Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
“Because you know how lousy it feels, people telling you how perfect things will be and they’re not being straight.”
In his eighth novel, Kazuo Ishiguro weaves the story of an AF (Artificial Friend) named Klara, who stays with a little girl named Josie and her family. Our first-person narrator is the eponymous Klara who is bought to provide friendship to sick Josie as she stays at home all day, every day. For someone who has read McEwan’s Machines Like Me, there is bound to be some immediate comparison with McEwan’s Adam and Ishiguro’s Klara. I find Klara to be more expressive, extremely observant and sensitive at times: uncannily human emotions one would fear when imbibed in a robot.
I finished reading this book a while back. I refrained from writing about it immediately because I had and might continue to have mixed feelings about the whole concept of Artificial Intelligence. Never mind how much I love juggling enactivist philosophy with the traditional one, I think and rethink with certain agitation, the idea of cloning the human world or finding an alternative to human beings by researchers, scientists and academicians. The whole idea of “enaction” i.e. creating one’s own experience through one’s action seems to slip through a broken hourglass as humans helplessly stare at the void the sand leaves. Rightly an article in Scroll describes the novel as “very Huxleyan, but what sets the novel apart is its evocation of human weakness and mortality as understood by and artificial intelligence.”
Largely classified under dystopian genre, Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go is one of my favourite reads. The narrative style remains the same on the surface here: straight, brief, crisp and subtle detours that keep a grip on the plot twist. The idea of Artificial Intelligence is not new, writers have been exploring the subject for a while. What makes the book interesting is not the subject that has been discussed by Mary Shelley, E.M. Forster and Issac Asimov but the “delicacy of their treatment.” The novel calls for ambiguous and uncomfortable reactions when the reader realizes that Klara is having real feelings instead of instead of simulated ones that robots always have.
Rather than creating a sinister element throughout the text, Ishiguro rather designs an air of mystery that helps the reader to stay focused: a banal language that tries to fathom human loneliness and Dealing with futuristic ideas in a prophetic text, published in 2021 amid global conflicts of human making- the novel at places plays on metalepsis. This comes in especially in the middle of the text, when Josie, her mother and father meet for the substitution. The narrative is blurred via the conflict between the older and younger generation, humans and robots, ideas of forgiveness and guilt and especially between memory and forgetting. As Radhika Jones writing for NYT puts it about the book and what it deals with “With “Klara and the Sun,” I began to see how he has mastered the adjacent theme of obsolescence. What is it like to inhabit a world whose mores and ideas have passed you by? What happens to the people who must be cast aside for others to move forward?”
Reading ahead, Klara is very humane. One tends to forget that she is a robot. But it comes back, either through her precision while she describes things such as sunlight or through her confusion as she tries to gauge and place human emotions around her. Reading work of fiction is also a process to empathize with the characters, on the page and those they resemble in the real world. With this novel, I am yet to find an answer if readers could empathize with Klara or if they should. When she makes statements such as Klara says. “The more I observe, the more feelings become available to me” one wonders about the level of eccentricity that lies embedded in human emotions.
I read this statement in one of his interviews and then came across it in @footnotes.and.tangents story where Ishiguro said “I tend to write out of a projected fear of what would happen. To combat complacency, I suppose I’m always trying to remind myself in my writing that while we may be very pleased with ourselves, we may look back with a different perspective, and see we may have acted out of cowardice and failure of vision.” This rang true to me me while I was reading Stevens as well as Kathy and Tommy and it still rings true while I was meandering through Klara’s thought. As Simon puts it right away, this thought continues to weave a basic fabric in all his writings.
I might still have reservations about the book and pick it again at a later date and read, but it definitely charts the ontological territory of that consumes much of 21st-century debates. Perhaps another day, I might be able to love the book more than his previous ones.
“Perhaps all humans are lonely. At least potentially.”
