written another masterpiece, a work that makes us feel afresh the beauty and fragility of our humanity." - Alex Preston, The Observer
  
  
• "Klara and the Sun uses elements of both fable and dystopia to turn some familiar ideas on their heads. (...) If there's a message here for us, it probably isn't the one we're looking for. I don't think Klara and the Sun is about the danger of using artificial intelligence to satisfy the human need to love, although that may be the headline story. (...) Having very much enjoyed the first two thirds of Klara and the Sun, I was disappointed by an ending that veered too close to Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince -- but perhaps disappointment was always part of the author's plan. (...) This may be a novel that begins its real work on a reader only once the last page is turned." - Miranda France, Prospect
  
  
• "Klara and the Sun is about learning to love. (...) Ishiguro sets us puzzles along the way; but, like a beginner's crossword, nothing is especially hard to work out. He pulls off the authorial trick of having an unreliable narrator who helpfully includes all the necessary information at the appropriately dramatic moment.(...) The first 200 pages of Klara and the Sun can try the reader's patience. (...) But the last 100 pages mostly redeem the novel. As with Ishiguro's other books, it works on you without you quite realising. But the danger of over-explanation is always present." - Sameer Rahim, The Spectator
  
  
• "As ever, Ishiguro imagines all of this with a thoroughness that borders on the painstaking -- although luckily without ever crossing into the full-on punishing, as in the Tolkienian longueurs of The Buried Giant or the 500-page dream narrative of The Unconsoled. And yet, while this book is never as boring as those were, many readers might be left just as baffled." - James Walton, The Telegraph
  
  
• "(N)ot everything becomes clear, and for the reader -- even more than for the narrator -- there are areas of obscurity that seem impossible to penetrate. Ishiguro has made a striking effort to inhabit a non-human consciousness, and the way Klara perceives the world is in various respects entirely alien. (...) These characters inhabit a frighteningly uncertain and unjust world, but they are more or less equal to it as long as they can keep some sort of hope alive (.....) The novel touches on themes to do with the ethics of AI, the problems of social inequality and the contradictions of parental love, but Ishiguro is much less a novelist of ideas than he is a virtuoso of mood music, and the prevailing tone is one of tenderness and gentle optimism. (...) Klara and the Sun is a pretty strange piece of work. (...) (I)ts final emphasis, the impression it gives of quiet positivity, is radically different from anything else he has written." - Edmund Gordon, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "(I)f the weird complications of technology frame the plot, the real subject, as always in Ishiguro's dusk-lit fiction, is the moral quandary of the human heart. (...) Another author would have been eager to elaborate on the dystopian features of the not-too-distant era, but Ishiguro always implies, never details. One reads Ishiguro in a defensive crouch, afraid to have our worst suspicions confirmed." - Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Klara of the title is an android, a so-called Artificial Friend (AF) designed to provide companionship to children and adolescents. A "top-range B2", she is not quite the latest model -- the B3s have enhancements that she lacks -- but her artificial intelligence is quite advanced: the sales pitch the Manager at the store where she is on display makes regarding her emphasizes her:

appetite for observing and learning. Her ability to absorb and blend everything she sees around her is quite amazing. As a result, she now has the most sophisticated understanding of any AF in this store, B3s not excepted.

     'But doesn't your mom mind not having friends ?'
     'She has friends. That Mrs Rivers comes all the time. And she's friends with your mum, isn't she ?'
     'That's not really what I mean. Anyone can have one or two individual friends. But your mom, she doesn't have society. My mom doesn't have so many friends either. But she does have society.'

I believe I have many feelings. The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me.

- M.A.Orthofer, 3 March 2021

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Links:

• Official site
• Alfred A. Knopf publicity page
• Faber & Faber publicity page
• Blessing Verlag publicity page
• Anagrama publicity page
• Q & A at Wired

• ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
• the arts desk
• The Atlantic
• Bookforum
• Bookmarks
• The Brooklyn Rail
• Christian Science Monitor
• Curiosity Killed the Bookworm
• Daily Bruin
• Daily Mail
• Electric Literature
• Evening Standard
• 4Columns
• The Guardian
• The Harvard Crimson
• Irish Independent
• Kirkus Reviews
• Literary Review
• Lonesome Reader
• Los Angeles Review of Books
• The Los Angeles Times
• The Mancunion
• The Modern Novel
• The Mookse and the Gripes
• The Nation
• New Scientist
• New Statesman
• The New Yorker
• npr
• NRC (Dutch)
• The Observer
• Open
• The Oxonian Review
• Prospect
• Publishers Weekly
• The Scotsman
• Scroll.in
• Sibilant Fricative
• Slate
• Tony's Reading List
• USA Today
• Vox
• Vulture
• Washington Independent Review of Books
• The Washington Post
• Wired

• Nobel Prize in Literature, 2017
• Kazuo Ishiguro at the British Council

• Never Let Me Go
• [Nocturnes]
• When we were Orphans

• Ian McEwan's novel of Machines Like Me
• See Index of Contemporary British fiction at the complete review
• See Index of Books by Nobel laureates under review

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About the Author:

       Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Japan in 1954 and moved to Great Britain when he was five. He won the Booker Prize for his novel The Remains of the Day, has received an OBE, and was named Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2017, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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© 2021-2022 the complete review

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